housing
Collaborating, convening, and co-investing in neighborhoods to build thriving communities
Addressing the Local Housing Crisis
Housing is central to CFT’s mission to improve lives through health, wealth, living, and learning. Through CFT’s Housing Initiative, we are making a long-term commitment to help more people live in stable homes and strong neighborhoods connected to opportunity.
Across Dallas and its surrounding areas, rapid population growth has outpaced housing supply. Rising housing costs have deepened affordability gaps and placed increasing pressure on individuals and families. We are working with community leaders, developers, and investment partners to expand housing production, preserve affordability, and support policies needed to sustain mixed-income neighborhoods across the region.
Our North Star
Where people live shapes who they become. Homes and neighborhoods are the foundation of a thriving community, shaping economic mobility, educational access, health, safety, and long-term well-being.
Over the next five years, CFT has committed $50 million toward a new Housing Impact Fund, with a vision to reach $100 million through partner investment. The fund will provide low-cost, recyclable capital to help mission-aligned developers produce and preserve homes that working families and individuals can afford.
CFT’s Housing Initiative is organized around three connected strategies: production, preservation, and partnership/policy. Production expands housing supply through the Housing Impact Fund. Preservation protects long-term affordability through tools such as the Dallas Community Land Trust. Partnership and policy work through HouseDTX to strengthen the conditions that allow mixed-income neighborhoods to grow and remain stable.
Our Focus:
- Attainable Housing
CFT’s Housing Initiative focuses on housing often referred to as attainable, workforce, or missing-middle housing. This includes rental and homeownership opportunities for working families and individuals including educators, first responders, and essential workers who keep this region running.
- Initial Place-Based Focus: Southern Dallas
While CFT’s Housing Initiative will support work across Dallas and Collin Counties, CFT is placing early emphasis on historically disinvested neighborhoods in Southern Dallas. This focus reflects long-term partnership, available land, aligned public investment, existing community leadership, and the opportunity to support growth while reducing displacement.
Since we launched our Housing Initiative in fall 2025, CFT has granted more than $4 million in funding aligned with our strategy pillars.
Dallas Economic Development Corporation
Dallas Housing Opportunity Fund / LISC
Greater Dallas Planning Council
Texas Education Opportunity Fund (TEOF)
Spotlight on Production:
Innovative Construction Methods
Our strategy’s “production” pillar centers around increasing the supply of new homes that are accessible to more people.
This includes partnerships with mission-aligned community developers and builders, support for innovative construction methods, and access to low-cost capital through new loan funds, including program-related investments (PRIs). These tools help increase supply while supporting housing models that can remain attainable over time.
When we invest in innovative construction, we have the ability to provide not only a home, but also jobs in the economy of the future.
CFT’s Housing Impact Fund will enable developers to build more homes, often using innovative construction methods, to meet community needs.
Spotlight on Preservation:
Dallas Community Land Trust
Preservation focuses on protecting affordability over time.
Established in partnership with The Real Estate Council (TREC) and JP Morgan Chase, the Dallas Community Land Trust (CLT) is a new form of home ownership in Dallas that unlocks the dream of home ownership for more and more families.
The Dallas CLT supports shared-equity homeownership, helping families build generational wealth while keeping homes affordable for future buyers.
Frazier Revitalization recently contributed the first two homes to the Dallas CLT.
Part of CFT’s housing strategy focuses on protecting permanent affordability through a Community Land Trust, known as a CLT.
Spotlight on Partnership: HouseDTX
A cornerstone of CFT’s housing initiative is to convene public and private sectors through partnership. In 2025, CFT helped establish HouseDTX, an alliance of community leaders working together to advance effective housing policy and practices.
HouseDTX partners are currently collaborating through three working groups:
- a funders collective led by CFT to help developers access capital;
- an advocacy group grounded in the work of the Dallas Housing Coalition;
- and a planning and policy group led by the Greater Dallas Planning Council to develop housing recommendations for city consideration.
HouseDTX intends to release an annual housing snapshot to track progress toward closing housing gaps, stabilizing housing stock, and strengthening accountability across the housing ecosystem.
Housing Strategy Featured Partners
Los Angeles: A Cautionary Tale
Shane Phillips, author of The Affordable City, explains how slowed homebuilding in the Los Angeles metro area led to skyrocketed housing costs. Dallas is on the same trajectory; homebuilding has slowed significantly while our population has only increased.
CFT’s Housing Initiative helps Dallas change course by expanding attainable housing production, adding homes to the Dallas Community Land Trust, and convening partners through HouseDTX to coordinate capital, policy, and implementation.
Resources
Investments in Housing Press Release
Housing Strategy Partner Spotlights
In the News
D CEO Magazine: A $100 Million Bet on Affordable Housing in Dallas
D Magazine: How Dallas Leaders Aim to Fix the City’s Affordable Housing Problem Through Policy
D Magazine – FrontBurner: Could a $100M Fund Help Relieve Dallas’ Affordable Housing Problem?
Dallas Business Journal: Communities Foundation of Texas launches $50M housing initiative to tackle affordability issues
Dallas Innovates: Communities Foundation of Texas Launches $50M Initiative to Tackle Dallas’ Housing Crisis
Dallas Morning News: Communities Foundation of Texas launches $50 million housing initiative
NBC 5: Communities Foundation of Texas Launches $50M Dallas Housing Initiative
NBC 5: Millions pledged to grow Dallas housing
The Lab Report Dallas: These Stories Will Shape Dallas in 2026
WFAA: Communities Foundation of Texas aims to make housing more accessible in North Texas
WFAA: Dallas’ affordable housing supply is evaporating, report finds
White Rock Lake Weekly: Funds to address city’s housing challenges
Housing FAQs
Is there a housing crisis in Dallas?
Yes. Dallas and the surrounding region continue to grow, but housing supply has not kept pace. That imbalance has increased home prices and rents, reduced the availability of homes attainable to working families, and placed added pressure on the rental market.
Dallas is at an inflection point. Other high-growth regions show what happens when housing production fails to keep up with demand: costs rise, workers move farther from jobs, and communities lose the affordability edge that once supported growth.
CFT’s Housing Initiative seeks to help Dallas choose a different path by expanding production, preserving affordability, and aligning partners around policies and investments that sustain mixed-income neighborhoods.
Why is CFT adding housing as a strategic initiative?
Where people live shapes who they become and often dictates whether people can remain connected to opportunity over time.
As a foundation committed to education, health, and community safety, CFT is investing in housing because research shows that secure, quality housing is linked to positive outcomes in each of these areas.
Stable homes and strong neighborhoods influence access to jobs, schools, health, relationships, and long-term well-being.
We also know that high-opportunity neighborhoods have the power to shift the economic trajectories of entire generations of children.
Today, the Dallas region stands at a critical inflection point. We can continue down the path we are on and allow housing prices to climb to ever more unattainable levels, or we can build more new housing and protect enough of the existing supply to keep up with rising demand – so that rents and mortgages stay affordable for more people.
Is CFT changing its mission to focus on housing?
No. CFT is applying its mission through housing. Housing shapes many of the outcomes CFT already works to improve, including health, wealth, living, and learning. Stable homes and strong neighborhoods influence access to schools, jobs, health, safety, relationships, and long-term well-being.
What is CFT's role?
CFT does not build housing directly.
CFT serves as a convener, catalyst, and investor, helping housing efforts move forward through key efforts like our Housing Impact Fund and HouseDTX.
CFT provides strategic funding, supports long-term affordability, and helps strengthen coordination and policies among public, private, philanthropic, and community partners.
Is CFT’s housing initiative focused on addressing homelessness?
No – CFT remains a long-time investor in solutions to homelessness and continues to support that work through established regional partners.
CFT’s Housing Initiative complements those efforts by focusing specifically on attainable housing production, preservation, and the systems needed to sustain mixed-income neighborhoods.
What type of housing does the initiative focus on?
CFT’s Housing Initiative focuses on housing often referred to as attainable, workforce, or missing-middle housing. This includes rental and homeownership opportunities for working families and individuals including educators, first responders, and essential workers who keep this region running.
Is CFT building housing directly?
No. CFT does not build housing directly. CFT serves as a convener, catalyst, and investor, helping partners move housing efforts forward.
Why focus primarily in Southern Dallas?
While our housing initiative will span both Dallas and Collin Counties, we are particularly focused on the historically disinvested neighborhoods in Southern Dallas, where momentum for development is already in place.
CFT will play a leadership role to fund, catalyze, and convene partners to help continue to move work forward. This focus also provides an opportunity to create housing that allows existing residents to stay and benefit from the development that’s happening in their neighborhoods.
We acknowledge that housing pressure exists across the region beyond Southern Dallas, and CFT investments will also be applied in other areas.
However, Southern Dallas is where CFT is focusing early effort in a deeper, place-based way. This focus aligns with growing momentum in the Southern Sector with projects like Forest Forward, Halperin Park, UNT Dallas development, and more.
Southern Dallas is among the last remaining places with undeveloped land and is a crucial area for the long-term sustainability of Downtown, and the region as a whole.
How will CFT measure success?
CFT will measure success through homes produced and preserved, capital leveraged, stronger cross-sector coordination, and community-level outcomes connected to health, wealth, living, and learning.
Over the next 10 years, CFT and its partners aim to contribute to:
- at least 5,000 to 10,000 attainable homes produced or preserved,
- 2X leverage on CFT’s housing investments,
- stronger alignment among philanthropy, business, banks, and government,
- and healthier, safer, more stable neighborhoods across Dallas.
Stay in touch.
Join us and other funders, advocates, planners, and community leaders to expand access to housing in Dallas.