‘Don’t give up’: How one Fort Worth woman defied the city’s home affordability crisis
These days, in the small windows of time she finds between work, workouts and guiding her two daughters into adulthood, La’Nitra Smith preoccupies herself with small projects around her new home.
“I like decorating, making everything my own,” she said, sitting on a couch in her living room. The space was snug and sunlit. Mocha, the family’s large yet cheerful dog, sat in a crate a few feet away, shifting between tail-wagging and short naps.
Smith’s stepfather, eager and handy despite his 80 years, was coming over later that day to install a security camera. He’d already helped her pitch fence poles across the backyard and install a gate in the driveway.
“He just needs something to do,” Smith laughed.
Smith, 42, purchased the home in June with the help of Trinity Habitat for Humanity, an affordable housing nonprofit. She was still adjusting to the mundane obligations of homeownership; she was also savoring a sudden, unfamiliar steadiness.
“I’ve been sleeping comfortably,” she said. “I haven’t been stressed out about a bill or anything. I just go and pay it — still have money left over.”
She’d pursued that stability all her adult life. The past decade or so was especially trying. She became a single mother, working constantly, spending sparingly and still saving rarely in the years that followed, she remembers.
Homeownership has long been upheld in the American psyche as an essential and attainable aspiration for the responsible, hardworking and family-oriented.
The possibility of homeownership, and the transformative benefits it promises, have floated further and further out of reach of the average American family in recent decades. The prices of homes have soared; the opportunities to build the wealth needed to afford one haven’t expanded in kind.
Dallas-Fort Worth had long been an island of relative affordability as waves of high living costs swept across other American cities. But the Metroplex is quickly succumbing to the tides.
La’Nitra managed to defy the city’s growing home affordability crisis. Does her story offer a solution others can follow, or only an exception that others in similar circumstances can only hope to replicate?
Renting in Fort Worth
Smith grew up in southeast Fort Worth, the oldest of seven full and half siblings. Her mom drove buses for a living. Her father took on janitorial gigs before finding his way in HVAC repair.
The couple split when Smith was around 7, she remembers, yet both remained present and loving figures in her life. She and her full siblings lived with their mother most days, she recalls, bouncing around apartments before settling in a home in Glencrest passed down from a family member.
“It was never a dull moment at home,” she recalled.
She graduated from Polytechnic High School in 2000. She took a few months of classes at a community college in Hillsboro while clocking in hours at a grocery store by her mother’s house.
Smith recalls leaving home when she was about 20. The pressures of adulthood presented themselves quickly.
She worked various gigs to stay afloat, at one point, she remembers, balancing shifts at Walmart, Goodwill and Chuck E. Cheese.
“I quit Chuck E. Cheese after I got knocked over by a bunch of kids,” she said, laughing and cringing as she described the scene. “I was in the Chucky suit, and it was too hot.”
She met her future husband at her first apartment, a place she remembers with very little fondness.
“It was trash,” she laughed. “Me and my roommate, we did not last there long at all.”
The couple later moved in together and, in time, decided to marry. They had two girls, Jaliyah and La’Nisha, in the span of about two years. Around that time, she enrolled in nursing school.
The family moved repeatedly over the years, responding to opportunities that arose and the constraints they confronted.
Smith and her then husband had attempted to buy a home. In 2004, before the kids were born, they purchased a property on Pate Drive, around the Fairhaven neighborhood.
Whatever quiet suburban life they hoped to nurture there quickly came apart. Disputes with their neighbors compelled them to move not long after moving in, Smith recalled; a bank foreclosed the home, and they didn’t attempt to buy another one, she added.
The couple ultimately split in the mid-2010s. Parenting alone introduced Smith to new stresses and strains. She was now covering her and her kids’ expenses on one income. Living costs in the Metroplex, meanwhile, had begun to climb to record highs.
“When you’re by yourself, it is never comfortable,” she said. “It was never a comfortable feeling.”
Smith had also parted ways with her well-paying but emotionally draining nursing career.
“It takes a toll on you,” she said.
She clocked in for her final nursing shift in late 2014. She then worked at a logistics company in Grand Prairie for two years before settling into a customer service job at a payment services company in north Fort Worth. She began as an agent, fielding calls from disgruntled vendors, and now supervises a team.
Smith began moonlighting as a personal trainer in 2021. She squeezed sessions with clients in between working, cooking, cleaning, pick-ups and drop-offs, church, family events and the other innumerable responsibilities that fell on her lap.
Smith — “the Fine’sse Trainer” — has since amassed 38,700 likes and almost 4,000 followers on TikTok. On good months, she says, the gig can bring in an extra $3,000 a month, but good months are never a given.
Her day job, her training and the little extra she brought in from meal prepping still only allowed her to tread water.
“No one can really afford what they really want to afford out here,” Smith said. “People barely make enough money to just put money into savings accounts.”
She and her daughters toughed out a few years in a cheap but bug-infested apartment complex off Hulen Street to save some cash. They eventually escaped to a nicer development farther up the street, but rent jumps forced another move. Ultimately, she traded convenience for affordability and moved to Benbrook.
Years of hustling never seemed to bring stability closer within reach. The cycle exhausted her.
“I was moving around. I got tired of doing it,” she said. “You’re always having to look for somewhere else to stay that’s cheaper.”
One possible solution came to mind: “I need a house.”
Housing affordability in the Metroplex
American politicians, pundits, and financial planners have long celebrated homeownership as the keystone to financial prosperity. Decades of research largely bears out that conclusion.
In a tumultuous and unforgiving economy, experts find that homeownership is, more often than not, a reliable anchor, a steady generator of wealth that, when properly managed, can carry over for generations.
The wealth gap between renters and homeowners, always present, has widened in recent years. The Urban Institute, an economic policy think tank, found that the median American homeowner accrued $165,000 in wealth between 1989 and 2022; the median renter added $5,800 to their name in that time.
Yet as the financial benefits of homeownership expand, the pool of those who can afford it is contracting. Home prices nationwide have climbed to unseen highs; the costs of maintaining a home have risen in tandem. Incomes haven’t followed suit. The National Association of Realtors found in 2023 that middle class buyers could afford only around 23% of the homes on the market.
North Texas had long been a haven of home affordability, thanks in large part to its cheap and ample land. Breakneck growth — paired with spikes in property, construction and loan costs — has pierced that bubble.
In 2011, 83% of homes in Fort Worth were priced below $200,000, according to a city analysis. That share had shrunk to just 12% by 2021, homes in the $300,000-$400,000 range taking their place. Rents, meanwhile, had jumped roughly 23% between 2021 and 2023.
“Citywide, a median income household cannot afford a median priced home,” Fort Worth officials stated bluntly in its August 2023 housing affordability strategy.
Researchers at Harvard calculated that a family today would need to earn $116,238 annually to afford the median priced home in the Metroplex — at least $30,000 more than the region’s median household income.
The signs of strain had begun to present themselves in Fort Worth’s least privileged neighborhoods decades earlier.
Authors of the “Southside Sector Plan,” a revitalization strategy for neighborhoods south of I-30 drawn up by city planners and neighborhood leaders in the early 1980s, noted that “moderate income persons are unable to buy their own house.”
The ever-rising costs of homeownership — property taxes, energy bills, day-to-day expenses — risk prying properties away from the families who have managed to hold onto them.
“What happened in Austin 20 years ago or Denver 20 years ago or San Francisco, Portland, etc., 30 and 40 years ago is now happening here,” said Gage Yager, the CEO of Trinity Habitat for Humanity.
Yager’s organization is among the most prominent in a patchwork of nonprofits and government programs trying to combat the crisis.
Founded in the mid-1970s, Habitat has constructed and repaired hundreds of thousands of homes across the world, with the stated mission of expanding affordable housing access for low-income families — or the “hard working essential family,” as Yager puts it.
Volunteers and prospective Habitat homeowners spend hundreds of hours piecing the houses together to keep construction costs low. The organization, in turn, offers homebuyers low interest mortgages and comparatively cheap monthly payments. Those accepted to Habitat’s programs must also undergo financial literacy and home management training before receiving their deed.
Trinity Habitat, the nonprofit’s branch servicing Johnson, Tarrant, Parker and Wise counties, had only six or seven employees in the late ‘90s when Yager signed on, he remembers. The group had about seven homes in the pipeline then; last year, they produced around 50 to 60, according to Yager, and helped repair at least 100 more. Kirstie Harper, Trinity Habitat’s senior director of family success, says the bulk of the organization’s homes fall within the $171,000 to $230,000 range.
Yager acknowledges that his operation is no panacea for the region’s worsening housing struggles. Experts estimate that the Metroplex is short almost 50,000 residences, a daunting gap to bridge several dozen homes at a time. Trinity Habitat only accepted eight families into its program in 2023, according to Yager, a product of the organization’s strict application requirements.
“Credit worthiness is a huge deal,” Yager said. “Our lending criteria is quite conservative, because I have to have families pay.”
For a family living paycheck to paycheck, it’s not difficult for a moment of bad luck to derail years of diligence. A medical emergency or a sudden layoff can tailspin into a missed car payment or a late internet bill.
By keeping the bar high, Yager says, his organization has kept its foreclosure rate at around 2%.
“They get foreclosed on occasion,” he said, “but not very often.”
Homeownership and stability
Smith heard about Habitat through a friend in 2021. She quickly threw her hat in the ring. To her surprise and dismay, they rejected her application, she remembers.
“My feelings were hurt,” she said. “I’m not going to lie — I cried.”
Habitat found two missed payments on her record, according to Smith — an overdue electricity bill from the time she lived with her husband and an unpaid apartment cleaning fee. She promptly paid what she owed and reapplied. By June of that year, she was in.
She embraced the construction and the classes and the fresh feeling of hope. By 2023, everything in her life seemed to be on the up and up. Her oldest daughter was graduating high school and preparing for college; her youngest followed close behind, eyeing culinary school. Her home, meanwhile, was physically and financially coming together.
That summer, Smith’s gradual, determined journey toward stability almost tumbled off track. She underwent an emergency hysterectomy in August. The operation all but dissipated her savings, she said. She had to pause training for months.
“I was basically starting from zero,” she recalled.
Her oldest, meanwhile, needed help finding her footing at university. She confronted the frightening possibility that she might miss a bill or fall behind on rent, wrecking the dream of homeownership she felt so close to securing.
Smith’s father agreed to help cover rent payments, and her boyfriend chipped in when he could. Smith ended up taking a second job at Target by her apartment. For months, she recalled, she clocked out of her day job at 5 p.m., jetted home and situated her daughters, and clocked in at Target by 6:30 p.m. for a five hour shift. She tried to keep up her training commitments in the meantime.
“I really was not supposed to be working, but I was like, you know, I don’t have a choice but to do what I can do,” she said. “I got to help her out.”
Things settled by last spring. Her daughter found a job, and Smith rebuilt her savings. By the summer, the family moved into their new home, a one-story building on a quarter acre lot wedged between East Loop 820 and the western banks of Lake Arlington.
She now pays $1,099 a month for her mortgage and a few hundred more for utilities, hundreds of dollars less than she was paying at her most recent rental.
Besides a few needed home repairs and the occasional neighborhood power outage, Smith has few complaints. She’s a manageable drive from her office, and only a 10 minute jaunt from her mother. Her neighbors, she says, are friendly and helpful. Above all, she feels at ease.
“You just don’t give up on what you want,” she said. “Especially when you know you have two kids depending on you.”
This story was originally published February 27, 2025 at 5:50 AM.
