City of Fort Worth on track to close rent relief program as funds run out
The city of Fort Worth plans to close the application portal for its emergency rental assistance program by the end of the month, with funds dwindling and thousands of applications still to process.
In an informal report that will be presented to the Fort Worth City Council on Tuesday, city manager David Cooke wrote that the program plans to close its application portal by March 31, and then to continue processing existing applications until the program runs out of funds.
“We’re going to try our best to assist those that we still have pending,” said Victor Turner, the director of the city’s Neighborhood Services Department. He added that city staff will also continue to direct folks in need to resources that are available, including utility assistance resources.
The closure of the city’s rent relief program would follow the closure of similar programs across the state and region. The statewide Texas Rent Relief closed its portal in November, in a process that some said was not well-communicated. The cities of Arlington and Dallas have also already closed their programs.
“We’re one of the few cities that’s still open, most of the other large municipalities have already closed the portal,” Turner said.
According to Cooke’s report, Fort Worth’s program has distributed nearly $31 million in rental assistance funds. And while the program still has more than $28 million left, there are more pending applications than the remaining funds can cover.
In order to fulfill the 5,856 rental assistance applications that have not yet been addressed, the city’s program would need $9.5 million more than it has, the report says. That anticipated shortfall would be despite a fund boost of $10 million that the city program recently received from Tarrant County’s emergency rental assistance program.
The county’s program, unlike some other local programs, has struggled to distribute its funds. County staff have said that this is due, in part, to overlaps with the now-closed Texas Rent Relief program; in addition to reallocating some of its funds to the city, the county is also in the process of pivoting some remaining funds to a program that will help residents pay for security deposits and “hard to house” fees.
The state and local rent relief programs have been funded with federal dollars and aimed at assisting folks who have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The funds have residency requirements — the programs in the cities of Arlington, Dallas and Fort Worth were open only to city residents, while the Dallas and Tarrant county programs are open only to county residents who do not live in a city that has an independent program.
And while the Fort Worth rent relief program is just another such program to close its doors in recent months, the shuttering of rent relief programs doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is back on their feet.
In the month of February, the Fort Worth area saw more eviction filings than during any other month since the pandemic began, according to data compiled by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. Eviction filings in the Fort Worth area hit a low of 116 in April 2020, when public health mandates prevented landlords from evicting tenants. Since then, eviction filings have risen and fallen in an unsteady pattern, before jumping to nearly 3,200 filings in January 2022 and then nearly 3,300 filings in February 2022.
According to the Eviction Lab, the Fort Worth area’s eviction filings for February and March are now also higher than they were before the pandemic began.
The Fort Worth City Council is scheduled to address the rent relief program and its anticipated funding shortage at its work session at 1 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall.
