State of Dallas Housing - 5 Year Comparison Report

buildingcommunityWORKSHOP is excited to share our State of Dallas Housing - 5 Year Comparison Report! This report focuses on how Dallas’ housing landscape has changed over five years. Using our State of Dallas Housing 2017 report as a baseline, this year’s report shows how the data changed from 2016 to 2021.

You can also learn more about the current state of Dallas’ rental housing market by checking out Child Poverty Action Lab’s recently released Rental Housing Needs Assessment.

We hope this report, along with all the other great work happening in Dallas around housing, will lead to tangible outcomes for those in need of attainable housing. Learn how you can support attainable housing in Dallas by visiting Dallas Housing Coalition’s website

Exploring Affordable Housing Options in Dallas

We’re excited to announce that we have a new project starting up in Dallas! 

With funding from the Truist Foundation and the MUFG Union Bank Foundation, we have begun a partnership with East Dallas Christian Church (EDCC) in their effort to repurpose existing assets in the Peak's Addition neighborhood of Dallas and explore the reprogramming of existing facilities as well as affordable housing options for their vacant property. Church Cartographers, a mission-based consulting firm specializing in reimagining underutilized church assets, and East Dallas Development Organization (EDCO) are also key project partners joining in this effort.

When the project is complete, EDCC will have a vision for community programming of an unused building as well as a report on their vacant land detailing: 

• Number of units that could be built

• What percentage of AMI could be served at each price point

• Preliminary development proforma

• Potential cash flow resulting from project, should EDCC wish to pursue it

The research produced through this project will add to [bc]’s ongoing efforts to push innovative solutions for affordable housing in Dallas. Like so many other cities, Dallas faces major housing affordability issues,with low-income communities of color being most at-risk of displacement and losing the rich historic character of their neighborhoods. The aim is to approach the concept of the Missing Middle - an industry term for the lack of quality low rise medium density housing options) to meet the demands of affordable housing, equitable opportunities for home ownership, and healthy neighborhoods. See image below, courtesy of missingmiddlehousing.com.

We have been engaged in research and mapping to understand existing neighborhood assets and opportunities and will begin the community engaged design process in the weeks to come. Stay tuned for more from this exciting project!

Samano Building: Historic Adaptive Reuse in Brownsville

In late 2020, we began work with our partner cdcb on an exciting historic adaptive reuse of the Samano Building in downtown Brownsville. Located at 1158 E. Elizabeth Street, the property consists of five stories, each approximately 5,775 square feet, with a basement. Originally built as a bank in 1925, the Samano building most recently was a Payless Shoe Store, followed by a period of vacancy until cdcb acquired the building.

When complete, the Samano Building will include a small grocery store and coffee shop on the ground floor (filling the gap in nutritious grocery access left when HEB moved from its downtown location), coworking/office spaces on the middle floor, and 34 units of affordable housing on the top floors with set-asides for citizens in transition. 

Check out these photos of Samano - including what it looked like in its heyday and a rendering of what the building will look like when work is complete!

Samano soon after construction at 1158 E. Elizabeth Street

The building as it stands today

The future Samano Building - rendering by Donald Hickman

How to Be a Housing Advocate

Everyone deserves a safe, healthy, affordable place to live. Every neighborhood deserves housing that meets the diverse needs of our community. But unfortunately, the housing reality in most cities is far from perfect. Housing segregation persists due to a legacy of racist housing policies like redlining. Today, misconceptions about affordable housing persist among many residents — but housing diversity strengthens our economy, improves commuting times, and provides a number of other benefits.

If you would like to help promote housing diversity in your own neighborhood or city, [bc] has put together a guide on how to be a housing advocate that covers the following topics:

• What housing diversity is and why it’s a good thing

• Why the city of Dallas doesn’t have housing diversity

• Why it’s hard to find affordable housing

• Misconceptions surrounding affordable housing

• What YOU can do to be a housing advocate

The report features a case study of Dallas, but it applies to cities across the USA. To learn how you can be a Housing Advocate and promote housing diversity in EVERY neighborhood, read the full report here.

MiCASiTA Wins Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge

We are excited to announce that cdcb | come dream. come build. and [bc] are among the 6 winning teams for the Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge from Enterprise and Wells Fargo. With this award, our team will have $2.5 million to expand our innovative solution for rural homeownership, MiCASiTA, from 2020 to 2022.

ABOUT MiCASiTA

Affordable housing is too often synonymous with a one-size-fits-all approach that fails to offer any real choices for families most in need. MiCASiTA allows residents and community members to make decisions about each housing development – cultivating agency and control that yields power.

MiCASiTA is a unique off-the-shelf environmentally sustainable, disaster-resilient modular homeownership innovation. It is designed for rural families across the Rio Grande Valley and more communities struggling with persistent poverty nationwide. MiCASiTA marks a departure from a one-size-fits-all model to a system that empowers communities of color with modest incomes to choose and design their own homes.

WHAT WE’LL DO

Over the course of its grant, cdcb and [bc] aim to build six prototype dwellings whose construction costs are less per square foot than the average unit in the market. They will complete the design and launch of their Choice Empower software system, allowing clients to choose and weigh the costs of design options. They will also expand the MiCASiTA model to one additional persistent poverty region in the United States.

Looking beyond the lifespan of the grant, cdcb believes that successful scale for MiCASiTA is not just increased unit production: It is a client-led design and production system that is easily adopted and implemented across the country. That system will include a franchise model with built-in systems, processes and technology to support market diversity and context, both culturally and economically.

Most importantly, MiCASiTA aspires to generate a documented increase in client empowerment that shows measurable improvement in families’ physical and financial health and the true transfer of intergenerational wealth in communities of color.

Meet the other amazing winners of the Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge!

2019 State of Dallas Housing Report: Heirs Property

Each year, bcANALYTICS releases its State of Dallas Housing Report, a data-driven assessment of the housing landscape in the city. In 2019, rather than releasing the report in a single document, we have decided to roll it out over the course of three installments in order to be more responsive to current needs and changes as the City of Dallas begins to implement its first ever Comprehensive Housing Report. 

Our analytics team has been working hard and the first installment of the State of Dallas Housing is here! This report assesses the scale, distribution and impact of heirs property on neighborhoods and individuals in Dallas County. 

Read the full report here!

Acres Homes: New Home Development Program

Healthy, viable communities rely on strong interpersonal ties at the neighborhood level—and the preservation of affordable housing is crucial to this equation. With that in mind, we are excited to announce a partnership between buildingcommunityWORKSHOP and the City of Houston focused on creating affordable single family homes for sale using lots available from the Houston Land Bank.

Building off of our work with the Disaster Recovery Round 2 (DR2) program, [bc] is partnering with the City to design 18 new, single-family homes in the Acres Homes neighborhood. Through DR2, we had the opportunity to work with local designers in developing a Community Engagement process to set contextual and programmatic design preferences for the targeted neighborhoods and to produce informed schematic home designs, including floor plans and elevations. Taking into consideration lessons learned from our affordable housing projects and the recent changes to the floodplain ordinance in Houston, [bc] worked to adapt the designs to pier and beam foundation as well as to increase their spatial efficiencies. These home designs are based on the feedback received during the DR2 engagement process, individual design meetings with over 300 households, and our recent participation in the Acres Home neighborhood design charrette through the Complete Communities initiative.

A Unique Approach to Housing Affordability

By building on lots owned by the Houston Land Bank, this program establishes a long-term strategy for affordability in the Acres Homes neighborhood. The Houston Land Bank relies on the use of strategic relationships between developers, builders, community organizations, and other stakeholders to stimulate the revitalization of vacant, abandoned, and/or tax foreclosed properties.

Why New Home Development?

The City of Houston’s New Home Development Program concentrates on bringing infill homes built on vacant lots, adding options for healthy affordable housing that increase neighbor proximity and give more families the opportunity to become first-time homebuyers.

Building new homes increases a community’s physical assets, encouraging future development and investment. Furthermore, partnerships between home designers, builders, and community organizations engaged in community revitalization are strengthened when the affordable housing stock is developed.

Here’s the Master Plan for Acres Homes:

Stay tuned for more updates on the Acres Homes development. We look forward to sharing more with you here on our website and in our newsletter!