The Data Screams: The Housing Crisis Is Here

What can Dallas learn from Charlotte, a city two-thirds its size, a thousand miles east?

The Lab Report’s last two stories examined how churches in North Carolina’s largest municipality are adding rooftops to chip away at its housing shortage. Dallas churches have for years, in fits and starts, talked about developing land they own but don’t need; those in Charlotte are already turning dirt every year. They are putting up apartments and condominiums and single-family homes that are affordable to everyone from restaurant workers to schoolteachers and first responders.

Since 2019, the faith-based initiative there has delivered at least 1,500 new units of housing and attracted interest from over 100 places of worship. (And counting.) It’s also helped these congregations find a future beyond the collection plate, literally saving some churches from running out of money as their memberships decline.

It is important that Dallas recognize its challenges—in this case, housing—are not unique. Solving the affordability issue, which includes ensuring that even the poorest Dallasites have dignified access to a quality home, will require many strategies that swim hard against the current. And a good way to identify new paths is by finding them in similar markets where they’ve led to results, like how Charlotte’s faith community mobilized into becoming small-scale housing developers.

“Whether you’re a Christian or a Muslim or whoever, it’s a moral imperative that you care about the community and your people in it,” says Linda McMahon, CEO of the Dallas Economic Development Corporation, whose former job leading The Real Estate Council involved advising partners on housing. “The churches, they have the ability to do this. But they don’t really have the support system or the tools to do it.”

Locally, housing affordability grows more dire each year. Dallas is rapidly losing stock that is affordable to people considered low-income, who, using the federal government’s definition, make up about 60 percent of our renters. “Affordable” generally means that someone isn’t spending more than one-third of their income on housing.

“We’re losing affordable housing faster than we can produce it,” says James Armstrong, the deputy director of Housing and Homelessness for the city of Dallas.

Census data show that a surprisingly small number of young adults, and families in particular, are moving to the city; residents under 18 actually declined by eight-tenths of a percentage point from 2013 to 2023 while this population grew by 9.6 percent over the same period across the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. (The city of Dallas’ largest population growth is among those 65 and over, which grew by almost 33 percent over the decade.) Meanwhile, housing currently affordable to middle-income earners will not be in 10 years, and maybe sooner. Dallas isn’t producing or preserving enough places for people to live to flip these trends.

These findings, and many others, come courtesy of the Child Poverty Action Lab’s housing team. Next month, they plan to release an updated version of the Rental Housing Needs Assessment, an analysis that helps policymakers, journalists, advocates, and other researchers understand the depth of the problem. (The Lab Report is editorially independent, but our colleagues share their work with us.)  

The median renter in Dallas makes just under $55,000 a year, according to Census data, and like national trends, wages aren’t rising alongside increasing costs. Dallas is really a renter’s city: only 42 percent of our housing is owner-occupied while 58 percent is renter-occupied, and demand continues to outpace supply. Higher earners are remaining renters longer, maybe because of the higher price of for-sale homes, maybe transience, maybe they just don’t want to deal with homeownership. That means they’re occupying apartments instead of cycling into homes and opening their former rental to someone else. Complicating matters, the city’s zoning decisions have for decades favored protecting single-family neighborhoods over adding density, effectively making it harder to build.

The inventory for low-rent units plummeted between 2021 and 2023. There are now just 47,000 that rent for $1,000 or less, the report found, down from 98,000 two years prior. The data lags—the CPAL assessment uses the U.S. Census’ five-year American Community Survey, the most recent of which runs through 2023—so it’s a fair assumption that there are even fewer today. About 90 percent of all very-low earners are cost-burdened, meaning they spend over a third of their incomes on housing. 

Some other takeaways:

• The report found a gap of 46,000 units for people making below 50 percent of the area median income, which is about $52,000 for a family of four and a little under $36,000 for a single earner.

• That delta between the supply and demand for homes priced for these earners has increased from 39,900 in a single year and remains on pace to grow to 76,100 units by 2035 if we do nothing.

• For those who make a little more, the folks in the 61 to 80 percent AMI bucket who bring in between about $43,000 and $58,000 a year, the news is good but fleeting: a present surplus of about 38,000 will give way to a deficit of 63,000 affordable units for all earners at or below 80 percent AMI by 2035.

Charlotte’s gap already extends into higher income brackets. It estimates needing 32,000 more units for residents making 80 percent or less of the area’s median income, which is any amount below $90,000 for a family of four. The churches use this data to help inform the types of development they wish to pursue; some may target the chronically homeless while others price their units for first-time homebuyers. The city views this strategy as one of many ways to solve its housing problem.

“I believe that we’re heading toward a path where communities can actually create the number of affordable housing units that they need for their communities,” Charlotte assistant city director Warren Wooten told Lab Report senior writer Sharon Grigsby, who visited the city to learn what’s behind the success of its faith-based development. “Church-based housing will be part of that.”  

A critical takeaway for the city of Dallas is the way Charlotte has scaled its program. Its City Hall is a convener, the steady rhythm section that keeps time as the song lurches to its conclusion. The city government has created a fund, stocked with voter-approved bond dollars, to help churches close financing gaps, which makes the deals pencil despite renting or selling the developments for below the market rate. City Hall provides education, particularly around often-byzantine pre-development requirements, zoning help, and connections with trusted developers, helping calm the skepticism that is often natural when a congregation considers letting an outsider develop its land.

This has attracted at least a little attention from our policymakers. Council member Cara Mendelsohn, who chairs the Housing and Homelessness Solutions Committee, says “it has been a misstep to not view [places of worship] as essential partners as we develop the next generation of housing plans.”

“The opportunity to unlock new housing on land that would not otherwise be considered developable, along with congregational support as part of the offering, could help people serve more deeply while strengthening and improving the lives of people exiting homelessness or generational poverty,” she says.

Mendelsohn says she would like to see programs offer churches interest-free loans “provided the housing is serving very-low income residents” and gap financing from bond funds. She seems most interested in the impact faith-based development could have in addressing the shortage of units for Dallasites who are deeply impoverished.

“Faith communities are centered around moral principles that include assisting the homeless and highly affordable housing, making them natural partners for housing development,” she says. “Congregations that wish to serve and expand in this area and already own non-taxable land are uniquely positioned to offer affordable housing.”

In Dallas, philanthropy appears willing to place itself at the center of the city’s next big housing bet. The board of the Communities Foundation of Texas in 2024 agreed that it was time to significantly invest in helping with affordability. Its executive team soon came to the same realization Charlotte did, that scaling requires a nucleus between the development and business communities, city government, lenders, and other key stakeholders that are foundational to housing projects.

The foundation last October revealed a campaign, called HouseDTX, that includes a $100 million fund. CFT promised to give $50 million in the first five years while raising another $50 million. The goal is to disburse that money toward a trio of guiding strategies: build more housing, preserve more of what affordable stock already exists, and nudge the city toward changing its building and zoning codes intended to blow apart the bureaucratic barriers that can stifle affordable developments and limit new types of construction. In the next five years, CFT hopes to create or preserve 5,000 units of affordable housing.

“There are so many issues in housing that are prior to anyone seeing a house, like the policy, the planning, the capacity among our developer community, the capital and its availability,” says Nadine Dechausay, CFT’s chief strategy officer. “All of those things have to be addressed if we’re going to see any change, and it doesn’t happen except through relationships and coordination of the partners that we currently have.”

She says faith-based housing will be the focus of one of five working groups—each will help determine more targeted investment strategies—launched by the end of the year. 

That’s not to say churches have never built here. Nearly three decades ago, Richie Butler, now the senior pastor at St. Luke Community United Methodist Church just east of downtown, joined the African American Pastor’s Coalition in building a new subdivision near Interstate 20 and Hampton Road. Called Unity Estates, the project allowed churches to invest in 285 single-family homes priced for workers like teachers and firefighters. “Now there’s a Target and all kinds of retail down there,” he says. “The project helped catalyze all that activity in that area, so it was transformational.”

“Unfortunately, it was never repeated,” he says. “That’s the sad reality.” 

Butler, who previously chaired CFT’s board of directors and has a background in real estate, says he’s helping a large church in southern Dallas, which he declined to identify, develop a master plan for 60 of its acres. The goal is to partner with the city’s public facility corporation, an entity that can exempt property taxes for developers willing to price half of the units at affordable rates, to build 755 apartments. “Once we cease to be affordable,” Butler says, “I think we will cease to attract people the way we have been.”  

Beginning in late 2024, the national nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners provided a six-month education program for 20 Texas churches interested in building affordable housing. Three are in North Texas: Cornerstone Baptist in South Dallas, Concord Church in Oak Cliff, and DeSoto’s Disciple Central Community Church. Enterprise’s education and help with costs for civil engineering and architectural fees has allowed Cornerstone to get the two-family Davis Manor House closer to construction. “Hopefully, and prayerfully, with their help, we’ll be able to get this first home out of the ground later this year,” says Cornerstone senior pastor Chris Simmons. The others are not as far along.

But those projects have been piecemeal, driven by churches that don’t always have development experience. Dechausay says HouseDTX is designed to identify strategies like faith-based housing as part of a menu of solutions to add to the city’s housing stock, something Charlotte realized, too. It will take far more than one strategy to dig out from the shortage. 

“Relative to the problem, this housing amount is small,” Wooten, the assistant city director in Charlotte, told Sharon. “But what happens to a household when they get stable housing is a generational change that we have yet to figure out a way to fully quantify. You talk about breaking cycles of poverty.”

The new rental housing assessment shows the direction Dallas is heading. The aging units that make up most of the affordable stock are increasingly disappearing, vulnerable to price increases and demolition. When asked about where faith-based efforts fit into the city's affordable housing strategy, Armstrong, Dallas’ deputy housing director, agreed with Mendelsohn that the city hasn’t done enough to partner with its faith community. “Everyone has to do their part,” he says. “There are some places the city will support, there are some places the city will lead, and there are some places the city will collaborate.” 

Charlotte’s faith-based initiative has created a variety of product types; it’s not only multifamily apartment complexes. Dallas is currently reforming its zoning codes, which Armstrong is hopeful will lead to new rules that allow for the construction of more duplexes, triplexes, and other housing that is generally referred to as “missing middle.” He says the city is looking for ways to allow other forms of construction—modular and manufactured, in particular—especially as the federal government hints at creating new funding sources for these sorts of projects, which are quicker and cheaper than traditional construction types. The city is one of many partners in the HouseDTX initiative.

“The city’s job is to support and to fill in the gaps through the housing department by financing the activity of preservation and production of affordable housing,” Armstrong says. “The city is in the gap business.”

And as Charlotte shows, those opportunities—gaps—aren’t always difficult to find; they can even be right next to where you attend church. 

Senior Writer Sharon Grigsby contributed to this report.

Matt Goodman is the co-founder and editor of The Lab Report. [email protected].

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