Housing Forward, Dallas' lead homelessness response agency, is seeking $5.6 million in city dollars to bolster the Street to Home initiative -- a program city officials say can cut unsheltered homelessness in half by 2026.

The Street to Home initiative, a $30 million multi-pronged effort, seeks to connect unhoused residents to permanent housing and services such as rental help and mental health support after closing an encampment. The City Council is expected to approve $2.5 million ARPA dollars for the project on Feb. 12, and then once more during the spring for contracts worth $3.1 million.

Growing discontent with encampments in public spaces such as parks and near businesses has pushed officials to ramp up efforts. On Tuesday, Christine Crossley, the director of the Office of Homelessness Solutions, and Housing Forward CEO Sarah Kahn gave a briefing to the Housing and Homelessness Committee to demonstrate why the initiative could use more funding annually.

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Crossley said the initiative was built on lessons learned from the $72 million rehousing initiative Dallas had undertaken between 2021 and 2023 to house 2,700 unhoused residents, as well as its successor in 2023, which housed 6,000 individuals nearly a year before its deadline in 2025. Both efforts led to a 24% reduction in homelessness last year.

Crossley and Kahn said providers have learned some lessons over the years. They need to speed up rehousing people in shelters to free up beds, and that most everyone wants permanent housing.

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"The more that we can continue to demonstrate that we are quickly housing people out of shelter, the assumption is that we can encourage more people to go to shelter when they see shelter as a place where they can quickly get rehoused," Kahn said.

Moreover, Street to Home, which began in July and targeted sites downtown -- the library and areas around City Hall as well as Harwood, Main Street Garden and Pacific Garden in December -- taught them that to address a dynamic geography like the downtown area, which is also where one may find a host of homelessness providers, requires they address the entire area altogether.

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"When we target one location within the city, and we house out of that, and we ensure that people are not able to come back and sleep in that location, it creates pressure in other parts of downtown," Kahn said.

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Another thing they learned was that other such as the Dallas Police Department involved in the homelessness response needed tools. This is where freeing up shelter spaces comes in handy.

"It's really important to provide a tool so that if people are coming back to downtown, we have a response that we can transport people to shelter and that people are willing to go there," she said.

Chronic unsheltered homelessness represents nearly 14% of the population that's experiencing homelessness, a small yet visible subsection compared with the 86% that are experiencing homelessness in other ways.

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In December, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recorded an 18% increase in homelessness in 2024. The rise, the department said, was driven mainly by a lagging inventory of affordable housing, rising inflation and stagnating wages.

Council member Jesse Moreno, who chairs the committee, asked how the project would address individuals who may not accept the outreach. Crossley said the city sends in its cross-departmental strike team in cases where there might be a danger to public safety and health.

But that's where closure maintenance comes in. In order to reduce recidivism, Crossley said there are roving teams made up of outreach workers, "which are the Navy Seals of behavioral health care" who follow unhoused residents from the street to their permanent housing in the community.

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