Model Project for Permanent Supportive Housing in Dallas Breaks Ground
THE COTTAGES AT HICKORY CROSSING will provide homes for 50 chronically homeless Dallas residents who suffer from severe mental illness and have also been involved in the criminal justice system. Residents will live in small, freestanding cottages on a wooded site southeast of downtown and will receive intensive behavioral health services and social services to improve their lives.
"This leading-edge project is the thing to do on a humanitarian level—and it also makes financial sense,” said Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings. “By providing homes and intensive mental health treatment, we’re offering a permanent solution to a complex problem in a way that’s cost-effective for the city and county: it’s less expensive to provide homes for the chronically homeless than to have them live on the streets, untreated, where they keep rotating in and out of hospitals and jails.”
The Cottages project is a unique coalition of public and private groups working together. The City of Dallas, the Dallas Housing Authority and Dallas County are providing public funding while private support is coming from CitySquare, Central Dallas Community Development Corporation, Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance, Metrocare Services, UT Southwestern Medical Center and CFT, which initiated the project with a $2.5 million challenge grant from its W.W. Caruth, Jr. Foundation Fund.