Ahead of a critical vote to fuel Dallas’ homelessness response with $10 million, the debate over whether the city was succeeding in serving its unhoused population took a new turn Tuesday when a committee meeting devolved into a public spat over homeless encampment data.
Council member Cara Mendelsohn, who chairs the committee, invited Allen Gwinn, a professor at Southern Methodist University with expertise in IT and data analytics.
Gwinn, who shared his personal story about helping a person experiencing homelessness, used 311 service calls data from 2020 to 2025 and highlighted that residents had made 44,545 service calls about encampments in the past five years.
He then overlaid crime data that appeared to show 1,200 instances where police reported unexplained deaths in public spaces such as alleys, fields and parking lots, among others. Gwinn said there was a connection between the encampments and deaths.
Political Points
Other facets of his data analysis also showed that the majority of homeless encampments were near Dallas Area Rapid Transit centers.
“The trends that are there, even as defective as the data is, would indicate that we’re not effectively addressing (homelessness) right,” Gwinn said.
At Wednesday’s meeting, the Dallas City Council is expected to approve $10 million for rental assistance and supportive services for Housing Forward, the region’s lead agency serving unhoused residents. The goal is to transition more than 1000 residents out of the shelter system into housing and free up existing bed space through the street-to-home program. This latest funding will target more than 425 people.
However, Tuesday’s discussion underscored that not everyone’s on board with that strategy.
Once Gwinn was done presenting his research, Mendelsohn lauded his work and said it highlighted “the nexus between the 311 calls of homeless encampments and the unexplained or natural deaths.”
“And very often, things will be said around this horseshoe as we’re making policy about allowing people to remain unsheltered, and I’m a big advocate of removing encampments against people’s will because it’s not safe for them,” Mendelsohn said. “It’s not good for our community, and to me, your data is showing one of the possibilities that happens, which is that people are dying.”
Then, the meeting blew up.
Gwinn had not spoken with Housing Forward. He had also not spoken with Dallas Area Rapid Transit before arriving at his conclusions, though his data was based on city data.
“I just prefer data to be presented with less subjective language,” council member Adam Bazaldua said, as he called on Housing Forward’s CEO and President Sarah Kahn to offer her take on the data.
“I think it’d be more appropriate and well-rounded for us to have (Kahn) weigh in on your perspective of this data that’s being presented to us,” he said, adding that he would like to hear from DART as well.
Mendelsohn stepped in. “This presentation is from the professor. We’re not going to do this today,” she said.
“I have the ability to yield my time to ask from a stakeholder,” Bazaldua said.
“Your time has now ended,” Mendelsohn said.
Bazaldua challenged Mendelsohn’s ruling as chair, and city attorneys called for a recess.
Bazaldua left. Eventually, all other council members — including Zarin Gracey, Lorie Blair and Deputy Mayor pro tem Gay Donnell Willis — followed. The meeting adjourned in less than an hour.
Bazaldua, Gracey, and Willis raised concerns about the data’s objectivity and were perturbed that they couldn’t request clarifications. “There were a lot of questions around the data that was presented and the subjective comments that accompanied it,” Willis said. “Sadly, most of the committee was prevented from asking questions about it.”
Treatment first or housing first?
The back-and-forth between council members is part of a national discussion playing out in every city and town. Is it better to tackle the mental health needs of people experiencing homelessness before offering them a roof over their heads, or do they need a home first to stabilize?
Mendelsohn falls on the side of treatment first, but the city’s homelessness policy has followed national practices under the housing-first umbrella.
Mendelsohn, who has been critical of Housing Forward’s claims that it had effectively ended street homelessness downtown, said Gwinn’s presentation offered “a compelling case for enforcement of no-camping laws and stronger efforts to bring people inside for mental health and detoxification or addiction treatment, family reunification, and supportive services for their own safety.” She added the hotspots mapped showed areas the city was not addressing successfully.
Gracey said he would support funding for Housing Forward. “There isn’t another option right now,” he said.
Housing Forward’s street-to-home initiative was utilized in a campaign to tackle perceptions of rising crime and instability in downtown Dallas. In the program’s second phase, the organization now wants to expand the program it used to rehouse 250 residents earlier this year.
The agency said all its public and private partners were concerned with the number of people sleeping outside, not the number of phone calls. “It’s completely unacceptable to allow people to die on our streets,” Housing Forward said in a statement when asked about Gwinn’s presentation Tuesday.
“The Coalition is integrating mental health, outreach, and enforcement responses to provide immediate relief on the ground, and equipping shelters to bring more people inside,” the statement said. “This morning’s presentation underscored the importance of continued funding for these critical interventions. The streets can no longer be our waiting room.”
The data at issue
Gracey, who had questions about Gwinn’s takeaways, said the professor’s analysis lacked context as to how he arrived at his conclusions. “The DART lines he would pull up, the death count, and all of the homeless encampments around there. And you know, what’s the point of that? So then when it came time to seek clarification and ask questions about it, we couldn’t,” he said.
But his curiosity was piqued. Gracey wanted to know if there was a way to track the timeline of when the encampments arrived, and whether there is a way to track and prevent habits or characteristics that “made this an area of opportunity to become an encampment.”
Blair, who oversees District 8, could verify some of the hotspots in the heatmap, but she too wanted to assess the data, as her district does not have as many DART hubs, yet the heatmap showed more service calls than she expected. It was also the first time council members had viewed the data because the material was only made public the day of the meeting, Gwinn said when asked by The News.
Bazaldua said he thought the data deserved more scrutiny. “There were about a dozen stations that I could see that would have had one or at most two encampments measured,” he said. “But then you look at other ones that were actually highlighted by him, where there is a concentration, and I wanted to know what other attributes were considered in the correlation of these concentrations.”
Gwinn told The News he became interested in analyzing crime data after he saw repeated stories of dead bodies in waterways and in alleys. He looked at police data and filtered deaths that were recorded in public spaces such as alleys, highways, fields and parking lots, among others.
However, Gwinn’s analysis may come with its own limitations.
For instance, Gwinn’s data focused on the concentration of calls in a particular area.
Kevin Oden, director of the Emergency Management and Crisis Response department, leads a team that regularly addresses homeless encampments. In November, city officials assessed 582 locations after they received service requests related to unsheltered residents.
Of those, 96 were confirmed to have encampments. Thirty-six were within 300 feet of schools or neighborhoods. Nine had pets. “We were able to resolve 22 of the encampments without needing to do notices to vacate and clean up and all that,” Oden told The News.
“We get service requests all the time if there’s a guy moving up and down the street who has a shopping cart,” he said. “I wouldn’t include that as any sort of encampment. Those are just individuals that we can engage with and see if there’s needs that can be met.”