Fort Worth lags other Texas cities in providing rental assistance amid COVID pandemic
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How Texas forgot renters
Tenants paid the price across Texas when leaders failed to enact a long-lasting eviction moratorium and other protections during the coronavirs pandemic. Read the Star-Telegram’s investigation:
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Over the last year city officials say Fort Worth had a philosophy of helping people pay rent rather than delaying rent coming due. But Fort Worth’s housing assistance payments were ouptaced by other large cities in Texas.
As of mid-April, according to the city, Fort Worth had provided $7 million in rent, mortgage and utility assistance to about 3,000 households through its emergency housing assistance programs throughout the pandemic. On March 8, it started a new program using a portion of $27 million in housing assistance funds from a Dec. 27 federal relief package. As of April 20, 2,300-plus households had applied through the new program, but the city declined to say if any had received funding. Asked by the Star-Telegram for the number that had received funding, Victor Turner, director of Fort Worth’s neighborhood services department, would only say the applications were in various stages of review and pending.
Compare these figures to other cities across Texas: San Antonio, a little more than 1.5 times the size of Fort Worth, had expended $71 million on over 30,000 households between the beginning of the pandemic and mid-April. Houston, which has three times the population of Fort Worth, spent around $50 million of CARES Act federal funding to help 42,000 households in 2020. (It spent even more through other funding sources.) In February, Houston rolled out a rent relief program for a new batch of federal funding in combination with Harris County. In two months, it gave around $55 million to 15,000-plus households. Dallas, 1.5 times the size of Fort Worth, had spent twice as much on assistance, around $14 million, between the onset of the pandemic and mid-April.
In 2020, most of the funding for each city came from the federal government’s CARES Act package, passed last spring, and the cities had the option to choose how much they wanted to allocate for emergency housing assistance. (Some cities also supplemented their housing assistance programs with other cash streams). So was this a case of Fort Worth budgeting the right amount to meet a lower demand or not raising enough awareness for its availability?
“I think we had enough funding available and we had the ability to add to that number if need be,” Turner said. “I think the funds were available to meet the demand.”
With its federal funding, Fort Worth also awarded money to local nonprofits (some $5.8 million was allocated to them last year, including $400,00 for housing services, according to a city budget analysis) and invested in homeless services. The city used $9.3 million in federal CARES Act funding to turn a former extended stay hotel into a permanent supportive housing facility. According to the Tarrant County Homeless Coalition, the number of people experiencing homelessness in Tarrant County increased by 6% in 2020 from 2019.
To alert people about Fort Worth’s rental assistance programs, Turner said Fort Worth worked with nonprofits and Justice of the Peace Courts. The Star-Telegram interviewed Fort Worth tenants who had lost jobs and wages because of the pandemic, making them eligible to receive funding, but they either knew nothing about aid programs or had difficulties gaining access.
Fort Worth Resident Myesheia Westmoreland said she was among various renters at her eviction hearing discussing how they were unable to secure funding from the city. A renter named Jessica in south Fort Worth, who asked that only her first name be used because of fear she could lose a new job said she tried various outlets for getting assistance. “It’s like I was getting dead ends,” she said. “Everyone is like, ‘you can call 211, these are the places that can help in your area.’ I’m like they’re not offering anyone services, they’ve run out of resources.” She said she didn’t hear about the CARES Act and Fort Worth potentially being able to offer assistance from its funding until she had already been evicted.
Some of the difficulties with securing the funding were out of Fort Worth’s control. The federal government’s paperwork requirements for proving loss of income or employment made it difficult for both tenants who applied and city workers who had to make sure they were following the rules.
The complications with federal aid were one of the reasons housing advocates pushed for moratoriums, grace periods for paying back rent and other mechanisms to delay rent payments in Texas. Major cities such as Dallas and Austin initiated grace periods early in the pandemic, and Houston did in February 2021. Fort Worth did not set a grace period, and Mayor Betsy Price declined an interview request to discuss the city’s pandemic housing policies.
Over an email through her spokesperson, Price said the city believed a grace period would violate state law. But the other Texas cities enacted their grace periods successfully. Attorney Mark Melton, who helped design Dallas’ grace period, said, “It’s very clear a state or a city can do this.”
He had a message in case Price changed her mind: Give him a call because he would help author a grace period proposal for Fort Worth.
Will Fort Worth take him up on the offer? Price’s spokesperson was vague when the Star-Telegram asked if Price would change her mind. The spokesperson said she would pass along Melton’s contact info “to the right person.”
