On Monday, a committee of the Dallas City Council sat down for a presentation titled, simply, "Homeless Solutions Proposed Strategy." When I arrived at City Hall in the morning, I thought surely there would be a massive turnout for such an occasion — a path forward, finally, after so much stumbling in the dark. And just days ago, we learned that homelessness is the No. 1 concern among citizens surveyed by City Hall.

But, nope. No cameras, a handful of spectators. Maybe they should have added Confederate monuments to the agenda. That packs 'em in.

Then again, what's the rush? There will be more meetings about this. And then some more. I used to think this city was very good at talking about homelessness and very bad at doing anything about it. Now I don't think we're even good at talking about it.

"We have become the homeless capital of the world," an exasperated Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway said Monday. That isn't even close to the truth. Try 19th in the country, according to our latest count.

We do have an Office of Homeless Solutions now. And the woman who runs it, Monica Hardman, has actually proposed homeless solutions, one of which would actually solve homelessness: giving the homeless permanent places to live. It's called, you know, "housing first." Not exactly a revolutionary concept.

But that will take money, and we have but a fraction of it: $20 million in 2017 bond funding that Hardman and her boss say we need to turn into $200 million before we can build new buildings or adaptively reuse old ones. And that, they say, will take years — and many investors and private donors who will need to be convinced this is a solid investment.

And so we're stuck, as ever, looking for temporary, incomplete, expensive fixes like the ones proposed Monday. Such as adding beds to shelters — 100 at Dallas Life, another 50 at The Bridge. Or covering rents and deposits for the few people fortunate enough to find apartments that will take them.

Or creating pop-up shelters in empty city buildings, churches or privately owned buildings across the city that would be converted into short-lived sanctuaries that rotated around the city every 90 days. Seniors, disabled, families with children, children booted from foster homes, the LGBT and veterans would get first dibs.

City staffers hope to launch their pilot by August. Maybe in your neighborhood; maybe in mine, which is fine by me. But it probably won't happen, because all I hear is panic over this proposal, which is meant to house the more than 1,000 unsheltered spread across the 200 encampments city officials know of in this city.

I first heard about it a couple of weeks ago, when the concept surfaced at meeting of the Citizen Homelessness Commission held in an auditorium beneath City Hall. I got a couple of freaked-out calls from people who had heard the city was going to stash the homeless in neighborhood rec centers, which wasn't quite the case but not far off.

Two weeks back Hardman and her boss Nadia Chandler Hardy, the city's chief of community services, unveiled two locations for a pilot program: the West Dallas Multipurpose Center off Singleton Boulevard and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Center in the shadow of Fair Park. But when the proposal reached council on Monday, those locations had been erased. Chandler Hardy told me later MLK and West Dallas aren't exactly habitable for overnight guests.

Commissioners were aghast at the $2 million annual price tag; "alarmed at the timeline," said Chad Crews, council member Philip Kingston's appointee to the commission; and skeptical of its likelihood of success, given that it's but a short-term fix to a long-term problem this city cannot seem to solve. Council members were only slightly more supportive.

Lisa Kelso, who said she had been on the street for more than a year, sleeping on the streets in downtown Dallas. (Ron Baselice / Staff Photographer)

West Dallas' Omar Narvaez said he could see it working if you only allowed families with kids. "Folks can live with that," he said. But what they won't tolerate is "somebody who's chronically homeless," he said. He also fretted that without proper screening, there would be "all kinds of communicable issues" coming into city facilities.

White Rock's rep Mark Clayton was the council member most supportive of the concept. But even he was worried about packing up and picking up a shelter after three months. Because what happens to the people living there? Where will they go? And what of the hundreds of others who want to take their spots but for whom there will be no room?

"You can have displacement issues with lingering consequences," said Clayton, the council member also tasked with solving poverty — poor guy.

Adam Medrano, whose downtown constituency has seen the homeless population explode in recent years, wasn't onboard with giving The Bridge more money for more beds for more bodies. And of pop-up shelters, he said, "I don't agree with that, either." He suggested putting people in the garage-slash-exhibition space beneath the downtown convention center, converted last summer into emergency-shelter space for Hurricane Harvey evacuees.

"We've done it before," said the council member. Yes, but we did it with state and federal money and assistance from the American Red Cross and the involvement of the police and the Office of Emergency Management, among other helping hands. "We know how to do it."

Which sounds, almost, like sweeping the homeless under the rug. Or the convention center.