A Dallas Megadonor, a New Nonprofit, and the War on ‘Housing First’

3 hours ago 17

On October 15, 2024, the Texas Senate State Affairs Committee held a wide-ranging special hearing in the Capitol’s underground extension. The first subject was “addressing homelessness,” an issue that affects tens of thousands of Texans on any given night. Among those who testified were elected politicians, law enforcement officials, and service providers from major cities across the state, as well as Monty Bennett—a Dallas hotelier and major conservative political donor who lacks experience providing homeless services but has given at least $127,500 combined to the campaigns of six GOP lawmakers on that committee since 2015.

“I’ve taken up the charge to try to help my city with this big homelessness problem,” Bennett said. “There’s been a lot of great work, but the point is that it’s just not working, and I do believe that the state needs to get involved.”

Bennett’s criticism that afternoon was relatively measured compared with the language that has appeared in the right-wing nonprofit news outlet where he serves as publisher and board member, The Dallas Express. A 2022 editorial board opinion piece, for example, was headlined “Dallas’ Office of Homeless Solutions Continues to Fail,” and another report that year proclaimed “Dallas Spends Millions on Homelessness; Gets No Results.”

Bennett, who resides in the wealthy enclave city of Highland Park, recommended a model to the lawmakers: Haven for Hope, the primary homeless shelter in San Antonio, which, he said, could be emulated statewide. He also plugged a then-year-old Dallas nonprofit called Refuge for Renewal, where he’s a founding board member, which has proposed creating a new “transformational campus” for the homeless on approximately 50 acres of city-owned land nearly 10 miles outside downtown Dallas in Oak Cliff, a neighborhood with a history of redlining, racial segregation, and disinvestment.

Tyler Arbogast, a real estate developer who briefly served as Refuge for Renewal’s executive director, was among those the committee specifically invited to testify (while Bennett spoke during the public testimony portion). Arbogast argued at the hearing that the current approach to homelessness is too fragmented, a problem that Refuge for Renewal could solve with the help of state funding. Two higher-ups with Ashford, the name of the group of hospitality companies that Bennett oversees, also testified.

Refuge for Renewal has been covered favorably by The Dallas Express for the past year and a half, and Bennett has served as an apparent spokesperson for the organization. In addition to Bennett, its board of directors—according to its September 2023 state incorporation filing and its most recent federal tax filing—includes Rob Hays, who stepped down as CEO of Ashford Hospitality Trust in June 2024, and Mark Melton, a local lawyer and founder of the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center. The nonprofit’s tax filing shows $230,000 in contributions in 2024 and $239,000 in expenses.

At the hearing, Bennett and co. stuck out from the crowd of ostensible experts. For one thing,Refuge for Renewal had not—and still has not—established a shelter or other form of service for the unhoused. For another, no representatives from Dallas’ established homeless service providers, including those who run the city’s two largest shelters, testified. If they had, they might have pushed back against the criticism they received in absentia, as well as Bennett’s expressed goals of rejecting what are known as “housing first” policies and shifting services for the unhoused away from downtown.

No major bills passed in the following legislative session as a result of that hearing, but it marked a continuation of Bennett’s efforts to influence Dallas politics and the city’s homelessness response, which had taken a less-punitive turn around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In North Texas, Bennett is well known for large political donations to President Donald Trump, state lawmakers, and right-wing school board candidates. In 2021, the hotelier repurposed the brand of a defunct Black newspaper, The Dallas Express, into what often amounts to his personal political mouthpiece. In parallel, Bennett and a California-based protest-for-hire company called Crowds on Demand seeded a local network of right-leaning astroturf advocacy groups. In 2024, this network worked to promote the Dallas Hero Initiative, a campaign he helped fund that successfully passed two ballot propositions to establish a minimum number of police officers in Dallas and enable litigation against the city.

Bennett’s increasing focus on homelessness, which Black and Indigenous people are far more likely to experience, dovetails with the state’s taking an interest in the issue since 2019, when the City of Austin decriminalized camping and begging. That move spurred the Legislature to pass a statewide homeless camping ban in 2021. It also aligns with the priorities of billionaire-funded right-wing think tanks, including the Cicero Institute—founded by Austin venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale—and the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), which have worked during the same timeframe to undermine housing first, a 34-year-old paradigm that prioritizes housing before things like job training or sobriety and has guided federal policy for two decades. These groups instead propose criminalizing behaviors associated with homelessness and reemphasizing institutionalization through civil commitment, which was recently expanded in Texas to apply in more cases of mental illness.

This right-wing policy agenda seems now to have triumphed in D.C., following Trump’s July executive order aimed at ending “endemic vagrancy” by terminating support for housing first and “shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings”—like the “accountability centers” proposed in Utah, which the Cicero Institute has praised.

“I think when we look at the push of this backwards, racist, anti-homeless approach at the local, state, and federal level, it starts with Joe Lonsdale and the Cicero Institute,” said Jesse Rabinowitz, communications director for the National Homelessness Law Center, which opposes criminalizing the homeless. “It’s especially true when we’re talking about Texas. … There is a huge role these out-of-touch, right-wing billionaires and megadonors play in shaping homelessness policy, and they’re the last people who should be shaping homeless policy.”

Rabinowitz continued: “We did mass institutionalization in this country. … We don’t do it anymore because it was ineffective and cruel.”

Devon Kurtz of the Cicero Institute, which wrote the model legislation for Texas’ camping ban, called the rhetoric of Rabinowitz’s organization “vile” and said groups like the law center would rather “people choose to die on the street out of a misguided sense of their own agency” instead of embracing coercive policies toward the addicted and mentally ill.

In the years following the pandemic, homelessness has increased state- and nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s point-in-time counts. In Dallas, local estimates show a decrease over the same time period, though experts note this data can be unreliable, and public perception doesn’t always track these numbers.

“The data tells us we’re moving in the right direction,” said Sarah Kahn, the CEO of Housing Forward, the coordinating agency for a coalition of 150 organizations focused on homelessness in Dallas and Collin counties. “But people aren’t feeling the progress when they see visible homelessness and people who are vulnerable living on our sidewalks, under our bridges, and on our streets.”

According to the City of Dallas, complaints about homeless encampments are up 45 percent since 2021. Polling by the Cicero Institute shows that 72 percent of likely voters think big cities like Dallas should do more to solve homelessness.

Some local actors, Bennett chief among them, have helped sow the perception that homelessness in the city is out of control. The Dallas Express, which began a newswire partnership with TPPF last February, has in various pieces described the homeless as “vagrants” and argued that housing-first policies are failing.

Bennett’s Refuge for Renewal has addressed local and state officials, released a proposed site plan for its campus, and been framed in the Express—often without disclosing Bennett’s overlapping ties—as a contrast to “traditional housing-first models” because it proposes to bring “shelter space, mental health care, addiction treatment, and job training under one roof.”

Meanwhile, local homeless service providers feel the pressure from political actors at all levels who want to change the way homelessness is addressed but have yet to solve the underlying lack of affordable housing. And providers still have to do their work at the end of the day.

“What hurts getting it done is the political swinging game, where we are trying to ride a pendulum that’s going this way and that way, and then all the rules are going to change, and then none of the rules are going to change,” said Daniel Roby, the CEO of Austin Street Center, one of Dallas’ largest homeless shelters, which provides beds as well as medical and vocational services. “That hurts our ability to be able to make an impact.”

Roby has led the organization for more than a decade, helping pull it from the financial brink and overseeing significant growth. (Ashford has donated to Austin Street Center.) In 2025, Roby almost saw his shelter shut down, as state lawmakers considered a measure that would have created a buffer zone of 1.5 milesbetween public schools and any homeless shelters. That bill followed a high-profile 2024 lawsuit from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton targeting an Austin homeless navigation center near an elementary school.

Long-term practitioners like Roby worry about the elevation of homelessness to a hot-button issue and about the criminalization of those they serve. “Here we are trying to do the work, and sometimes it feels like people are trying to make it more difficult instead of less,” Roby said. “Ultimately, people have to have a home to not be homeless. … I think people are politicizing homelessness, and it’s killing people.”

Bennett and Hays did not respond to Observer requests for comment for this story; an Ashford employee initially responded to a message sent to a Refuge for Renewal email address but did not answer follow-ups.

Melton, the anti-eviction lawyer, said he remains part of Refuge’s board “on paper” but added there’s “never been a board meeting.” He disagrees with Bennett’s opposition to housing first, he said, and believes criminalization “doesn’t work.”

Today’s homelessness crisis has relatively modern origins.

In the 1970s and into the ’80s, a global economic crisis blended with Reagan-era austerity and the longer-running trends of destruction of cheap single-room housing and defunding of federal low-income housing programs. This birthed the problem as we now know it, with a greater portion of unhoused women and families, younger men, and people who are employed and lack addiction issues but simply can’t afford rent. The mid-century failure to provide community-based services to the mentally ill following deinstitutionalization also played a role that experts debate.

The greater Dallas-Fort Worth area fits this trend. In November 1986, the NBC station in Fort Worth ran an interview about rising homelessness with a man who earned $155 a week as a cleaner but couldn’t make ends meet. Bob Hayes, a representative who worked with the National Coalition for the Homeless at the time, told NBC that the increase came from the loss of low-income housing and federal assistance.

In the 1990s, Dallas joined cities across the country taking a more punitive approach by enforcing “quality of life” ordinances prohibiting public sleeping and panhandling while aggressively dismantling encampments. The city particularly cracked down ahead of the 1994 World Cup. After authorities displaced residents of a shantytown under Interstate 45 despite insufficient shelter beds, homeless plaintiffs sued the city but were ultimately unsuccessful.

In the 2000s, business-development pressures led Dallas leaders—including then-city homelessness czar and future mayor Mike Rawlings—to make the presence of the unhoused a key issue and back construction of The Bridge, now the largest shelter in Dallas, located on the outskirts of downtown. But visible homelessness persisted and criminalization continued: Between 2003 and 2022, the city continued to pass new panhandling-related restrictions.

Records previously obtained and reported on by the Observer show that Dallas issued more than 38,000 public sleeping citations and more than 37,000 solicitation citations between 1998 and mid-2020, with more than half resulting in warrants. In the five-and-a-half years since, new records show, the city issued about 1,000 sleeping citations, 1,500 solicitation citations, and roughly 350 citations under the state’s 2021 camping law (the city did not provide new requested warrant figures). The data shows a lull in enforcement following the pandemic and a sharp spike in 2025.

But critics have long said these tactics don’t actually work.

“They in fact result in an increase in homelessness,” said Hannah Lebovits, the interim director of the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington. “In the years following the passage of these laws, not only do we not see a sustained drop, but we actually see an increase,” while the unsheltered are also pushed into more-dangerous locations.

Between 2015 and 2021, even as the city invested in shelter space and beds filled up, unsheltered homelessness quadrupled, noted the Housing Forward CEO Kahn. “We tried to manage that inflow in emergency shelters with more outreach workers and temporary solutions,” she said. “But what we realized is we were not adequately investing in pathways out of homelessness.”

During the same timeframe, some nonprofits moved to embrace a different approach: housing first. In 2016, Dallas organizations started experimenting with placing homeless individuals into housing prior to solving other problems, such as mental illness, which affects approximately 40 percent of the homeless in Dallas County. In 2021, Kahn said Housing Forward worked to reorient the whole homeless services system around “investing in diverting people from homelessness and rehousing out of our current shelters, as opposed to building new ones.” This shift began yielding “incremental progress across the community,” she said, though not all in the community have perceived the change.

Around 2021, homelessness was highly visible in Dallas as the economic impacts of the pandemic rippled through the metro and federal guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention slowed the city’s displacement of encampments. Dallas utilized federal pandemic relief funds to invest in rapid-rehousing programs, but those efforts couldn’t address the fact that the city has the second-most severe shortage of low-income rental housing in the country.

From 2021 through at least 2024, Keep Dallas Safe, a group that’s part of the astroturf network that Bennett and the California contractor seeded, then sent emails to the city and Paxton arguing Dallas was insufficiently enforcing the legislature’s 2021 camping ban, which can lead to loss of state grants.

In late 2024, another organization funded by Bennett, the Dallas Hero Initiative, threatened to sue the city for not clearing homeless encampments. In March 2025, two Republican state lawmakers (neither from Dallas) filed bills that, closely echoing the concerns Bennett expressed to legislators, would have allowed property owners to sue Downtown Dallas Inc., the area’s public improvement district, if it did not crack down on crime and homelessness.

The following month, the City of Dallas engaged in a concerted campaign to rid downtown of visible homelessness, and it has since claimed to have effectively ended homelessness in the business district as citations under the city’s quality-of-life ordinances and the state’s camping law have jumped.

Despite the city’s punitive efforts, Bennett has continued to describe central Dallas in apocalyptic terms.

“Downtown Dallas is rotting from the inside out from the crime and filth,” he wrote in a November X post. “It [has] turned what should be Texas’ crown jewel into an embarrassment.”

The “housing first” paradigm reversed a longstanding logic that the homeless must first seek treatment, maintain sobriety, and even hold a job to receive housing assistance. Instead, the approach focuses on swiftly getting them into stable housing, where services will be more effective.

The model was incubated in New York City during the 1980s and tested there at scale in the early 2000s, with promising results. In 2004, President George W. Bush’s administration adopted the approach at the federal level, considering it both more humane and cheaper. It was later expanded under President Barack Obama. The bipartisan philosophy came to guide federal funding, which in turn shaped local policies, for 20 years, surviving even the first Trump administration.

But today, a systematic right-wing attack has dislodged the housing-first approach and ushered in a new era of criminalization, with Texas leading the way. The Cicero Institute has now helped spread its camping ban legislation or influenced other homelessness legislation in around 20 additional states. In tandem, TPPF has pushed a similar agenda through a stream of policy papers and blog posts, lobbying, and panels involving lawmakers and Cicero. Ultimately, Trump’s second electoral victory broke the dam.

“What we’ve been doing is trying to promote these policies, although we [knew] there wasn’t really a whole lot of ground we could make until we had a different administration in the White House,” said John Bonura, a TPPF policy analyst.

“One of the reasons why Haven for Hope works is our proximity to downtown.”

At the national level, the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” transition plan proposed to “end” housing first. The Manhattan Institute has put out similar policy papers—and saw one of its researchers, Judge Glock (who formerly worked at Cicero), appointed to Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson’s 2023 homelessness task force months prior to Johnson’s switch to the Republican Party. These efforts culminated in Trump’s July executive order—which Kurtz said was “heavily based” on Cicero’s research—and sweeps of encampments in the nation’s capital, though exactly what that order will mean for homelessness policy in Texas is unclear.

“We’re in a state that happens to have a lot of things in place that this executive order calls for,” said Eric Samuels, president of the Texas Homeless Network. “So we are unsure how this would impact Texas. We would be concerned if there was an aggressive push to issue citations for people sleeping outside, especially in communities that don’t have enough shelter beds.”

Bennett’s approach to homelessness has aligned with this larger conservative push. “Putting people into free housing without addressing root issues is a useless exercise,” Bennett posted on X in April 2024. In an August interview on American Family Radio (AFR), a Christian radio network, Bennett said that there are “a lot of people that want to be homeless” and “You have to make it very inconvenient for someone to be homeless” so they will either move elsewhere or seek services.

Refuge for Renewal will be “a one-stop shop where the homeless people get picked up, they get taken there, their needs are assessed, and then they get shipped off to where they can be helped,” he said. “And it’s not an option for them to loiter in the streets.”

Ostensibly, Bennett and Refuge for Renewal aren’t actually planning to reinvent the homeless shelter wheel, instead claiming they plan to emulate a particular model praised by Cicero and TPPF that’s existed for 16 years: San Antonio’s Haven for Hope. Republican leaders, including Governor Greg Abbott, have also pointed to that shelter before, often while complaining about homeless response in places like Austin.

But these conservatives’ understanding of the Alamo City refuge may be clouded by their ideology.

On San Antonio’s near West Side, just west of I-10 beside railroad tracks and the county jail, Haven for Hope is a sprawling “transformational campus” that provides overnight shelter and a suite of services, along with office space for partner nonprofits. It’s the largest center of its kind in Texas, occupying more than 500,000 square feet on 22 acres.

Haven for Hope was started in 2006 by Bill Greehey, the founding CEO of Valero Energy and a longtime major GOP donor. With the support of business and civic leaders, Greehey raised the funds to acquire a large plot of land populated by defunct warehouses and homeless encampments to create the shelter, which opened its doors in 2010. He was reportedly inspired to take action by a documentary on homelessness produced by local news station KSAT in 2005—the same year the city passed ordinances banning public camping and panhandling. Even with the bans and the launch of Haven, Bexar County has seen a steady increase in homelessness since 2019, according to local point-in-time counts.

In its early years, Haven for Hope drew criticism for requiring homeless clients to sleep on mats in an open-air courtyard and rewarding them with beds, more services, and better food if they showed good behavior. Its founding CEO, Robert Marbut, would go on to serve as Trump’s federal homelessness czar and is a critic of housing first; a 2015 headline in the San Antonio Express-News reads, “Haven for Hope bucks ‘Housing First’ strategy.” But outdoor sleeping is no longer allowed at Haven, and the shelter has altered many of its original policies such as not allowing families. Notably, the nonprofit actually embraces the philosophy that some of its conservative fans assail.

What’s novel about Haven for Hope, in the words of Alberto Rodriguez, the shelter’s vice president of operations, is precisely that it utilizes a “housing first framework in an emergency shelter at mass scale.”

Moreover, staff at the San Antonio shelter see their central location as critical. “One of the reasons why Haven for Hope works, in my opinion, is our proximity to downtown,” said Terri Behling, director of communications.

Bennett’s proposed Refuge for Renewal cites Haven for Hope as its inspiration and, per emails obtained by the Observer, has attempted to organize visits to the San Antonio shelter for Ashford employees, City of Dallas staff, and local elected officials. (The emails also reveal the blurry lines between Bennett’s hospitality company and the nonprofit, with a senior company executive referring to “the Ashford ‘Refuge for Renewal’ team.”) But distance from downtown is critical to the Refuge’s proposal. At the 2024 legislative hearing, in the pages of The Dallas Express, on social media, and in radio and podcast appearances, Bennett has criticized the presence of shelters downtown and argued they contribute to crime and business disruption.

Similarly, Bennett and The Dallas Express have lambasted housing first, including an unbylined January 2025 Express article touting Refuge for Renewal that criticized such efforts as “short-term solutions at the expense of measurable long-term progress.”

Plus, while the founder of Haven for Hope secured near-universal alignment of the San Antonio business community, other homeless service providers, and the city, Bennett’s approach has been divisive. The Express routinely pummels city council members and local civic institutions. His speech at a 2024 Downtown Dallas Inc. meeting prompted a former mayor to say Bennett seemingly hadn’t “been downtown in a long time, maybe ever, until today.” And the Dallas Hero Initiative went up against a unified front of elected officials, civic institutions, and many business leaders, who criticized it as destructive.

Unlike Bennett, David Woody, president and CEO of The Bridge, has years of experience navigating tensions with downtown businesses while maintaining Dallas’ biggest shelter, but he now finds himself left out of conversations—including a controversial September meeting at Dallas City Hall between Refuge for Renewal advocates, state Senator Tan Parker (a North Texas Republican who serves on the committee that held the 2024 legislative hearing), and four council members to discuss the future of Woody’s own shelter, which sits on city-owned land.

According to meeting notes that the Observer obtained through a public records request, Mark Nunneley—a senior Ashford executive who testified at the legislative hearing and was appointed by Mayor Johnson in October to chair the city’s Citizen Homelessness Commission—presented to the group about Refuge for Renewal. Nunneley said the proposal “allows for Bridge to close and that team to relocate to Refuge and have them run it,” while the city could sell the existing shelter’s downtown property, per the notes. Nunneley, who did not respond to Observer requests for comment, is not listed in Refuge’s state or federal filings as a board member or anywhere on its website, but emails show he has repeatedly interacted with council members on the nonprofit’s behalf.

Other supporters at the meeting included Aaron Harris, a longtime Republican consultant with close ties to Bennett, and Steven Van Amburgh, a real estate developer whose firm KDC has done major build-outs in downtown Dallas. KDC is a member of the Metroplex Civic & Business Association (MCBA), a conservative alternative to the Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce that operates out of the same building as Ashford and on the same floor as The Dallas Express.

In effect, the proposed plan would place Bennett and Refuge for Renewal in the driver’s seat of the county’s largest homeless shelter, extending Bennett’s influence over homelessness policy in Dallas. (Hays, the Refuge board member and ex-Ashford executive, was also appointed in 2023 by Johnson to the board of the Dallas Area Partnership to End Homelessness.) Further, it would free up prime real estate near an area one developer, Mike Hoque, already has in his sights for residential development after the city handed him a $96-million incentive package. His company, Hoque Global, is an MCBA member.

Zarin Gracey, the council member for the district where the Refuge for Renewal campus would be, told the Observer he does not support locating a large shelter in his district. According to the meeting minutes, Gracey’s response to the pitch included: “I’ll be honest with you right now, I don’t like it.”

Woody told the Observer there are currently no plans for The Bridge to move, and he worried that the community, which is largely Black and Latino, near the proposed site is being ignored.

Overall, Woody believes the business-led push to drive shelters and the people they serve out of downtown is misguided. “They believe that they can just drop in because they have big money and that folks are going to come [to their shelter],” he said. “The thing is that folks are in this area, and have been in this area, and are in areas like this in every other city for a reason.”

Two decades ago, Ikenna Mogbo had an out-of-control gambling addiction.

Around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, as many Americans found themselves unhoused for the first time, he lost everything. That’s when he checked himself into The Bridge, where he stayed for about nine months. While there, he landed a low-level job with a residential treatment program and eventually worked his way up to chief housing officer for MetroCare Services, a local mental health and supportive housing nonprofit. Mogbo also serves now on the board of directors for The Bridge, and his experience informs his belief that the best place to address homelessness is where public transportation services have a nexus. “In Dallas, obviously, that’s downtown,” he said.

“If you place the resources that are supposed to assist people to get back as contributing members of society in disparate, far-flung places, then the people are not going to access them.”

Business and property owners downtown may see this as fundamentally at odds with their own priorities, particularly those who own old offices that are sitting empty at high levels. Roby, the Austin Street Center CEO, said business leaders often approach him with concerns about how homelessness affects their bottom lines. In recent years, anxieties around possible closures or relocations of major downtown businesses has spurred the concerns.

“Downtown Dallas is losing businesses because crime and homelessness aren’t being addressed,” Bennett wrote on X in August. “If we don’t enforce policies that restore safety, downtown will continue to hollow out.”

But downtown may be less dying than transitioning. The area has experienced a residential boom and a rise in visitors, and developers are converting empty office buildings into housing. Experts say longer-term structural factors such as suburbanization, gentrification, and the shift to online business are more to blame than homelessness for what’s changing.

“Dallas, well before this shift towards housing first, was already grappling with the economic implications of regional changes,” said Lebovits, the UT-Arlington professor. “Any downtown-development concerns or economic-development concerns are really unrelated to homelessness directly.”

Despite the persistent issue of vacant commercial properties and perception issues around the unhoused, Mogbo told the Observer the shelter he once stayed at hasn’t stood in the way of economic progress. “Development has exploded around The Bridge,” Mogbo said, citing the large apartments across the street and the nearby farmers market. “It’s a fallacy that having that location there has a negative effect on development.”

Whether Bennett’s claims comport with the facts, however, may not matter in a sense. As Lebovits remarked, speaking to her own prior research, one benefit of singling out the homeless is it creates a simplistic narrative that plays into preexisting fears of the unhoused, while laying complex problems at the feet of those who lack the political power to fight back.

“It certainly helps to tell that story,” Lebovits said. “Because it makes it seem like if we just fix that problem, we will fix all of these other trends. We know that’s not true.”

This story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post A Dallas Megadonor, a New Nonprofit, and the War on ‘Housing First’ appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Read Entire Article