Affordable

Workforce Missing Middle Subsidized Tax Credit Affordable Attainable

HOUSING

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT IT (AND WHY IT MATTERS)

NOTHING POLARIZES AN ASSEMBLY of citizens and civic leaders like a discussion about affordable housing.

So, when the Dallas City Council, resolved to tackle a citywide shortage of accessible homes, met last year to consider the construction of multiple Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) developments, drama ensued.

The thorniest proposal was for a 200-unit development near Central Expressway and Forest Lane.

It looked promising on paper and garnered support from around the horseshoe. However, District 10 representative Adam McGough, echoing residents’ concerns, said, “no way.”

Following McGough’s impassioned dissent, the Council voted 9-6 to advance the project. (A few weeks later, angry neighbors took the fight to State Rep. John Turner, D-Dallas, who by law was able to override the City Council’s decision. The apartments were never built.)

The neighbors’ and councilman’s opposition drew criticism from fellow councilors and City staff, who are under pressure to build homes and reduce what researchers at Up For Growth say, as of 2020, is an 87,000-unit deficit.

As home prices and rents increase and conversations about housing become more fraught, one might wonder who is right — homeowners demanding a say in neighborhood planning or those who argue we need to build more housing at every opportunity?

The answer, of course, is both. And neither.

Policymakers cannot ignore the neighborhoods’ desires and concerns. They would be out of a job if they did.

But pressure to construct and rehabilitate more homes is only going to increase, and negative public opinion about affordable housing can be a big barrier to meeting Dallas’ mounting need.

If we cannot strike up more constructive conversations, promising

developments will keep croaking in infancy, and our city’s housing demands will go unmet, say those inside the city planning world.

Unaffordability can lead to housing insecurity, homelessness and a host of societal problems that affect every socioeconomic bracket, says David Noguera, director of the Dallas Department of Housing and Revitalization.

Ensuring our city is a place where people of varying incomes can rent, finance or purchase a home begins with public support for all types of housing, he says. “We can help create and preserve affordable places

“The lack for people making of trust is around $50,000 strong in those two or three neighborhoods a year — bear in mind this means some teachers, your delivery surrounding the drivers, post office proposed site.” personnel — or we can let them figure it out themselves,” he says. The problem with the latter, he says, is sprawl and the loss of valuable members of society. Residents move farther out or leave Dallas for somewhere more affordable.

“Dallas is going through a level of growth we have not seen in years,” Noguera says. “We are not building enough housing fast enough. Take the word affordability out of it altogether — we need more, period.”

Research from Up for Growth, in a report titled Housing Underproduction in the U.S. 2022, backed that up.

“Spotting and responding to underproduction trends can improve lives, economies and the planet,” said Mike Kingsella, CEO of Up for Growth, a nonprofit committed to solving the housing shortage and affordability crisis. He attributed underproduction in more than 200 metropolitan areas to “NIMBY-ism (not in my backyard) and exclusionary zoning.”

Noguera has seen examples of people who say they support affordable housing but don’t want it in their neighborhood.

That’s often due to a misunderstanding of what affordable housing is, he says.

“When people hear ‘affordable housing,’ they think it is going to attract undesirable neighbors,” he says. “I think, from one perspective, we need to educate our residents on what it means and on the impact of our decisions.”

But in some cases purported concerns about traffic, parking, property values, the environment or character of the neighborhood mask biases and racist attitudes, he says. “I have heard things at these meetings that make my jaw drop,” he says. “Those kinds of comments make it difficult for everyone involved in trying to get something done.”

A HOT-BUTTON TYPE OF HOUSING

The housing tax credit is the City’s most essential financial tool for producing affordable housing. It’s not the only one, but it is a good place to start as we learn about what affordable housing is and is not.

It is a term we will hear more as our city strives to build enough homes to accommodate a population that, according to the Dallas Federal Reserve, grew by almost 100,000 in 2020-2021.

The housing tax credit has been around since 1986. (Texas removed the words “low-income” in 2005.)

Through this program, banks and other corporations put cash up front into a development that includes affordable units in return for 10 years of credits against their taxes.

“The term is a very loaded one, and it attracts attention from all sides of the housing debate,” Noguera says.

People often conflate housing tax credit projects with slums, poverty and crime, but in reality, the developments he’s looking at all involve mixed-income housing, he says.

A good project might include a third of its units at market rate, a third at 30% area median income and a third at 60% median income, for instance.

The City scores housing tax credit projects based on various components — crime rates in the surrounding census tract, for example, or proximity to transit and medical hubs.

When a housing project contains “affordable” or “tax credit” in its description, that does not mean voucher housing, transitional housing or a homeless shelter, Noguera says.

Those are things we as a community also have to address, he says, but when people conflate those things, it does nothing to advance the creation of more homes for Dallas residents.

DAMAGING DIALOGUE

Councilman McGough acknowledges that when people associate affordability with crime and vagrancy, it gives ammunition to critics who would call our neighbors NIMBY or worse.

“There are going to be outliers and people who say things that they’ll interpret as racist and other things,” he says. “And it absolutely kills me when it happens, because that is not my experience with the majority of people in this community. We have had a lot of thoughtful, not

ignorant, discussions, and people here genuinely want to help figure this out. ”

That 2021 Council meeting where members debated an HTC project near our neighborhood exemplified what happens when we do not have constructive ways to discuss housing.

One Preston Hollow resident said she “spoke for the whole neighborhood” in opposing the project due to its proximity to a “homeless camp.” The next agreed and spent the rest of her time testifying about drug deals and public nudity near the site. A homeowner complained that developers of lower income apartments would let just anyone live there, and another said the area already has plenty of diversity. Councilmember Adam Bazaldua said he was “blown away” by the “disturbing” citizen comments.

“I heard a bunch of NIMBYs who were not only saying to people — people like cooks and front line, essential workers, people who make around $30,000 a year — that we do not want them, and then going even further and comparing the working class to criminals.” Lee Kleinman, who then represented North Dallas, said what happened at that meeting was the result of built-up frustration over a neglected part of the city where drugs and crime historically have run amok. While the two things are not connected, he says, those conditions breed skepticism.

“The lack of trust is strong in those two or three neighborhoods surrounding the proposed site, and when you piss off a neighborhood, they are going to rally when they have the opportunity for their voices to be heard,” he says.

And after Rep. Turner quashed the project, local media weighed in.

“It turns out, in Texas, angry neighbors can override their city council,” WFAA’s David Schechter reported at the time. “All they need is a letter of opposition from their state representative.”

The case typified “the kind of implicit bias and unfettered antagonism” that will make it impossible to build adequate affordable housing, Central Track reporter Doyle Rader wrote.

How do we get to a place of less anger, more understanding and collaboration to more smoothly bring housing to all Dallas neighborhoods?

EDUCATION — WHERE WE STAND

We need all types of housing — from expensive houses on large lots to townhomes and condos to multifamily buildings.

The City also has Community Block Development Grants to build single-family homes, a repair program to preserve single-family homes and a downpayment assistance program, says Kyle Hines, assistant director of Dallas Housing & Neighborhood Revitalization.

Homeownership remains the primary driver of household wealth.

But when people give up on homeownership, because of high prices or too much competition, they enter the rental market, and more residents are pushed out of rental opportunities.

“I don’t want the conversations to be pigeonholed into discussing housing for a particular group of people, because our city needs more housing at all price points,” Noguera says. “It’s critically important that whatever we’re investing in as a City serve a mixture of incomes.”

An “affordable dwelling” costs 30% of a person’s gross income, whether you are at the lower or upper-mid point of the income spectrum.

“At all levels, if you’re spending more than a third of your income on housing, it impacts your ability to pay for the basic things like food, gas, car insurance and health care.”

Affordable housing is not just for poor people, he says. However, those with lower incomes have a tougher time obtaining housing, which is why subsidized housing receives more attention

The average annual income for Dallas households is about $60,000, he says, while the average for-sale home is about $340,000 and the average rent is approximately $2,500 a month.

“That is the issue. Those gaps,” Noguera says.

KEEPING NEIGHBORS IN THE LOOP

The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs has a running list of housing tax credit projects across the state and their “Apartment status. complexes are

But homeowners driving our in the vicinity of any proposed project murders.” should be hearing about these things before they even land on a list like this.

While council members don’t agree on everything, many have said the only hope of gaining neighborhood support for most multifamily projects, much less affordable ones, is to bring neighborhood stakeholders in on plans from the start.

Councilman Chad West who is on the City’s housing committee points to the way Councilwoman Cara Mendelsohn handled introducing a homeless shelter to her district. After the Council agreed to place one in each of 14 districts, she went to her constituents right away, explained the situation and got their input, effectively

letting them decide where it would go.

“I wish I would have done that,” West says, and it demonstrates a way we might gain neighborhood support and improve the public perception of affordable housing developers.

In his 16 years working for Dallas, McGough says he’s learned one thing for sure.

“The No. 1 thing you do, is you communicate with the neighborhood, identify changeable pieces, and you do your best to honor the community.”

The developer is responsible for “effectively communicating” with the people, he says, and while some City officials have said the same, others including Kleinman say it is also a responsibility of the Council member.

FIXING WHAT WE HAVE ALREADY

Another barrier to public support in dense areas is the condition of existing multifamily communities.

Long ago, areas such as Vickery Meadow and ForestCentral Expressway began suffering the effects of too many apartments with too little oversight. A 2004 article in a Texas paper called Dallas “one of the nation’s deadliest cities” and focused on apartments in Northeast Dallas. It read like “The Wire” and labeled multifamily communities “killing fields.”

As recently as a few months ago, a police spokesperson, referring to the same area at a safety committee session said, “apartment complexes are driving our murders.”

So it is easy to understand why nearby residents are not clamoring for more.

ALL HOUSING CONSIDERED

The stories we tell about the “affordable housing crisis” often “fail to explain why housing is increasingly out of reach for many people or the societal benefits of creating and preserving affordable housing,” writes housing researcher Tiffany Manuel, in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Many see differences in housing quality as an inherent feature of the market, as inevitable, she explains. They believe differences in affordability and access indicate that the market is healthy.

“Those notions allow us to rationalize disparity,” she says. “This idea allows us to justify the fact that so many live in unstable situations.”

Once people understand structural causes of inequity — such as Dallas’ well-documented history of redlining, segregation and unfair housing practices — they might better accept the need for structural solutions.

“If we do not explain the systemic causes and consequences of lack of affordable housing, we allow the view that the housing market is beyond human control to go unchecked,” Manuel says.

The more we learn, the more enlightened our discussions about homes and the health of our housing ecosystem, the better and stronger our city can be, says Councilman West, who is working on a “more visionary” housing document to complement the City’s Comprehensive Housing Policy.

Just as closed-minded homeowners who oppose everything are problematic, hurling insults at them can be just as harmful, because it impedes much-needed communication and understanding, McGough says.

Three years of research by Stanford on strengthening the affordable housing sector’s public image reflects the limitations — yet the significant role — of language.

“Changing how we talk about affordable housing for all will not, in itself, rewrite the future,” Manuel says. “But it is an important part of reaching that dream.”

HOUSING WAGE BY ZIP CODE

The National Low Income Housing Coalition publishes a report each year showing the “housing wage.” That’s what a person/household needs to earn working full time in order for a two-bedroom rental unit to be affordable by the official government standard. For example, in Preston Hollow, a person needs to make about $28 an hour or $55,000 a year in order to afford something in the neighborhood.

$23.08 75220 $39.23 75225 $23.85 75229 $24.42 75230 $32.69 75244

AFFORDABLE HOUSING, A GLOSSARY OF TERMS

LIHTC/HTC: Low Income Housing

Tax Credit or, in Texas, Housing Tax

Credit, is the City’s most essential financial tool for producing affordable housing. Written in 1986, the program allows banks and other corporations to put cash up front into a development that includes affordable units in return for 10 years of credits against their taxes.

SECTION 8: Named for Section 8 of the United States Housing Act of 1937, this housing choice voucher program is the federal government’s major program for assisting very low-income families, the elderly and the disabled to afford decent and safe housing in the private market.

WORKFORCE HOUSING:

Urban Land Institute defines workforce housing as housing affordable to households earning between 60% and 120% of area median income. That’s about $36,000-$72,000 a year in Dallas. The term aims to conjure images of young teachers, mail carriers and health care workers.

ACCESSIBLE HOUSING: As

housing proponents try to scrub affordable housing’s image, they try other words that mean essentially the same thing, and this is one of them.

MISSING MIDDLE:

Architecturally, between apartments and single-family houses, are lowerdensity multi-unit or clustered housing types, such as duplexes, that are closer in scale to houses. The term also is often used to describe the population who would live in these dwellings.

NIMBY: Not in My Backyard. Coined in the 1970s, according to Oxford

Languages, it is a person who objects to the sitting of something perceived as unpleasant or hazardous in the area where they live, especially while raising no such objections to similar developments elsewhere.

YIMBY: Yes in My Backyard. Pushing back against the NIMBYs, these supply side advocates are pro-development activists in pursuit of equity, or they’re gentrifying tricksters, depending who you ask.

EXCLUSIONARY ZONING:

These ordinances place restrictions on the types of homes that can be built in a particular neighborhood with the intent of restricting housing for low-income residents. Common examples can include minimum lot size requirements, minimum square footage requirements, prohibitions on multi-family homes and limits on the heights of buildings.

NOAH:Naturally occurring affordable housing is available on the regular market, open to anyone and not subsidized by a government or nonprofit, but it falls within the budget of many families.

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IN THE THICK OF IT IN THE THICK OF IT IN THE THICK OF IT

Preserving history and minimizing displacement in Elm Thicket-Northpark

Story by RENEE UMSTED | Art by JYNNETTE NEAL

Jonathan Maples doesn’t call what’s happening to Elm Thicket-Northpark gentrification. “It is a hostile takeover disguised as gentrification, wrapped in racism,” he says.

Maples has lived in the neighborhood adjacent to Love Field Airport his entire life, nearly 60 years. His grandmother was the first person in his family to buy a home there, in the 1960s. Maples’ family owned it until 2002, and this year, it was torn down and replaced with a two-story home.

Elm Thicket-Northpark was settled as a Freedmen’s Town — composed of formerly enslaved people — in the late 1920s, when Love Field was still an air base. The neighborhood was mostly farmland, with no paved streets. Everyone paid a few cents for water at the local well. Hilliard Golf Course, Dallas’ first municipal course for Black people, was established there.

In the late 1960s, Love Field Airport was expanding, and the residents — who decades earlier were pushed to live in that area — were pushed out, along with the businesses they established. Many of them worked at the airport. The new neighborhood boundaries became Lovers Lane, Inwood Road, West Mockingbird Lane and Lemmon Avenue.

Growing up, Maples says, three values defined the neighborhood: community, unity and pride. Residents founded churches. They took pride in their children and their homes. Many group activities were centered around K.B. Polk, which became Dallas ISD’s first Talented and Gifted Vanguard school.

But recently, developers have been coming into the neighborhood, buying up properties, tearing down old homes and replacing them with new ones that don’t match the existing single-story cottages.

“I don’t get the whole concept of: We’re going to come into your neighborhood, we’re going to do whatever it is we want to do, we’re going to build whatever it is we want to build, and you can’t have anything to say about it,” Maples says.

He may not call it gentrification, but displacement is occurring. Wealthier groups are entering a historically working-class neighborhood, and their newer, bigger, pricier homes are driving up property values and taxes. For some existing residents, especially those on fixed incomes, this process is making living in Elm Thicket-Northpark more and more unaffordable.

“They were done paying for their houses in the late ’60s, early ’70s,” Maples says. “Now they’re afraid they’re going to be taxed out.”

As property values are increasing, the demographic makeup of the neighborhood is also changing. In 2000, Black residents made up 60% of the neighborhood; 14 years later, they only comprised 30% of the neighborhood. During the same period, the number of Hispanic residents rose to 42% of the total population, up from 26%, and white residents accounted for nearly 20%, up from 11% in 2000.

It’s not just the increasing property values and differences to the look of the neighborhood. For residents including Maples, the development is eliminating the neighborhood’s history.

And for years, residents have been standing up to development they see as threatening their neighborhood.

“I am not my grandfather’s grandfather,” Maples says. “We don’t live in fear.”

In the past, longtime neighbors have opposed proposed zoning changes that would allow what many of them see as unwanted structures. Elm Thicket-Northpark was also selected as the target area for District 2 in the City’s Neighborhood Plus program, and neighbors ultimately created an action plan to work toward goals regarding safety, stabilization, preservation, beautification and more.

For the past several years, neighbors have been meeting with City staff and council members to discuss zoning changes for the neighborhood overall. The latest in the process came during July’s City Plan Commission meeting, when commissioners voted in favor of Elm Thicket-Northpark residents opposing development plans. The proposed changes include limiting the lot coverage and building height of new developments, balancing historic structures with new builds. Effectively, the zoning amendments would prevent new construction from towering over old cottages.

Maples says he hopes the City Council will vote along the City Plan Commission’s recommendations. “For the most part, we just want to be heard,” he says. “We don’t want to be run over.”

Redlining is one factor that could have contributed to the decades of affordable real estate in Elm Thicket-Northpark. That redlining process dates back to the 1930s, when the federal government started insuring mortgages as part of New Deal programs to prevent foreclosures following the Great Depression.

Guidelines were added to help appraise and vet properties and homeowners who would qualify for the mortgages. Color-coded maps showed which properties in more than 200 cities across the country were “worthy” of being granted loans.

Areas were ranked by riskiness. Those marked with “D” and lined in red were considered “hazardous,” unworthy of receiving loans. Many of these areas — including part of Elm Thicket-Northpark — were also predominantly Black neighborhoods.

The “best” neighborhoods were given “A” ratings.

The Federal Housing Administration’s Underwriting Manual, which was in effect in 1938, laid out instructions for underwriters at the administration when evaluating how risky a mortgage was, helping determine which loans should be insured.

Barriers such as highways, hills and parks could prevent “adverse influences” of business and industrial facilities, as wel as “lower-class occupancy and inharmonious racial groups” from entering an area, according to the manual. In other words, the government’s underwriting manual dictated that a physical barrier should separate white neighborhoods from minority neighborhoods, and wealthy neighborhoods from poor ones; with such a barrier, the rating of a location would be lowered, making a mortgage riskier and typically more expensive.

The manual directed underwriters to examine a location’s surrounding areas to see whether “incompatible racial and social groups” were there. To maintain “stability” and property values, according to the manual, neighborhoods had to stay segregated.

Borrowers themselves also were rated.

Say someone wanted to buy a home in a lower-income or minority neighborhood. According to the manual, those existing neighbors would, over time, cause the borrower to lose enthusiasm for the property. So that borrower should be given a lower rating.

No mortgages often meant no homeownership. While white and wealthy families were able to purchase properties 80 years ago, many minority populations were robbed of that opportunity. As a result, many minority families haven’t been able to pass down assets — properties — and accumulate generational wealth, at least not to the extent of their white counterparts.

In 1977, to begin rectifying decades of discriminatory lending, the U.S. government passed the Community Reinvestment Act. It requires banks to create an assessment area map to show where each one does business, and it sets regulations on the maps. One of the rules prohibits assessment areas from excluding low- or moderate-income communities.

According to the redlining maps from the 1930s, only a section of what’s now known as Elm Thicket-Northpark was redlined. The rest of the area was mostly farmland, so it wasn’t redlined, and a neighborhood developed. As the population grew, residents opened businesses and restaurants, forming a kind of self-sufficient community.