Starting at 8 a.m. today, Texas residents will have the first chance in two years to apply for rent assistance through a state program and perhaps avoid evictions.
This is especially important in Harris County with more than 300 cases of eviction filed in the county each day this year; and the rising cost of apartments, with the average rent at $1,300 in 2022 as reported by Costar Real Estate.
The funding is coming through the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs which is re-opening applications to their Texas rent relief program Tuesday through Tuesday, March 28.
Households who are applying or re-applying can do so online at Texas Rent Relief’s website.
This program first started in February 2021 and provided $2 billion in emergency rental funds from the U.S. Department of Treasury to assist Texas households that were financially affected by the pandemic.
The re-opening of program will provide roughly $96 million in relief funds to returning and new-household applicants. Once allocated, this money can cover past due, current and future payments up to three months in advance, said Kristina Tirloni, media advisor for the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs.
This assistance is available for up to 18 months of coverage in total if households are first-time applicants. If households are re-applying, they are eligible for the remainder number of months that have not been covered, Tirloni said.
To qualify, a household cannot earn more than 80 percent of their area’s median household income, cannot receive other rental-based assistance and must have either received unemployment benefits since March 2020 or claimed financial hardship due to reduced income or increased expenses.
According to Tirloni, those who face active eviction cases are prioritized for approval under the program’s Eviction Diversion Program.
Residents who risk losing their houses are asked to include their court case’s docket number and the information of the precinct’s Justice of Peace, so their applications can go under immediate review.
If the individual has only received a written notice to vacate, they will not receive the same priority review as someone with an active court case already filed, Tirloni said.
Prior to closing the rent relief applications in November 2021, Tirloni said the TDHCA received thousands of applications per week.
“When you look at where we were with COVID-19, that started affecting individuals in the state around March and April 2020 and we launched in February 2021,” Tirloni said. “We were really seeing that we were providing assistance right at the height of when people needed it the most.”
The demand of residents was so high, it exceeded the amount of money the department had at their disposal, Tirloni said.
Of the 316,520 households assisted in the first allotment of funds, 58 percent of households had an income that was 30 percent below the area’s median income and 122,130 were single-member households, according to the Texas Rent Relief Program’s Dashboard.
In Harris County, 80,731 households applied and were approved, receiving a collective amount of $530,354,252 in relief dollars.
This time around, Tirloni said, “I think our expectation is that we will get enough applications to definitely be able to distribute the $96 million, and we may get more applications than we have the funding availability for. That can certainly happen.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
