All Neighbors Coalition and city leaders outline Street to Home strategy and launch Dallas Street Response operations

Leaders from the All Neighbors Coalition, city homelessness staff and the city’s Emergency Management and Crisis Response (EMCR) office gave the Dallas Community Homelessness Commission an update on local homelessness efforts and a briefing on a new operations unit on June 25, 2025.

The All Neighbors Coalition presentation, led by Sarah Khan (identified in the meeting as “CEO of Housing Ford”) and Christine Causey (identified as Director of Office Solutions, Homeless Solutions), described a multi-pronged approach that relies on diversion at first contact, increased rehousing and targeted interventions for people with complex behavioral-health needs. "We've diverted 6,641 households over the last since 2020 from 2021 through to 2024," Khan told commissioners, and she said diversion costs were about one-tenth the cost of an average shelter stay in the single-adult system.

The presenters framed the Street to Home initiative as a $30,000,000 effort to focus rehousing and integrated services on the city’s largest and most visible encampments. Khan said the downtown pilot had moved 257 individuals into housing with integrated mental-health care and had identified a smaller sub-group — roughly 20 people in the pilot — with complex needs who required inpatient or short-term behavioral-health placements before housing. "We're ending street sleeping downtown," Khan said, and added the work pairs outreach, shelter capacity and behavioral-health resources in an attempt to move entrenched sleepers into permanent housing or appropriate clinical pathways.

The presentation included system-wide context: presenters said unsheltered homelessness had risen sharply between 2015 and 2020 and that, since 2021, rehousing and diversion efforts have produced a net decline on point-in-time counts even as annual inflow continues to rise. Khan reported a 28% decrease on point-in-time measures since 2021 and cited a system-wide figure that, of people who stopped receiving rental assistance, 90% were not later recorded as returning to the homeless response system. Presenters also said the Continuum of Care sees roughly 700 people a month newly entering homelessness across Dallas and Collin County, and that 88% of that inflow is in Dallas.

After the coalition update, Kevin Oden, director of Emergency Management and Crisis Response, described an operational realignment the city calls the Dallas Street Response. Oden said city council approved transferring 23 staff from the Office of Homeless Solutions to EMCR to centralize field operations and that the unit is already operating. He described four pillars: proactive encampment resolution, sustained closure maintenance, integrated behavioral-health support and partnerships with outreach and service providers. "This is about making our services faster, more coordinated, and more responsive to the community needs," Oden said.

Oden outlined an encampment response workflow routed through 3-1-1: initial outreach and engagement, an escalation visit if someone declines help, posting a closure notice, a cleanup and then post-cleanup monitoring to prevent reenactment. He said enforcement would be a last resort after repeated attempts at voluntary engagement. "This is about both compliance and compassion and not jumping straight to one or the other," he told the commission.

Oden also gave performance targets and data points the new unit will track and publish on a dashboard: targets include responding to 90% of high-priority 3-1-1 calls within 24 hours and keeping 80% of hotspot areas clear for 30 days. He said 3-1-1 requests concerning encampments grew from roughly 8,000 in 2021 to over 11,000 in 2024. Oden said the city will emphasize sustained closure maintenance — regular patrols, shelter access and coordinated downstream placements — and will continue to work with the Housing Board, the All Neighbors Coalition and outreach partners to route people into housing and services.

Presenters repeatedly flagged gaps in behavioral-health capacity. Khan and others said the system needs more short-term crisis/respite beds and that some people unfamiliar to conventional shelter models require inpatient care or specialized pathways. Commissioners pressed for more granular data (for example, council-district–level breakdowns and counts of people with repeated shelter placements) and for plans to finance ongoing operations. Khan and the presenters said they are studying dedicated local revenue models used elsewhere (food-and-beverage taxes, parking taxes and similar mechanisms) but did not present a finalized funding plan.

Votes at a glance

- Approval of minutes (May 15 and May 25, 2025): Motion to approve moved by Commissioner Galia Silhan (transcript read “Silthon”), seconded by Commissioner James P. Hawk (transcript read “Hauck”). Voice vote recorded; chair announced minutes approved with no opposition recorded.

- Motion to allow a second round of discussion on the All Neighbors Coalition presentation (item 4): Motion was seconded and put to a roll-call vote; the motion failed (noes outnumbered ayes). The meeting record shows a roll-call tally reported to the commission as 3 yeas and 5 nays; the chair announced the motion failed.

What it means next

Presenters said the Street to Home pilot will continue and that the city intends to replicate the model in other high-priority encampments across Dallas and Collin County while maintaining shelter capacity for people who accept it. City staff said they will publish a performance dashboard this quarter and that commissioners and the public will be able to submit follow-up questions in writing to staff. Presenters asked the commission to provide ongoing local feedback from districts and constituencies as the units scale operations.

Ending note

Commissioners and presenters repeatedly emphasized the limits of local authority: staff cautioned that encampment work requires close coordination with public-health, behavioral-health providers, law enforcement and neighboring jurisdictions. Presenters said they will provide additional data on request, including demographic breakdowns and program outcomes, and asked commissioners to forward specific data questions to staff for follow-up.