In Fort Worth, a housing voucher doesn’t guarantee anyone a place to live. In fact, the housing voucher denial rate in the city is as high as 78%, a previous Fort Worth Report story found.
Fort Worth is looking to address this issue with an amendment to the city’s Human Relations Ordinance that would prohibit housing discrimination on the basis of income for veterans with vouchers and for city-incentivized projects that include a housing component.
City Council will vote to approve the language on March 19. The city’s Human Relations Commission recommended the amendment 7-0 during its March 4 meeting.
The subject was raised during the city’s three-hour workshop on homelessness on Feb. 13.
Council member Elizabeth Beck, who is a veteran, told the Fort Worth Report it’s important the city gets ahead of homelessness by preventing it.
“The two proposed changes would allow us to do that while also supporting our veteran population in a meaningful way. What that means as a city leader is looking at every policy and finding the places where we can do more to support both housing efforts and our veteran community,” Beck said in a statement.
State law prohibits cities and counties from passing ordinances that prohibit source of income discrimination except in two cases: veterans and using incentives to encourage voucher acceptance.
Fort Worth’s new proposed ordinance will rely on those two exceptions, said Fernando Costa, assistant city manager.
“Those two exceptions provide us with some ability to prevent such discrimination, but the state law plainly gives property owners broad discretion as to the selection of their tenants,” Costa said.
If passed by council, landlords in the city would no longer be able to turn away veterans looking to rent while using any sort of federal housing aid. The ordinance would also require all projects that include housing and receive any kind of city incentives to accept all types of tenants, regardless of source of income.
There would be no opt-out option, Costa said.
“If the developer is receiving public benefits in the form of an economic development agreement, tax abatement, anything that would constitute a public incentive by the state law, then we will contractually expect them to not discriminate on the basis of tenants’ source of income,” he said.
Beck described this new rule as “a win on several levels.”
Mary-Margaret Lemons is the president of Fort Worth Housing Solutions. The housing authority supports any measure that protects against income discrimination, she said in a statement to the Fort Worth Report.
“We understand the challenges families and veterans face with finding a home in Fort Worth’s tight rental market, and welcome the city encouraging the acceptance of vouchers by landlords,” Lemons said in an email.
The city of Austin is the only municipality in Texas that already had an ordinance banning source of income discrimination that was grandfathered in after the state law was passed in 2015.
“My understanding is that other states have been more permissive about what (cities) can do. Texas effectively has preempted cities on this issue, as the legislature has done on many issues, and severely restricted our ability to enact regulations that serve our interests,” Costa said.
However, the state recently passed a law in 2023 that prohibits homeowners associations from discriminating against renters who receive federal housing aid.
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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 or @ssadek19.