For 68-year-old Connie Rescendez, the clock is ticking when it comes to finding a home.
The Las Vegas Trail resident received a housing voucher from Tarrant County in August, which she hoped would allow her to move to a safer part of town. She had 60 days to find a two-bedroom apartment to move into with her 19-year-old grandson.
Despite being given a map and a list of participating apartments, Rescendez — who lives off her Social Security income — had trouble finding a landlord who would accept her voucher. They either tell her nothing is available or, once she shows up for a tour, tell her that they don’t accept vouchers.
“They have that little equal housing (symbol) that they accept (vouchers), but when you call them, they turn you down,” Rescendez said.
One apartment search required her to make eight trips between an “available” apartment and meetings with her case manager, only to find out ultimately that vouchers were not accepted there.
Rescendez’s struggle is common for those seeking housing vouchers. A 2018 pilot study funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that Fort Worth had a voucher denial rate of 78%, higher than Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., among others.
Fort Worth Housing Solutions, the city’s housing authority, told the Fort Worth Report that it does not have more recent numbers available on the current denial rate in the city, but that it remains high and that climbing rental rates have only add to the problem.
Why is the denial rate so high? Landlords point to the higher costs associated with accepting vouchers. Also, voucher holders are not a federally protected class under the Fair Housing Act, which allows landlords to turn away potential residents based on their income. Texas law further prohibits cities from passing laws preventing discrimination based on income.
Frances Espinoza, executive director of the nonprofit North Texas Fair Housing Center, who worked on the 2018 HUD report, said vouchers have historically had high turndown rates because it all comes down to the landlord’s discretion.
Rising rents have additionally limited where voucher holders can go and be accepted — a trend that has only intensified in recent years.
“It’s just getting harder and harder for voucher holders because they can’t find anywhere to use their voucher because the rents are too high,” Espinoza said.
Time is money
The demand for housing choice vouchers in Fort Worth is competitive, and receiving one of the few vouchers allotted to each housing authority can be a years-long process for some individuals.
Fort Worth Housing Solutions’ voucher waitlist opens every four years for about five days to a week, said Mary-Margaret Lemons, president of the agency that administers the program. When the application period closes, vouchers are distributed via a lottery system.
Once a tenant receives a voucher, the countdown starts to find a unit: 60 days. In some cases, candidates may be able to get an extension of up to 90 days and, in rare cases, 120 days.
Despite having almost a million residents, the city has only 6,500 vouchers available at a time, including special program vouchers dedicated to individuals with disabilities or who are homeless.
The last two times the application portal for vouchers opened, Fort Worth Housing Solutions received over 20,000 applications, Lemons said.
“We know that a very large percentage of our population qualifies for some type of affordable housing and we don’t have the vouchers to support them,” she said. “When people get called and there’s a voucher available, they work very hard to meet all the program requirements and to be a good tenant and stay in that housing, because they’re just so hard to come by.”
Fort Worth Housing Solutions currently has 1,200 landlords who accept vouchers on its lists.
There are many requirements and additional costs that deter landlords from taking even a single voucher, said Kevin Pellegrino, CEO of the Apartment Association of Tarrant County.
According to the National Apartment Association, only 7 cents out of every $1 of rent is returned to apartment owners as profit on average. In Texas, the number is 5 cents, the national association reports.
“When you get into the federal voucher program, you have to go through another series of inspections, which increases the cost of doing business,” Pellegrino said. “It takes longer to rent, it’s more expensive to rent, and it becomes cost prohibitive for the landlord to actually accept the voucher.”
Landlords who refuse to accept a housing voucher are protected under Texas Law.
The Texas Local Government Code prohibits cities and counties from passing any regulations that prohibit landlords from refusing to rent or lease to someone because the person depends on housing assistance to pay rent.
However, the law does not apply to ordinances that protect military veterans, nor does it affect a city’s or county’s ability to offer incentives to encourage the acceptance of vouchers.
Accepting vouchers in what Fort Worth Housing Solutions describes as “high opportunity areas” — low poverty rates, and lots of educational and work options— can get even trickier. Housing voucher denial rates in those parts of Fort Worth can be as high as 85%, HUD reported.
However, landlords of low-performing properties often seek out vouchers, because it’s easy money, Pellegrino said. The voucher allows them to fill their units.
“If I’ve got a high-value property, it’s well kept, well maintained, people are going to come and pay money directly to me to rent that place at a premium dollar,” Pellegrino said. “The low-cost places, they might not be having people knocking down the doors to begin with, so they’ll take the voucher program.”
HUD reported that cities with income anti-discrimination laws saw much lower denial rates in low-poverty parts of town. Newark, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., both consider voucher holders as a protected class and saw denial rates at 31% and 15%, respectively.
Pellegrino points to the 2008 housing market crash as an example of what happens when income is not taken into consideration.
“You had all these people that didn’t have to verify their income apply for a mortgage …,” Pellegrino said. “All of a sudden, there are people who are not paying their mortgages and the housing bubble bursts. … If you can’t verify people’s income, how do you know whether or not they can pay the rent?”
Voucher holders are required to pay 30% of their income toward the rent of a unit and the rest is covered by the voucher. Lemons said that means landlords are guaranteed a portion of the rent payment.
However, some disagree that the guaranteed portion of the rent incentivizes landlords to partake in the program.
“There’s actually a disincentive for me to take the program because you’re only increasing my costs. And I’m only making slim margins on stuff as it is,” Pellegrino said.
Learned lessons
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world, HUD pumped in dollars and offered waivers to keep people housed. Housing authorities and agencies saw firsthand how some of those changes worked for the better.
“We’re trying to go back to HUD and make some of those things permanent in the system. We started allowing a lot more self-certifications and getting people in units and then following up with inspections,” Lemons said.
Lemons said she understands that time is money for business owners. She says finding ways to cut the time between the start of the process of accepting a voucher to actually moving in will benefit both parties.
“I really believe that we can work with landlords to get past most of those issues,” she said. “I’m hopeful that things like that can actually become how we practice and will keep people housed and get people housed quicker.”
Fort Worth Housing Solutions created its “Just Take One” program to educate and encourage landlords to participate in the housing choice program because of the difficulties families and veterans are having with locating an apartment in Tarrant County as a result of the tight rental market.
“We’ve had some success getting new people to sign up. And it could be anybody from a mom and pop that just have one rental property to investors,” Lemons said.
As rents have continued to steadily climb over the years, the amount of money each voucher is worth has remained the same. That means Fort Worth Housing Solutions can’t actually serve 6,500 families.
“We have 6,500 vouchers, but typically, it’s at least 1,000 vouchers that we can’t fill. We would go over budget,” Lemons said.
However, Pellegrino believes that developing more housing will help bring rents down and give tenants more options.
“We just want to see more growth and development happen, so we can provide more housing for folks. Because the more housing we provide, the less you have your homeless issues going on. The happier people are in general,” he said.
As for Rescendez, the 68-year-old voucher holder was unable to find a new place before the allowable 60-day search came to an end. Discouraged by her experience, she decided not to apply for an extension.
Rescendez will remain in her Las Vegas Trail apartment, even though she sees the location as unsanitary and unsafe for her and her grandson.
“I had no choice,” Rescendez said. “If I don’t have a unit and I lose my voucher … where would I go?”
Sandra Sadek is a Report for America corps member, covering growth for the Fort Worth Report. You can contact her at sandra.sadek@fortworthreport.org. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policyhere.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.