Dallas’ latest plan to address its affordable housing crisis is slated to go to the City Council in April, according to the city’s top housing official. But he says it’ll take years and hundreds of millions of dollars from the city alone to make a dent.
“I don’t like to put too much on any plan, particularly for a city that has hundreds of them,” said David Noguera, Dallas’ director of housing and neighborhood revitalization. “However, I do believe that this plan helps build the momentum that we need to allocate the funding and supplemental resources that make mixed-income housing possible in areas that haven’t seen it in generations as well as established communities that lack affordable housing.”
He said the policy could be voted on as early as April 12. The city’s revamped comprehensive housing policy is seeking to address a familiar problem.
When the plan was first adopted in 2018, Dallas officials estimated that the city had an affordable housing shortage of 20,000 homes. Five years later, Noguera believes that the city still needs around 20,000 homes to fill the gap.
He presented what he described as “back of the envelope numbers” to City Council members on Wednesday to begin to put a price tag on how much it would cost. He estimated the city would need to spend roughly $400 million to meet that goal, he said, plus count on 10 times as much from developers and other private money.
Noguera told The Dallas Morning News that the overall pool of money would not only go toward building homes, but also to improve streets, water infrastructure, public safety and other quality of life issues.
“If we were to go into a number of neighborhoods and not build a single house, but we addressed all these things, you’d see the private sector come in so fast and build housing right away,” Noguera said. “But many of these things are the deterrents for them.”
Where the money is going to come from is still being sorted out, he said. One option could be a planned $1 billion capital bond program that voters could be asked to approve as early as May 2024. The city could also tap federal grants and program fees and consider tax breaks, Noguera said.
“This is not something that’s going to get done by City Hall staff and elected officials alone,” he said. “It’s going to need the support of a much broader network of stakeholders.”
The housing director said he and other staff planned to brief a council committee later in March to dive deeper into the numbers and possible funding sources.
The city’s housing supply hasn’t kept up with demand and rising costs.
Noguera on Wednesday said that city programs meant to build new housing have led to almost 12,500 new, under-construction and planned homes since 2018. Another 550 homes have either been preserved or are in the process of being fixed through home repair programs.
Pressures from rising rent costs and property taxes are making it harder for people to afford their homes, said Thor Erickson, an assistant director in the city’s housing and neighborhood revitalization office.
“We’ve seen an increase at an average of 17% in rental rates in the city,” Erickson said Wednesday. “So you have renters that are being pressed up against rising rent costs that forces them to move to another neighborhood, potentially of a lower standard apartment.”
The actual number of affordable housing units Dallas needs could be much higher than the city’s goal of 20,000. At least one recent study shows estimates that Dallas is short more than 100,000 homes for its low-income families alone.
Data last year from Texas A&M University’s Texas Real Estate Research Center showed Dallas needed almost 55,000 homes for a family of four with an annual income up to $29,200, close to 39,000 units for a family of four with a yearly income up to $48,700, and around 8,000 for a family of four making up to $77,900.
For those families to be able to afford single-family homes, the cost would have to be up to $95,701 for those with extremely low income to up to $255,313 for low-income families, the data showed.
An independent audit in 2021 found the city’s current housing plan falls short of its intent to address lingering impacts of legalized segregation and other city policies.
Several council members said at Wednesday’s meeting they wanted to make sure the new policy actually leads to the city doing what the plan calls it to do. Council member Adam Bazaldua noted the city has had many plans developed over many years, and he didn’t want the new housing policy to become “another piece of paper on the shelf.”
“This is just a piece of paper, and it’s not going to mean anything unless we have the will,” he said. “But we’ve got to put our money where our mouth is.”
