This Texas City’s Attempt To Fight Charities That Feed The Homeless Cost It 8 Years And $250,000 “ Dallas city leaders voted Wednesday to walk back its crackdown on feeding the homeless in public and agreed to pay out a quarter-million-dollar cash...

This Texas City’s Attempt To Fight Charities That Feed The Homeless Cost It 8 Years And $250,000

Dallas city leaders voted Wednesday to walk back its crackdown on feeding the homeless in public and agreed to pay out a quarter-million-dollar cash settlement to the charities that took the city to court eight years ago. A national advocate for the homeless hopes Dallas’ experience will be a lesson to other cities like Fort Lauderdale, FL that are trying to ban charities from feeding the homeless in public.

The original Dallas ordinance required charities that wished to feed the homeless to provide bathrooms and running water, effectively restricting the groups to a handful of sites rather than allowing them to go to where the need was greatest. It also required them to register with the city no matter how large or small their food program might be, with the threat of a $2,000 fine for violators. Some charity workers defied the ban on feeding homeless people wherever they were encamped, and the matter went to court in early 2007.

Dallas’ experience shows that “cities can save a lot of time and money if they work with homeless service providers, work with homeless advocates, and adopt reasonable policies and procedures that constructively help get homeless people off the street as opposed to simply enacting these punitive ordinances on their own and then having to wind up in court,” said Jeremy Rosen, Advocacy Director for the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP). Wednesday’s deal doesn’t eliminate city rules, he said, but revises them to allow important on-street charitable work “while also being fair to some of the city’s interests in knowing what’s going on and when very large groups of people are going to be congregating in one place.”

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