What we know about homelessness in Cooke County

On Tuesday, Dallas County voters turned down a property tax for homelessness. Proposition A lost 364,685 to 338,375, or 51.87 percent to 48.13 percent, on the county's unofficial election-night count. It would have raised the county tax rate by 2.4 cents per $100 of value and brought in about $102.9 million for encampment cleanup, mental health services and housing. CBS Texas put the cost at $72 a year on a $300,000 home.

County Judge Clay Jenkins backed the measure. Commissioner John Wiley Price opposed it. The programs it would have paid for were set to start in January 2027.

The vote was in Dallas, but the question behind it reaches Cooke County too. We looked at what the counts show for our part of Texas, what state law allows, and what happened to the mental hospitals that once housed many of the people now counted as homeless.

The count near home

Cooke County has no homeless count of its own. The nearest is the Texoma count, which the Texas Homeless Network runs each January for Cooke, Grayson and Fannin counties together. It found 88 people in 2022 and 534 in 2026.

Read that rise with care. A one-night count depends on how many volunteers go out, where they look and which shelters report, and all of that changed between years. It also misses people who sleep in a car, on a relative's couch or in a motel. The 2026 count included 53 children and 19 veterans, and 68 people met HUD's definition of chronically homeless.

Texas went the other way

HUD's national count for January 2025 found 745,652 people homeless on a single night, 3 percent fewer than in 2024. About 266,000 of them were unsheltered: on the street, in a car or in another place not meant for living.

Texas rose while the nation fell. The state count grew from 24,432 in 2022 to 28,031 in 2025, an increase of about 15 percent. Of the Texans counted in 2025, 12,161 were unsheltered.

What the law says

Texas has banned camping in public places since September 1, 2021. House Bill 1925 added Section 48.05 to the Penal Code and made camping in a public place without permission a Class C misdemeanor, the lowest class of offense, punished by a fine. Before or when an officer writes the ticket, the officer must make a reasonable effort to tell the person of a place where they may lawfully camp, and to contact local officials or a nonprofit that can help.

The same law bars cities and counties from adopting any policy that prohibits or discourages enforcement of a camping ban. The attorney general can sue a local government that does.

In June 2024 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that enforcing a camping ban against homeless people does not violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In 2025 the Legislature passed Senate Bill 617, in effect since September 1, 2025, which requires notice and a public hearing before a city converts property to house homeless people.

Gainesville has no camping ordinance of its own that we could find; the state ban already applies here. We searched the 2,663 city and county records with searchable text in our government documents archive, which include Gainesville City Council minutes and agendas back to 2006, planning and zoning records, and Cooke County budgets. The word "homeless" does not appear in any of them.

A few missed bills away

The Federal Reserve's survey of household finances in 2025, published in May 2026, found that 63 percent of adults would cover a $400 emergency expense with cash or its equivalent. The rest would have to borrow or find other means, or could not cover it at all. Sixteen percent had not paid all of their bills in full the month before.

A widely shared figure says most Americans live paycheck to paycheck. We could not trace it to a survey we could verify, so we do not use it here.

Living in an RV

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2020 to 2024 counted 186,040 homes in the United States that were boats, RVs or vans, 0.13 percent of all housing units. Texas had 30,417, or 0.25 percent, about twice the national share.

Cooke County's estimate is 26 such homes out of 17,944, with a margin of error of 27, so the survey cannot tell it apart from zero. These figures count homes, not people.

Veterans and mental illness

HUD counted 32,495 homeless veterans nationally in 2025, down from 55,619 in 2009, the first year it counted them separately. That is a drop of about 42 percent. Veterans were about 4 percent of everyone counted. In Texas they were 1,907 of 28,031, about 7 percent.

HUD also counted 146,176 adults with a severe mental illness nationally in 2025, and 6,163 in Texas, up from 5,982 in 2022. The figure covers adults only, so it is not a share of the total count.

What Kennedy signed, and what came after

A common story says President John F. Kennedy emptied the state mental hospitals. The record is different. On October 31, 1963, Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act, the last bill he signed into law. It planned 1,500 community mental health centers so people could get care close to home instead of in distant hospitals. About half were built, none was fully funded, and the law gave no money to run them over the long term.

States emptied their hospitals anyway. Since 1965, Medicaid has generally refused to pay for adults in psychiatric hospitals larger than 16 beds, a rule called the IMD exclusion, so a state that kept patients in its large hospitals paid for them alone. In 1981 Congress repealed the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, which was meant to fund the centers, and replaced federal mental health grants with block grants to the states.

In 1955 the country had an estimated 559,000 state and county psychiatric beds. By early 2016 it had 37,679.

Did Cooke County lose something?

Not a hospital of its own. Cooke County never had a state hospital. The Gainesville State School is a juvenile correctional facility, not a mental hospital.

The state hospital for this part of Texas is in Wichita Falls. The Legislature authorized it in 1917 as the Northwest Texas Insane Asylum; it took its first patient in 1922 and was renamed Wichita Falls State Hospital in 1925. Its patient count peaked at 3,481 in 1955. Today it has 225 beds. A $452 million replacement hospital, also with 225 beds, is due in late 2027.

What the region lost is beds. Seventy years ago, the hospital in Wichita Falls held more than 15 times as many patients as it has beds today.

Where to get help

Texoma Community Center is the state's local mental health authority for Cooke, Grayson and Fannin counties. Its Gainesville office is at 301 North Grand Ave., with walk-in Open Access on Tuesdays. Its crisis hotline is 877-277-2226. The national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline answers at 988.

Abigail's Arms runs an emergency shelter for people leaving family violence.

During the January cold snaps of 2025 and 2026, Gainesville's warming center was at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, 411 E. California St.

We found no year-round general homeless shelter in Gainesville.