Dallas' The Bridge Homeless Center's Progressive Approach May Actually Make a Difference

The task force settled on a campus setting for the new center where people could eat, sleep and have access to services. The idea—a kind of shopping mall of social services—was gaining national popularity, and centers had sprung up in Miami and San Diego. The Dallas facility would have a courtyard with plenty of natural light. "We did not want it to be an enclosed environment," Dunning says. "Many chronically homeless people have a fear of being in an enclosed environment." The task force also envisioned that the homeless, by availing themselves of the services offered at the center, would be primed for re-entry into regular life.

Next came the controversial task of finding a location for the center. The task force examined six sites and finally decided on the southern end of downtown at the intersection of St. Paul and Corsicana streets. If Dallas was going to make a dent in the problem, the facility had to be placed where the largest concentration of homeless existed, says Dunning. "It was best to be downtown."

But the decision elicited ire from the business community; dozens of downtown enterprises, including Urban Market and Ace Parking, organized to fight the project. Calling themselves the Heart of Dallas Partnership, they opposed the 2005 city bond election, which, if successful, would earmark $23.8 million to fund construction of a new center. "It seemed to me that we were investing all this money and trying to revitalize downtown and that it would be a good idea to get that thing out of downtown," recalls Jerry Hamilton, a local developer who spearheaded the Partnership. "It is a downer when the place starts to resemble Skid Row with all kinds of vagrants and derelict people just kind of hanging out and loitering and panhandling and committing anti-social acts and urinating in doorways."

But the bond election passed handily. The initiative had the support of Miller, but Dunning credits the victory to the generosity of the voters. "Even those people not physically supporting the homeless are supportive of the city trying to help them," he says.

Also in 2005, Mike Rawlings, a former Pizza Hut executive, replaced Dunning as the city's homeless czar. The following year, the Dallas City Council selected Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance, a coalition of local homeless agencies, to plan and later manage the new homeless center. Metro Dallas' board in turn chose Faenza to head The Bridge.

"There were two things specific to Mike [Faenza]," Rawlings says. "One, he'd been in Dallas before, working with the county jail, so people in the mental health programs know Mike. Two, his whole life has been around mental health."

It had been 13 years since Faenza left Dallas for Washington, D.C., to lead a national mental health advocacy organization, but local groups still remember his unyielding advocacy. As the former president of the Dallas Mental Health Association, Faenza once packed the Dallas County Commissioners Court with protesters to get commissioners to fund a mental health program in the jail. He got his way. "In Dallas, Mike was very well-known," says Dr. Joel Feiner, director of the Dallas VA Medical Center's Comprehensive Homeless Center. "He wasn't bashful. And in some ways, some of us miss those days. There was an urgency to our efforts."

When Faenza returned to Dallas, he hadn't lost any of his zeal. It fell upon him to find funding for the mentally ill homeless, but few mental health organizations, including those with whom he previously had worked, wanted to allocate money to the homeless, especially if it meant less funding for other programs. So Faenza went to the Texas Legislature in 2007 after learning of a bill that would authorize $85 million statewide to fund psychiatric crisis intervention. Working with a lobbyist, he inserted a rider to the bill that would have diverted Dallas County's share of the fund to The Bridge. The legislation passed but without the rider. Still Faenza's tactics left some hard feelings within the local mental health community. "People said, 'This is a low-down trick,'" Faenza says. "But it established that I would be a tenacious advocate. Nobody doubts that."

Faenza next doubled the operating budget for The Bridge so that it would have case managers on site. At first, Rawlings balked, says Faenza, but he then came around and helped Faenza secure additional funding from the city. Of The Bridge's $6.4 million budget, the city kicked in $3.2 million, and the county gave another million, conditioned on seeing a reduction in the jail's homeless detainees. Faenza must raise the balance of the budget from private donors.