The officers arrived by 6 a.m. last Thursday, parking their squad cars and white vans on each side of Clarence Street, off Cesar Chavez Boulevard. The Dallas Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team walked into a clearing under Interstate 45 with zip ties looped around their duty belts and radios. They woke about two dozen people who had congregated in tents, then clasped their hands behind their backs.
Before sunrise, 23 people were placed under arrest at this South Dallas homeless camp two miles from downtown.
Housing Forward, the agency responsible for coordinating the homelessness response in Dallas and Collin counties, didn’t expect the day to begin like this. Thursday, May 14, marked the conclusion of a six-week services blitz that resulted in providing apartments or medical treatment to 47 people who had been living in tents beneath the highway.
As part of the encampment’s closure, police were expected to arrive with the city of Dallas’ Emergency Management and Crisis Response team and keep watch as people were instructed to leave the location. Instead, officers got here hours before service providers and immediately placed under arrest all 23 people who were present.
“Housing Forward does not support this approach, which merely cycles people between our overcrowded jail and back onto the streets,” read a statement provided by the nonprofit. “Law enforcement is an essential partner in maintaining the vibrancy and safety of our public spaces. But an overly aggressive enforcement response to individuals experiencing homelessness undermines our shared goal of eliminating street sleeping.”
For months, about 60 people had taken shelter in tents that extended the distance of roughly three football fields between Al Lipscomb Way and Coombs Street beneath the highway bridge.
This site — informally called “Coombs” by police and service providers, named for the nearby street — became the first Dallas homeless camp outside of downtown decommissioned through a new, weekslong approach that paired service organizations, city clean-up crews, and the police department. Housing Forward hoped to build rapport with the people living here by helping them secure vital documents and offering housing or treatment.
The officers’ response illustrates the challenge faced by service providers who must collaborate with a specialized police homelessness team that has ticketed and detained hundreds of people in encampments across the city since it was formed about nine months ago.
“We value the partnership we have with Housing Forward and other stakeholders with the goal of sustainable pathways out of homelessness, but we also have a responsibility to respond when public safety concerns, criminal activity, or legal violations happen,” a police spokesperson wrote in an email.
Many of those detained at Coombs either had not accepted the help offered to them, arrived too late, or said they returned to gather belongings. Their hands bound, they sat or lay in dirt near the camp’s front entrance, many with their heads bowed. Two were in their undergarments. A few were shoeless. At least 15 officers stood around them, forming a rough perimeter as the sun rose. Civilian employees with the city of Dallas’ Street Response team watched from a distance in bright red polos.
Advocates and service providers weren’t far behind. Nick McLean arrived at the site about half an hour after police, his eyes fixed on the two dozen who sat zip-tied on the dirt. He recognized about half of them through his work with The Human Impact, a nonprofit that offices a half-mile away and provides support to people experiencing homelessness. He said he tried to walk past the crime scene tape to speak with those detained, but police stopped him, telling him everyone was being taken to a detention center, not a homeless shelter.
An hour later, police officials relented and allowed McLean’s team to talk to everyone except for the three who had been separated because of felony warrants. McLean and two other Human Impact employees, Jeremiah Lin and Alyssa Bowyer, sat on the ground with the larger group for about half an hour.
Arms looped under his knees, McLean introduced himself then asked for names and how they were feeling. Most people were receptive, although one questioned McLean about why he was there if he couldn’t stop the police. “Don’t lose hope,” he told them, “there’s an opportunity here to not find yourself back in this kind of spot again.”
Their stories varied. One man had just moved into an apartment and told McLean his key was in a van that was about to get towed. Another told him he returned to pick up his belongings for his new unit. A woman said she’d heard people here were being housed, so she came to get a unit, too. Others told him the 24-hour notices to vacate were delivered at a later hour the prior morning; they thought they had more time, that they could sleep at the camp, grab their items, and leave after sunrise.
“I don’t think it’s true that all of the people who got detained today were sleeping out here,” McLean said. “Some people were in the middle of grabbing their stuff to go to their housing,” added Lin. A few who had been provided a place to live as part of the initiative had returned sporadically in recent weeks, Lin said, feeling lonely because the camp was their community.
Police eventually accepted McLean’s business cards so those detained would know they could stop by the nonprofit’s office for its weekly “meet and greet” events after their release. Human Impact invites people experiencing homelessness to socialize with one another and its staff. The organization has spent months building rapport with officers, McLean said. The fact that HOT allowed him to walk past the crime scene tape was a significant change.
“That’s the investment we’ve been trying towards,” he said. “All we care about is helping the people who have to experience what’s happening to them.” He believed many detainees would be released from custody by the afternoon.
The cops finished by 8:30 a.m. Seventeen people were taken to the city detention center, a short-term holding facility, and ticketed for prohibited camping. (That ticket, a Class C misdemeanor, often turns into an arrest warrant if the person misses their court date.) Four were jailed at the Lew Sterrett Justice Center for narcotics charges and a probation violation. One was taken to a hospital for medical treatment, then cited. Another was wanted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and transferred to federal custody.
Three cleaning crews swirled around the interstate’s pillars, clawing up tents, couches, blankets, discarded water bottles, blue and red pallets, black mesh netting, and dumped chairs. Andrew Rollo, a manager in Dallas’ Office of Emergency Management and Crisis Response, watched as skid-steers scooped it all up, sending plumes of dust into the sky.
City crews had visited Coombs three times in the days before the sweep to hand out notices, Rollo said. Along with Housing Forward, the city worked with nearby businesses, the Texas Department of Transportation, and Dallas Area Rapid Transit, which oversees train tracks across one end of the camp. “Everybody knows this as Coombs,” Rollo said. “It’s the reputation it has. We knew we had to address it.”
He pulled up a photo on his phone showing an RV that he said caught fire at Coombs earlier that week. The blaze rose to the interstate’s beams, melting some of the paint. “It’s so black under there,” Rollo said, pointing into the camp, “because of all the smoke and fire.” He counted about 15 burn pits at the site.
Soon, crews will trim vegetation, rip out weeds, and repair the surrounding chain-link fence. Patrols will visit Coombs daily to make sure no one returns to camp, he said.
Rollo is aware of the timing’s optics, considering the arrival of the FIFA World Cup and the Fan Fest at Fair Park in June. But he insisted that crews were not under the highway to get ahead of the event.
“That’s a little frustrating,” he said of complaints that the city isn’t addressing encampments, “because we do cleanings all the time, we’re working with the HOT team all the time, we’re doing outreach all the time, we’re responding to service requests every day. We are doing stuff like this. We’re trying, you know?”
Housing Forward, the city, and police have already identified their next targeted homeless encampment. The group doesn’t publicize locations prior to their closure, but noted it’s in Northwest Dallas, several miles from here.
“We stand ready to continue our longstanding partnership with DPD to provide real solutions to homelessness,” read Housing Forward’s statement.
“An overly aggressive enforcement response to individuals experiencing homelessness undermines our shared goal of eliminating street sleeping.”
Housing forward’s official statement.
While police cleared the camp in South Dallas, a very different event occupied the glass-walled atrium of the Winspear Opera House two miles away in the Arts District: Housing Forward’s annual State of Homelessness address.
Its CEO, Sarah Kahn, updated the room of about 100 with the organization’s wins since it formed in 2020. It has helped house about 23,000 people. It has recorded an increase of 83% in the number of households accessing services. Daily street counts of unsheltered people downtown have fallen by 90% since the organization’s “Safe in the City” campaign launched almost a year ago, a service-focused model that informed how Housing Forward is addressing Coombs and other large encampments.
“We have been able to hold back big surges in street homelessness that we’re seeing across the country,” she said.
Kahn believes the organization’s success has resulted from connecting these individuals with housing or medical treatment. During the event’s panel discussion, County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins argued there needs to be more focus on aid instead of punishment.
“When they get arrested, they come to our jail. That’s a very inefficient, and frankly, not helpful placement,” he said. “You can’t arrest your way out of the problem.”
This work isn’t cheap. Last year, the city and county governments gave the organization $20 million on top of $50 million provided by the federal government. Kahn knows how tenuous government funding can be, which is why Housing Forward is advocating for a special tax that would generate $100 million annually. Its goal is to replicate the services it provided at Coombs in large encampments across the region, which requires weeks of building rapport to help people get housing or treatment before police show up.
The tax would cost the average homeowner about $60 a year and will need to be approved by the Dallas County Commissioners Court by August to be placed on the ballot in November. Service providers first pitched commissioners on the idea in early May.
“We’re seriously taking a look at that,” Jenkins said during the panel. “This isn’t something we’ve been looking at for six months.”
Service providers were clear about their intention to pursue different ways to fund their programs. “We can either limp along, continue to go back year after year asking for people to squeeze budgets to give us the same funding we’ve been receiving,” Daniel Roby, the CEO of the shelter Austin Street Center, said during the panel. “Or we can decide that we can have a dedicated, ongoing funding base to make sure that we can adequately serve the people that the community is asked to serve.”
By 11:30 a.m., Coombs was mostly empty except for the skid-steer machines that scooped and dropped the last of the belongings into dumpsters. Two concrete barricades blocked the camp’s entrance on Clarence Street, topped with a yellow sign.
“You are hereby notified to remove your property and personal belongings and leave this location,” read the notice, which was tacked onto a wooden plank. “Abandoned property, property deemed hazardous, and debris may be removed by the City of Dallas.”
Those who were detained had been hauled away. All that was left on the road leading up to Coombs, near where the cops parked before dawn, was an orange Big Lots cart filled with a purple puffer jacket and red toy car meant for a toddler, yellow crime scene tape looped around its handle.
Matt Goodman contributed to this report.
Kelli Smith is a staff writer for The Lab Report. kelli@labreportdallas.com.
