With federal rental funds still in hand, Tarrant County considering new housing programs
While the statewide Texas rent relief program has nearly run out of funds, Tarrant County’s is struggling to distribute its millions of dollars.
Faced with the possibility of having to return some of the money, the county has begun brainstorming new housing programs — including paying for families’ rental down payments and offering incentives for landlords to rent to tenants who are struggling to find housing.
Wayne Pollard, the director of the Tarrant County Housing Assistance Office, said he’s working to put together a program that would use the county’s emergency rental assistance funds to pay residents’ security deposits.
“A lot of families cannot get into units because they don’t have down payment monies,” Pollard said. “They don’t have that start-up money to get that unit initially.”
Assistant county administrator Kristen Camareno said the county has also considered a “hard to house” program. The program would encourage landlords to rent to those who typically struggle to find housing — including those with criminal convictions or recent evictions on their records, and those with poor credit history — either through an upfront bonus to the landlord or by giving the landlord access to funds if something goes wrong during the tenancy.
Because the idea is still in the works, Camareno said it could shift toward paying for relocation expenses, application fees or hotel or motel costs.
If approved by county commissioners, such initiatives would mark a departure for the county’s rental assistance program, which has so far focused on paying rent and utility bills for tenants who have been financially affected by the pandemic.
The Tarrant County Emergency Rental Assistance Program is open to county residents who do not live in Arlington or Fort Worth, as those cities have their own rental assistance programs.
The county program has assisted 939 families, Camareno said Monday, and has distributed $7.6 million of its emergency rental funds. The county has an additional $13.5 million obligated, Camareno said, money that will be distributed if all the served families qualify for the maximum amount of assistance.
But the Treasury Department allocated to the county about $24 million in a first round of emergency rental funds. That means the county has actually distributed about a third of the total it has available — plus the federal government has already allocated an additional $26 million to the county.
Camareno said the county has struggled to get the rental funds out the door because of confusion and overlap with the state relief program.
“The state saw the majority of foot traffic,” Camareno said. “Because their program launched sooner, a majority of our residents went to the state program.”
So while the Texas rent relief program closed its portal to new applicants in November and has distributed or committed more than 95% of its nearly $2 billion in funding, the county program has lagged.
The county’s relatively low rate of distribution has put it at risk of having some of the funds marked as “excess,” meaning the federal government would take back that money and send it to a program that has already expended its funds.
Earlier this year, the Tarrant County Homeless Coalition also tried a bonus-based initiative similar to the “hard to house” concept. Equipped with half a million dollars from the state, the organization began offering landlords a bonus if they would waive certain application requirements for people receiving assistance from the coalition.
For instance, a landlord could collect a bonus if they accepted a tenant who did not yet have a state ID card, said Kimberly Doty, who heads up the coalition’s landlord engagement and outreach.
But landlords balked at the initiative, Doty said, with large-scale landlords particularly raising concerns about fairness.
“Where we were successful is the smaller, individual, privately owned properties. But there’s not enough of those” in the area, Doty said. “We weren’t able to spend the majority of it. It just wasn’t as successful as we’d hoped.”
Nicholas Yuva, the administrator for a Washington state program that aims to keep Washingtonians housed through financial safety nets, said landlords are primarily concerned about property damage when they rent to low-income tenants. Although that fear may be unrealistic, Yuva said, it can’t be dispelled until landlords begin renting to people they perceive as high-risk.
“Stigma-busting only comes from experience,” Yuva said in an email. “Landlords must experience positive low-income tenancies to minimize their hesitancy.”
Both Washington state’s program and a similar program in Tulsa aim to increase landlords’ confidence through safety net guarantees. Under those programs, landlords can recoup costs if a tenant falls behind on rent or damages a property.
This offer can bring landlords to the table, said Kristin Maun, the director of housing development in Tulsa’s economic development department.
“Our investment is focused on creating a safety net that hopefully doesn’t need to get utilized,” Maun said. “Ideally, we’re going to be able to connect both the landlord and the tenant with a safety net that ensures stable housing.”
Camareno said she hopes a new housing initiative can be brought before the county commissioners court in early 2022. She said the county is also considering sending some of its remaining funds to the rental assistance programs in the cities of Arlington and Fort Worth.
“We’re going to do everything we can to get as much money out the door as we can,” Camareno said.
This story was originally published December 21, 2021 at 9:22 AM.
