2025 Rental Housing Needs Assessment
February 2026
This is the third annual edition of this report. See past reports:
This year’s report is anchored by four core insights:
1) It’s hard to be a renter in Dallas. Of the 304K renter households in Dallas, 59% are low income (≤80% Area Median Income) and 50% are cost burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their gross income on housing.
2) There is a shortage of affordable rental units for very low-income households. For households that earn at or below 50% AMI ($52K for a family of four), the City of Dallas is short 46K affordable rental units — for every 100 households ≤50% AMI, there are just 60 affordable rental units.
3) Dallas is changing. In the past 10 years, Dallas has realized significant growth in the population of seniors (+33%), one- and two-person households (+23% and +19%, respectively), and high-income households earning more than $150K annually (+130%). This rapid growth, however, is juxtaposed with a slight decline (-0.8%) in the population of children, a small increase in households with three or more people (+2%), and a significant decrease in households earning less than $35K (-32%).
4) There are signs of progress, but progress is uneven. After record-high rent growth during the pandemic, renters have recently felt some relief: year-over-year rent growth was largely flat or down slightly in the City of Dallas in 2024 and 2025. An estimated 8,400 multifamily units were delivered in 2024 — 84% market-rate units and 16% income-restricted units. In the past 10 years, educational attainment and household income have both improved significantly, but long-standing inequities persist, and Dallas is the sixth most segregated large city in the U.S.
To achieve a stronger Dallas, housing must be a central issue. Whether your north star is growing the economy, improving the health and wellbeing of Dallas residents, or breaking the cycle of poverty, housing matters.
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WIC Playbook
CPAL’s WIC playbook features prototypes designed to increase WIC benefit uptake in Dallas through human-centered design.
- The WIC program plays an important role in improving birth outcomes and containing health care costs. Every dollar spent on WIC leads to savings in health care costs from $1.77 to $3.13 within the first 60 days after birth.
- National data shows that in 2021, an average of 12.13 million moms, babies, and young children were eligible for WIC but only 51% actually participated.
Crime in Dallas isn’t as random as you may think. Here’s how police can predict it.
CPAL has used risk-terrain modeling to help identify areas of high risk for violent crime.
- Once identified, police and community members work together to create “risk narratives.” These are hypotheses on how environmental aspects work together to create the potential for crime.
- Atlantic City, N.J., is perhaps the most celebrated case study for risk terrain modeling. In the first year, violent crime dropped 26% compared to the prior year. Robberies fell by 37%.
An Underutilized Housing Affordability Tool: Homestead Exemptions
CPAL examines homestead exemption access in Dallas County — who’s claiming, who isn’t, and how much money eligible homeowners could realize if they claimed this...
- ~57K residential properties in Dallas County may be eligible for the homestead exemption but have not yet claimed it, for an estimated total benefit of ~$310M.
- ~40K properties in low-income and very low-income census tracts in Dallas County may be eligible for the homestead exemption but have not yet claimed it, for an estimated total benefit of ~$200M, or ~$5,000 per household.
- While an estimated 95% of eligible households in high-income census tracts claim their homestead exemption, only 81% of households in very low-income census tracts claim their homestead exemption.