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For decades, Texas has largely treated homelessness as a local responsibility. Cities operate shelters and fund outreach programs. Counties run jails and public hospitals. Police officers respond to disturbances, while nonprofit organizations provide housing, treatment and other services.
Now, state lawmakers are questioning whether the fragmented system contributes to a costly cycle in which some of the most vulnerable Texans move repeatedly among the streets, emergency rooms, county jails and short-term treatment programs.
The Texas House Committee on Intergovernmental Affairs has been directed to study how the state can treat and prevent homelessness before the next legislative session. At a June hearing, lawmakers heard that local governments are already spending billions of dollars responding to people in crisis but often without producing long-term stability.
Republican state Rep. David Spiller said lawmakers first must understand the different problems that fall under the broad label of homelessness.
“We are really talking about three separate issues: homelessness, mental illness and systemic recidivism. They’re all related, but they’re all separate,” Spiller said. “I don’t think we can adequately fix it unless we understand fully what’s causing it.”
The testimony underscored that people become homeless for many reasons.
Some lose housing because of a job loss, rapidly increasing rent, domestic violence, a medical emergency or another financial shock. They may need rental assistance, temporary shelter or help finding another home.
A smaller but highly visible group of people experiencing chronic, unsheltered homelessness may also have severe mental illnesses, serious substance-use disorders or repeated encounters with police and hospitals.
Stephen Autry, Dallas County’s director of operations for judicial and correctional services, told lawmakers that county taxpayers are spending millions of dollars repeatedly incarcerating people accused of low-level, nonviolent offenses.
Many are arrested for criminal trespassing and remain in jail for days or weeks before returning to the street.
“For all intents and purposes, they were doing life sentences 30 days at a time,” Autry said.
At the time of the hearing, Autry said the Dallas County Jail held 7,018 people and was operating at about 94% of capacity. Housing one person costs the county approximately $96 a day, producing a daily jail-bed expense of roughly $681,000.
Autry said 53% of the people booked into the Dallas County jail during May 2026 were identified as having a suspected behavioral-health need.
“Communities are not getting safer. People are not getting better. The same calls keep coming in. The same officers respond, and the same offenders return to jail,” Autry said. “We cannot arrest ourselves out of this situation.”
B.J. Wagner, executive vice president for health and public safety at the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, presented an updated estimate of the cost of unmet behavioral-health needs.
Wagner said local Texas governments spend approximately $3.2 billion annually responding to about 18,500 high-need people who are also considered at high risk of becoming involved with the criminal justice system.
That amounts to an estimated $175,000 per person each year.
The estimate covers more than homelessness. It includes the costs generated when people with complex behavioral-health needs interact repeatedly with police, emergency medical services, hospitals, courts and jails.
Wagner said the central problem is that those systems often operate independently. A police officer, emergency-room doctor, jail employee and homeless-services provider may each encounter the same person without knowing what the other agencies have already tried.
Wagner said one opportunity for intervention begins when somebody calls 911.
Dispatchers may have difficulty distinguishing between a conventional public-safety emergency and a disturbance driven by an underlying behavioral-health crisis. Wagner told lawmakers that many of those calls are miscoded, causing communities to send a response that may escalate rather than stabilize the situation.
“They receive the wrong resource, the wrong response and often the wrong outcome,” she said.
The Meadows Institute has promoted specialized training for 911 personnel and multidisciplinary teams that can include police officers, emergency medical personnel and behavioral-health clinicians.
Wagner told the committee that participating programs have reported better identification of mental-health calls, reductions in misdemeanor arrests and less use of force.
Autry said officers also need somewhere other than jail to take people who are not an immediate danger but clearly require stabilization.
“Law enforcement needs to have a clear and reliable option to take these folks somewhere,” he said, “and know that they can be offered the types of services instead of using our Dallas County Jail as a mental-health holding facility.”
Possible state responses discussed during the hearing included crisis stabilization centers, mental-health diversion programs, substance-use treatment, intensive case management and improved coordination after people leave jail.
Witnesses also recommend allowing police, hospitals, EMS agencies and homelessness programs to share more information, while still protecting medical privacy and other sensitive data.
But lawmakers said improving the crisis response addresses only part of the problem.
Democratic state Rep. Cassandra Garcia Hernandez said the state must also consider how to stop people from losing their housing in the first place.
“That’s obviously what we would want — to address people who are currently homeless right now,” she said. “But where do we stop people from becoming homeless is just as important.”
No single proposal emerged from the hearing. The testimony instead presented lawmakers with a broader question: whether Texas should continue relying primarily on local governments to manage homelessness or build a more coordinated statewide system that invests in prevention and treatment.
