David Woody is only weeks away from retiring as president and CEO of The Bridge, but the people just keep coming. Since the start of the fiscal year in October, Dallas’ largest homeless shelter has checked in 5,244 individuals, about 41% of whom — 2,149 — had never been here before.
The Bridge Homeless Recovery Center, a 3.4-acre campus just north of Interstate 30 next to the Farmers Market, was funded through the 2005 bond and structured to allow in as many as possible. It requires no background or sobriety checks, has no faith affiliation, and provides a kennel with space for 22 dogs. Its guests, as they’re called once inside, must be 18 or older and experiencing homelessness.
About 600 people check in before walking beneath the trees into its open courtyard on any given day; beds are available for 320 of them. Makeshift overflow areas — cots in buildings and outside near the entrance — move that number closer to 400, usually several hundred spots short of what’s needed each night. It reopens at 6 a.m. each day.
Woody has pulled at this problem since he started in 2015 as chief services officer. After becoming CEO three years later, he invested in more case managers and other service providers intended to help guests exit homelessness. Woody knows The Bridge is successful when its clients leave and don’t come back. That requires complicated coordination with behavioral health specialists and physicians, job trainers and barbers, even the cooks responsible for three nutritious meals a day.
According to its data, the shelter has helped secure housing for 423 people this year. Those numbers also show that 95% of everyone The Bridge has helped find homes are still in their units a year later. It maintains a constantly changing waitlist of about 100 individuals ready and waiting for a place.
Offering a “shopping mall of social services,” as the Dallas Observer described it in 2008, the year it opened, is no longer the radical idea it once was. But running The Bridge hasn’t been without challenges. Because of its location and size, it’s an easy target for those who want to move the homeless shelter away from downtown. When this discussion reached City Hall last year, Woody wasn’t at the conference table. In response, he showed up during public comment at a Council meeting and fiercely defended its funding. He spoke to journalists about the need to keep the facility near many of the people it serves. The talk of moving has quieted, but it’s never gone for good.
Woody’s successor will be Annam Manthiram, who was most recently the North Texas Food Bank’s chief external affairs officer. She took that job after about two years as CEO of CitySquare, the now-shuttered anti-poverty nonprofit that provided permanent supportive housing, job training, and other services to thousands of people like those who walk into The Bridge each day.
Woody will work through July. For now he’s helping Manthiram get to know The Bridge, the external pressures she will navigate, and how to expand the work he has led inside these three or so acres. He believes The Bridge will be there for anyone who needs it. But he would also like to see the people not need to come.
The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
TLR: In some of the materials announcing your retirement, you said you were particularly proud about how you’ve changed the perception of The Bridge. I’m curious whether you had to change the organization’s perception among the population you serve.
Woody: There are so many people I would see early in my tenure, let’s say between here and City Hall, who would tell me, Yeah, I’ve been to The Bridge, but I don’t want to be there. I’ve been to The Bridge, and I don’t feel very safe there. I really took that to heart. I love talking to people, treating people with dignity and respect. That’s who I am. People who are in recovery from homelessness have to be in a space where they feel they can take a deep breath. Chill. We can’t treat folks on the campus like they would be treated if they were panhandling at Discovery Plaza.
That’s why I’m saying, bring them over here and allow them to experience that. Because the next step, hopefully, is we can help them craft an exit from here.
And they know they can stay in this place for 24 hours a day, right?
Let me speak to that. There is not enough night shelter in Dallas. Period. On our campus, we can sleep reasonably, in our dedicated spots, about 320 people. When my folks craft a plan for the guest, where you’re going to be at night is a critical piece of that. That’s for your own safety, such that you’re not being involved in the kinds of behaviors and challenges in the community that may be part of why you’re homeless.
At 3 p.m., there’s a list that goes up for who should be here for our dedicated spots. Unfortunately, like today, if I’ve got 620 people, I only have space for about 320 at night. Between 4:30 and 5 p.m., because they can’t sleep here, I’ve got to push them out. There’s always this delta, every day.
Our staff is trying to figure out where else they could go. Does it need to be Austin Street, the Salvation Army, Union Gospel, Dallas Life? But again, because the system is jammed, that leaves some people out there.
What we are offering now is overflow. We’re using our large dining hall, the small dining hall, and we’ve got some other nooks and crannies for 44 designated spots. Last night, we had 66 people here in overflow on top of the 320. We’re getting close to 400 in total, and two-thirds of the overflow are female. Any staff member here, they’re gonna say, ‘Hey, any woman, get them off the street.’ They’re vulnerable out there, and they’re not gonna get any rest because their head’s on a swivel.
In addition to this normal overflow, and I don’t want to say this is because of FIFA — but it’s because of FIFA — they’re moving folks here from the central business district, and they’re sleeping outside of our entry spot. Last night, I think we had 30 folks sleeping out there who were downtown.
And police brought them here?
Yes. We’ll see how long, post-FIFA, that lasts, but my goal, and I haven’t achieved it yet, is to be able to offer more night shelter. I want to do some renovations on our pavilion area to be able to expand that to sleep at least 100 more people.
Is that, in your mind, why being located downtown is important? That you’re close to the problem?
I’ve had conversations with some of these people who claim they want to move The Bridge. Pick it up, move it to Dallas Executive Airport [in Oak Cliff]. What’s that gonna look like? No. 1 is, why would that community say they’re willing to take all that on? I get why they wouldn’t. There are not a lot of districts in Dallas who are saying, ‘Bring some homeless services to us.’ But there are people on high who claim that residents would accept that. Come on. You’ve got to think at least a little bit critically about that.
No. 2 is, what about the unsheltered folk? In urban areas around the world, there are unsheltered people in urban areas. Can you imagine today where these 620 people would go if The Bridge wasn’t here?
We help keep the neighborhood clean. We’re part of the neighborhood, and that speaks volumes, both internally and externally. If you look out my window, we have high-dollar condos and apartment buildings, two of them, right across the street from The Bridge. That’s the opposite of what everybody would claim would happen if you built a homeless shelter in the neighborhood, right?
Do you feel managing the public discourse about The Bridge’s role in homelessness response pulls you away from the work that happens here?
The first thing that I’ve had to do is try to get at the table to be part of the conversation, which has not been an easy thing. It’s been extremely difficult to get invited to the table. And then when you get to the table, how quiet do I have to be and for how long? I’ve tried to be strategic about letting folks know, hey, if you’re talking about homelessness, you should have somebody from The Bridge there. We see 620 people a day.
I’ve grown to have just thick enough skin that I can see the bigger picture. I’ve grown to be able to figure out when to prioritize The Bridge and when I have to step away from that and see how The Bridge can be more helpful to the system. Right now, the system has to be more responsive to what citizens claim that they want to see and not see.
What are those things?
People don’t want to see homeless people. I’ll take a positive spin, that it’s a painful visual. Somebody standing and talking to themselves, somebody who is laying on the concrete with clamshell takeout boxes thrown around them — that’s a hard visual, and I get that.
There is not enough night shelter in Dallas. Period.
David woody, president and ceo of the bridge
The Bridge’s stated mission is to get those people in, connect them with experts who help them prepare for a life beyond the street, and then get them housing. That has become the approach for the region, with shelters operating as a place for stability before exiting. Is this working?
The Bridge has been doing that for 18 years. What I love about that, they’re saying that shelter should be the launchpad. People are thinking about how folks are getting ready for the housing that you would put them in. They’re not going to sit in there and do whatever for three months then lose the housing and end up needing to come back to a shelter.
We have expanded our care management teams. We now have an intensive care management team, which focuses on the needs of our guests with behavioral health, mental health, and substance use barriers. This is a discrete team, OK? We now have a discrete housing team, which is crafting relationships with landlords who may be willing to offer a unit or a group of units to an organization like us that is moving folks into a housing solution. We also understand that the landlord is running a business and they need to be leased up. I have 100 people here who are housing ready; we can keep them leased up.
We went from having relationships with eight landlords pre-pandemic to now over 50. That helps with our ongoing problem: I can’t move folks out of here fast enough so that I can reasonably accommodate the number who are coming onto the campus. When I started, we had 70 to 75 employees. We’re up to 120.
Ninety-five percent of the people we have housed are not coming back here because of that hard work. They’re still housed after 12 months.
Where do you see The Bridge in five years?
I see it probably right here. There’s some property around, and I’ve been thinking about what it would look like if we wanted to expand. Maybe we add more beds by going vertical. I’ve talked with our board about having our own housing option, maybe a permanent-supportive housing campus. I’d love to see us have 100 units, that we would have our own pipeline for exiting homelessness.
We have averaged about 300 to 320 new guests to homelessness every month for each of the last six months. That tells us a lot about what’s happening out in the community, the things landing folks in a position to have to come to The Bridge. We all know what they are. They’ve lost jobs, they can’t afford their bills; these are people who never thought they would become homeless. But about 55% of our folks are employed, working second or third shift.
My challenge is the numbers keep increasing.
Matt Goodman is the co-founder and editor of The Lab Report. matt@labreportdallas.com.
