Patrick Williams
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Dallas City Council members said the city has a “housing crisis” at a briefing Wednesday.
Over a nearly four-hour period, council members were briefed on the state of housing in the city and a new plan called Dallas is Home designed to encourage housing accessibility. Dallas residents — especially renters — are being squeezed by economic pressures and housing costs as wages remain stagnant, with a February report from the Child Poverty Action Lab finding that half of all renters in the city spent more than 30% of their gross income on housing in 2023.
Home prices have also outpaced wage growth. Dallas residents are renting in historically high numbers, including higher-end-households. That’s a sign of declining homeownership, Cullum Clark, director of the Bush Institute’s Southern Methodist University Economic Growth Initiative, told council members.
“The fact that we have lost a lot of our housing cost advantage relative to places elsewhere in the country also has diminished our competitive advantage in economic terms,” Clark said. “And we see that, for example, in very recent census data on people moving around the United States.”
Recent data released by the U.S. Census Bureau shows that while the Dallas-Fort Worth Metro area gained the second-highest number of residents nationwide in 2025, Dallas County’s population declined slightly.
The crux of the crisis in Dallas, Clark told council members, is an issue felt nationwide.
“I believe the evidence is overwhelming that the biggest driver of Dallas’ affordability crisis is ultimately national: our country dramatically underbuilt housing over a number of years,” said Clark.
Initial proposals for a new housing policy, Dallas is Home, were presented to council members Wednesday as the basis for discussions that will lead to the final plan. City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert said that Dallas is Home will borrow “on the best practices of previous policies while pursuing a multi-pronged approach” to address development, affordability and homelessness.
“We have a housing crisis in Dallas that we need to take seriously. I’ve been trying to sound the alarm with some of you guys for years now, and I feel like today you’ve really brought it to us,” said Council member Chad West at the briefing.
‘They’re Barely Making It‘
According to the Child Poverty Action Lab report, economic constraints hit households earning 50% or less of the area median income the hardest. That’s roughly $52,000 or less for a family of four, and in Dallas, they’re spending close to half of their income on housing on average. The squeeze was felt most by families making less than 30% of the area median income, who, on average, spent nearly four-fifths of their income on housing. Assuming a 78% rent-to-income ratio, a household of four earning roughly $30,000 annually would have $567 left each month for healthcare and groceries.
Rental burdens fall disproportionately on older residents, single-parent households and Black residents.
The most visible sign of cost burdens turning into cost crises came with the eviction statistics presented to the council. Close to 28,000 eviction notices were filed in Dallas in 2025, and filings have doubled since the end of COVID-era rent protections.
Higher rates of eviction were seen in southern Dallas, District 10 in northeast Dallas and District 12 in Far North Dallas. The majority of the notices were filed with an attached dollar amount, most likely due to non-payment of rent, according to the presentation.
“We just have so many apartments, and the apartments, to the point of the demographic study, the population are mostly service workers,” Cara Mendelsohn, District 12’s Council member, said. “They’re barely making it.”
Food service workers, one of the most common professions in Dallas, according to the CPAL report, typically earn around $30,000 and would need to pay less than $800 in rent to be considered not cost-burdened. Between 2021 and 2023, Dallas lost half of its inventory of apartments with monthly rents below $1,000, roughly translating to the loss of over 50,000 units, a figure CPAL housing chief Ashley Flores recently described to The Texas Tribune as “staggering.”
The city is also 46,000 units short of demand for households earning 50% or less of the area median income, with only 60 units available per 100 families in that income bracket, according to the report.
There has been some progress on multifamily development. In 2024, 8,395 new multifamily units came on the market, of which 1,373 were affordable units with deed restrictions on rent increases. Close to 84% of new units were market-rate, meaning unsubsidized and largely priced for working professionals. Most were built in West Dallas and near downtown.
Council member Laura Cadena, who represents District 6 in West Dallas, called for the city to include preservation in its housing plan.
“Districts 2 and 6 accounted for 49% of all new market-rate units,” Cadena said. “So this is showing me a pattern of gentrification of what we’ve known is happening in West Dallas.
Nurses and Teachers
Maxie Johnson, who represents District 4 in southern Dallas, said he needs more housing in his district for professionals who too often can’t afford to live where they work.
“I want homes that take care of our educators. I want homes that take care of our police officers. I want homes to take care of our nurses,” Johnson said. “I want homes to take care of our firefighters, and I want that to be in District 4, where they can live where they serve, but at a great price.”
The average price of a home in Dallas County is $336,205, said Nia Huggins, senior policy representative for the National Association of Realtors. She also told council members that the average age of a homebuyer in the U.S. has risen to 40-years-old, a record.
In Dallas County, the average homebuyer’s age is 41, and their average income is over $125,000 annually.
“We understand that affordability is an issue,” Huggins said. “One of the challenges is that we do not have enough housing stock. So we’re, on average, about 4 million units short of housing stock, which is why the cost of housing is extremely high.”
According to the briefing presentation, Dallas lagged far behind other rapidly growing cities like Nashville, Austin and Denver in single-family construction permits issued from 2017 to 2023.
At the briefing, Thor Erickson, head of the Office of Housing & Community Empowerment, emphasized the need to address permitting to alleviate housing issues.
“We’ve underbuilt housing everywhere. We need more permits,” Erickson said. “We need to address the housing shortage. We need to address how we approach home buyers.”
What’s Next?
Erickson explained that the proposed Dallas is Home plan would realign the city’s multi-departmental housing resources, including downpayment assistance programs and rental assistance, under a data-driven framework geared toward addressing housing and homelessness.
The framework also proposes giving the city council greater oversight of the Dallas Housing Finance Corporation and the Dallas Public Facility Corporation, the city’s nonprofit corporations charged with promoting housing development through tax incentives. As proposed by staff, certain projects would need approval from two-thirds of the council, whereas HFC and PFC projects can currently be greenlit with a simple majority.
West, whose district gained the most deed-restricted units in 2024, said he opposed a two-thirds supermajority, a sentiment shared by several other council members.
“With the majority vote, we can still approve or deny these deals,” West said. “Adding an additional threshold of going up to two-thirds for a vote sends a message to the market that we are really not interested in seeing any of your deals, and it takes away the options from council members.”
The council will receive and update at an April 22 meeting. Members will meet with staff in the meantime to tailor priorities in each district under the plan.
“We want people not only to want to live in our city—we also want to make sure that those already here can continue to afford to live in Dallas,” Tolbert told council members. “That’s why we’re calling it ‘Dallas is Home.’”
