From Ledbetter to City Hall: Cynthia Rogers-Ellickson on shaping Dallas’ housing

Cynthia Rogers-Ellickson does not give media interviews. Known for keeping a low profile, the City of Dallas’ director of housing and community development is protective of both the City and her work. But with her retirement approaching on Nov. 30, she agreed to sit down with us at the West Dallas Multipurpose Center — a City of Dallas community center and resource hub — to reflect on her life and legacy.

We reached out to Rogers-Ellickson specifically because of her West Dallas roots. After covering the programs she oversees from neighbors’ perspectives, we wanted to hear from a neighborhood native about how her background has impacted her approach to this work for the last two decades.

Growing up, Rogers-Ellickson could see the Dallas skyline from the front porch of her mother’s house in Ledbetter, a historic West Dallas neighborhood and one of the earliest settled areas along the Trinity River.

“When I became a teenager, I told my dad that I was going to be there one day,” she recalls, pointing toward downtown Dallas. “I didn’t think I would be there working for the City of Dallas. That has been very humbling, and I feel very fortunate.”

Can you walk me through your childhood in West Dallas?

I was born and raised in West Dallas in the late ‘60s and lived there until my early 20s. It was a very tight-knit community. I’ve even talked with other people who grew up there at the same time I did, and what we all remember most is that the footprint of that part of West Dallas hasn’t changed. We knew everybody from one end of the area to the other.

It was such a large, diverse community. Every race and ethnicity you can think of lived there. Some of our friends were being raised by grandparents, some had single moms, others lived in two-parent households. We had all kinds of backgrounds, and yet we always felt safe. We could walk to the store, to school, to the swimming pool, and along the way, families knew who we were. Nobody worried about us being snatched up or anything like that.

My mom is Hispanic, and my dad was white. He passed away very young. My mom’s family lived in Ledbetter, and my grandparents on my father’s side lived on Borger Street [in Los Altos]. So I ran between those two neighborhoods pretty regularly.

For me, a lot of my childhood meant walking across the railroad tracks to see my grandparents. Both my parents worked, so sometimes I’d stay with them after school, and later I’d go to Good Shepherd [now Mi Escuelita] for after-school care or summer camp, then walk right back to my grandmother’s house. It was all so safe. We just got to be kids.

You’ve mentioned busing played a big role in your education. What was that like? 

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a time when we got to experience busing. It’s funny because a lot of folks looked at it negatively, but I loved it. It gave me the opportunity to see outside of West Dallas while I was growing up, as well as experience life inside West Dallas. I learned so much from both experiences.

I went to school in North Dallas after third grade. I was at K.P. Longfellow until then, and after that I went to Marcus and T.C. Marsh in North Dallas for the rest of elementary and junior high. For high school, I applied for what they called an M&M transfer, and that’s how I got into Skyline.

I graduated from there, got married to my husband, who I’ve been with for 40 years now. We lived in West Dallas for a while, until my daughter was three, and then we moved to Oak Cliff. We’ve been there ever since.

How did growing up in West Dallas influence the way you see the world — and your role today?

What went on when I was there was so impactful to my life. I would have been different if I had grown up in Oak Cliff — my views probably would have been different. In West Dallas we’re very laid back. Everyone just gets along, minds their business, does their stuff, and works hard. I didn’t know anyone when I was young who didn’t work hard to take care of their families. 

We always lived in a house. My dad made sure of that. Whether we were renting or buying, it was always a single-family home. He believed children needed a yard and a free place to play. He loved cars too, so he wanted space for them. A lot of our friends lived in apartments nearby. We’d visit and hang out, but my dad never wanted that for us. He felt like having a house gave us freedom.

What led you into social services and community work?

When my daughter was grown enough for me to think, “Okay, now I can focus on a career,” I decided to go into social work. My bachelor’s degree is in psychology, and my master’s is in education. I always felt like I needed to better understand why we do what we do every day.

I had a lot of friends whose home lives weren’t so happy, and I always wanted to help. I wasn’t a doctor or a psychologist, but I was fascinated by how parents who seemed “normal” could still raise children who grew up struggling. It made me want to understand people better, so I went into social services.

My first job was with Volunteers of America. That was one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever had. I mentored children who had been removed from their parents because of abuse, and I worked with parents Child Protective Services thought could succeed with some coaching. I say that job is one of the hardest jobs, because there were times I was working with parents I felt didn’t deserve children, and yet they got them back. And there were others who didn’t deserve to lose their kids but never got them back. The system was so broken. I stayed maybe two years before I thought, I can’t do this anymore. It’s making me angry.

From there I went to Parkland Hospital, working with families to get Medicaid services, such as dental checkups, health visits, so they weren’t just using the emergency room as their medical plan. I did that for several years.

How did you make the shift into housing and community development?

In 1999, the City of Irving decided to accept federal entitlement grants from HUD for the first time, and they hired me to build housing programs from scratch. These were funds like Community Development Block Grants, HOME Partnership, and others. Irving had declined that money for 30 years, and suddenly said, “Oh yeah, we do have poor people. We need to serve them.”

It gave me the chance to look at what other cities had been doing for decades and take the best of those practices. The programs I wrote back then are still in place today. I stayed there six years, then moved over to the Dallas County Community College District — what’s now Dallas College — to finish my master’s degree.

Not long after, I got a call from the City of Dallas. They wanted me to manage a community center, but when I interviewed, Joey Zapata, who was then an assistant director, told me I was overqualified and recommended me to the housing department instead. So I went back into housing, and I’ve been here 19 years now.

What role does your department play in Dallas’ housing landscape?

At its core, our job is to finance housing opportunities. We’re not a “program” department; we’re the financer of housing needs.

That includes home repair, homebuyer assistance, and housing development. Everything we do has a loan attached to it. Some loans are forgivable if people remain in their homes; others are repayable, like loans to developers once their properties start generating revenue.

Right now, we have about 53 staff members, from office assistants up to assistant directors, and we manage around $17 million each year in federal and non-federal resources dedicated to affordable housing.

What are the main goals your team is working toward right now?

Our priorities are outsourcing our home repair program and outsourcing our home buyer assistance program. And when we say outsourcing, we [mean] giving those dollars to a vendor outside of the city offices to run the programs, because we find that in today’s processes in the city, it’s become very difficult to spend $1 without a lot of scrutiny, and the programs are meant to run themselves fluidly, so that the money gets out to the community and doesn’t sit in our accounts for very long.

And what we have found [is] that with the change in the city systems, in staffing throughout the city departments, there are so many people retiring, including myself, and with that happening, a lot of expertise and understanding how fluid you can be with what you do has been lost. Having to start over with a new group of staff who are learning how to do things makes it a lot harder to move the money than if we just give it to an entity outside of the city that doesn’t have as much red tape that they have to go through just to spend $1.

How do you see the new system assisting neighbors that have concerns about staying in their homes?

A common question people ask is, “If I die, will the City take my house? Will my children not get the house?” And I always tell them: We don’t want your house. We have no business being in the homeownership business. We do want them to be responsible with [the loan] we’ve provided, and we want them to legally transfer ownership to someone they know can continue to live out their lien.

[The new structure] definitely helps keep them in their homes. There will be ways for the empowerment piece of that department to work on gentrification. How do we help folks not be overtaxed? The city is also working on that. They are providing higher tax exemptions on the city side to help alleviate some of that tax burden. The state is doing some of that as well.

I think with everybody speaking to that concern, and the cost of living so high, and the cost of owning a home so high, a lot of advocates are coming out to speak on it, and we hear it. We’re hearing that, and we’re working through ways to help keep people in their homes.

Home repair definitely is one way to keep people in their homes. When seniors can’t tolerate heat and cold right there, it can’t be excessive. So that’s one way we help keep them in their homes — pay for their bill to get their heating and air system working right, and if they have plumbing problems — things like that. So, definitely working on their major systems to keep them in the home is what we try to focus on. There’s still never enough money.

What do you want your legacy to be?

What I hear when I go out and speak at events, since I rarely do interviews, is that they could always call Cynthia. People tell me, “Oh, you can always call her, she knows how to get through this process.” That’s what I want people to remember: that I was helpful in getting them through the process so they could either get their projects done or serve the people they needed to serve.

I want to be remembered as someone who was always helpful, because that’s what we strive for in the City — to be as helpful as we can in making sure people understand how we function and how we can make it easier for them to get the services they need.

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Next up: We spoke with Rogers-Ellickson in further detail about home repair programs, and future reporting will take a look at the current state of these services in Dallas and provide an updated Home Repair Resource Guide to available resources for residents.