Building Blocks: Fresh ideas for affordable housing
A Q&A with affordable housing nonprofit leader Ashley Flores, senior director of Child Poverty Action Lab
By JACQUELINE FELLOWS
Dallas Media Collaborative
In this series with local, regional and national affordable housing experts and leaders, we asked one simple question: What’s one innovative recommendation Dallas could do to start moving forward on affordable housing?
Ashley Flores: At the Child Poverty Action Lab, we do a lot of technical assistance for public agencies. We don’t explicitly do advocacy work around policies. We often provide data or illustrate what might be the implication and impact of a policy.
Dallas has become increasingly unaffordable for low- and moderate-income households. At the end of the first quarter of 2022, our average rent for Dallas was $1,462, which is up 13.7% year over year, so a big annual increase, according to CoStar.
And then we have record low vacancy rates. Our vacancy rate in the first quarter of 2022 was 6.38%. There’s this imbalance of supply and demand, which is causing prices to increase for renters and homeowners.
For a household budget, the commonly accepted standard is to not spend more than 30% of your gross income on housing expenses such as rent and utilities. The annual income needed to afford the $1,462 monthly rent without spending more than 30% toward rent is $58,480, which is roughly $28.12 an hour.
You really have to command a certain income to be able to afford housing in Dallas without spending a disproportionate share of your income on rent. In a nutshell, what we're seeing is that housing is increasingly unaffordable, and it's mostly out of reach for our lowest-income households.
To address this housing affordability crisis, everyone always hopes for a silver bullet, but the reality is you need a multi-faceted approach.
Increase the public’s understanding
We need to increase the understanding of the general public of what we mean by affordable housing. Affordable housing can carry such a negative connotation. “Big A” affordable housing would be all of your federal, state and local programs to build housing that’s subsidized, that's the voucher program, Low Income Housing Tax Credits, etc.
Then there’s “Little a” affordable housing, which is a naturally occurring affordable housing that, as it depreciates, has lower rent cost, but it's still a decent place to live.
And then there's also this general understanding for anyone, when you're looking at your household budget, what is affordable and reasonable to spend on your rent or your mortgage in consideration of all of your other costs at hand?
And so I think there's a lot of work we need to do, both to understand who needs affordable housing, which is a lot of people. And then what does affordable housing mean in different contexts? I think because of that, we have such a lack of understanding sometimes that gets in the way of progress.
When we go back to that example of Dallas' $1,462 a month in the first quarter, and you need to make $58,480 to afford that rent, now think about your home health aides who are making $11 an hour, think about your teachers’ aides. There's just that stigma sometimes attached to affordable housing, and it's helping to demystify what it actually means and who needs it.
Democratize data
This map, provided by the North Texas Eviction Project, provides a visual of where evictions are taking place across the DFW metroplex.
One important approach that the Child Poverty Action Lab takes is democratizing data and bringing data transparency to seemingly intractable problems. We did that with eviction data and the North Texas Eviction Project.
So getting data on where evictions were occurring around the county allowed our frontline providers with rent relief and legal aid resources to connect with tenants and landlords to make sure that rent relief was administered, and to make sure tenants in an eviction proceeding could access a pro bono attorney if they needed one.
Plan bond issues together
My dream is that one day all of the public agencies would plan their bond issues together, like the school district and Dallas College and the county and the city will all sit down together and think, you know, how can we optimize our resources? And how can we work in mutually reinforcing ways in different parts of the city?
I think there's this opportunity around cross-agency collaboration and creative use of resources even in ways that historically an agency may have considered outside of their lane, but housing now needs to become everyone's priority.
Rethink voucher programs
We’ve been working on a project related to voucher uptake in Dallas, and we've been doing a lot of research around what holds people back from accepting vouchers. And there's a number of reasons, but one involves misunderstandings and stereotypes or bias about voucher holders, and having a certain narrative in your mind.
It's what happens whenever there's any kind of a stereotype or generalization about a group or a place or thing. It’s very reductive and inaccurate. And so we need to put that human face to the story and counter harmful narratives that have gotten in the way of progress in a lot of areas, but particularly as it relates to housing.
We were talking to the CEO of a property management company, and he actually said: You know, they should do the same retooling of the voucher program that they did with food stamps to make it as portable and easy as possible, like a debit card where you just swipe and go, and you're minimizing the friction between the recipient of the benefit and the grocery store or apartment.
So his idea was basically: How can we take lessons learned from the modernization of SNAP and apply it to the voucher program? Which I thought was really insightful.
Ashley Flores, senior director of the Child Poverty Action Lab, provided solutions-oriented insights on affordable housing. Her interview with Jacqueline Fellows, a reporter and journalism professor of practice and digital newsroom manager at SMU, has been edited for clarity and length. CPAL and SMU are members of the Dallas Media Collaborative.
Did you know that what you just read was a solutions journalism story? It didn’t just examine a problem; it scrutinized a response. By presenting evidence of who is making progress, we remove any excuse that a problem is intractable. This story, supported by a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network, was produced by the Dallas Media Collaborative, a group of news outlets, universities and nonprofits covering affordable housing through a solutions lens.
