Texas housers

The rebuilding of the Texas Housing Counselor is a current project of the Texas Housers.  This page provides an overview of the project.

The lack of affordable housing is a major problem in Texas.

Millions of Texas families lack affordable housing. There is not a single metropolitan area in Texas where a minimum wage worker can afford median market rent. Instead, on average, a worker must earn $13.43 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent. Fewer than one in four families who qualify for publicly assisted housing receive any form of housing assistance.

Texas’ meager funding for social services, high housing costs and low wages devastate families, making it almost impossible for them to overcome poverty. In Dallas, 39 percent of all households are low-income and almost 11 percent of residents live below the federal poverty line.  Over 600,000 Dallas households live in substandard, overcrowded or unaffordable housing, or lack indoor plumbing.

At the same time, Texas’ unsubsidized affordable housing stock is declining. A limited supply of private, unsubsidized housing affordable to low-income families makes up only a tiny and rapidly diminishing share of the total affordable housing stock. According The State of the Nation’s Housing 2006, produced by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies:

The nation has been losing affordable rental housing for more than 30 years. This is the housing stock that is affordable, at 30 percent of income, to the third of renter households with incomes of $16,000 or less. From 1993 to 2003, the inventory of these units—with inflation-adjusted rents of $400 or less, including utilities—plunged by 1.2 million. With such drastic losses to upgrading, abandonment, or demolition, the shortage of rentals affordable and available to low-income households was a dismal 5.4 million.

The subsidized housing stock is also declining. Thousands of public housing units and privately owned apartments with subsidized rents have been demolished or converted to other uses. 

When affordable homes are demolished, or income is insufficient to cover the rent or mortgage, families are displaced. Studies show that high rates of school mobility reduce the academic achievement of children. For the segment of low-income children who are homeless, those who transfer schools are 35 percent more likely to repeat a grade and 78 percent more likely to have poor attendance than homeless children who remain in stable school placements. Such figures illustrate why housing needs must be met to improve the academic performance and lifelong outcomes of children living in poverty.

Given the paltry public resources for affordable housing, Texas needs to ensure that the available resources are well spent, that the public embraces affordable housing production, and that the capacity of existing housing delivery mechanisms—such as disaster related housing recovery, community based production and rehabilitation—are making effective use of the available financial resources.

Low-income families don’t know where to turn in the search for affordable housing.

While the supply of affordable housing is declining, the task of finding and qualifying for the existing subsidized housing is extremely difficult.  More than a dozen federal, state and local programs provide subsidized housing in Texas.  Each of these programs has different qualification rules and application procedures. Low-income families’ search for housing they can afford is frustrating and often consumes valuable resources they do not have. There is no central resource that low-income families can turn to in order to know what housing they qualify for, where it is located, and how to apply.  We describe the process of obtaining subsidized housing as “the survival of the fittest and most persistent.”  This is clearly a system that puts the elderly, people with disabilities and the poorly educated at a distinct and unfair disadvantage.

The complex and labyrinthine process of finding and qualifying for subsidized housing means that the demand for this housing is grossly underreported by government agencies and organizations.  As long as eligible families cannot find housing they are eligible for, they will not apply for it. If the low-income population were not uninformed, marginalized, and unorganized, the current system that denies them access to basic information about their housing options would have been addressed long ago.

The importance of open access to information about where families can find safe, decent, affordable housing cannot be overstated. In the unpredictable, chaotic world of poverty, housing is usually both the most expensive need and also the most essential one for a stable life. With a place to call home, children are more successful in school, families have a steady foundation, and seniors and people with disabilities can live with independence and dignity.

How program will address need

TxLIHIS is seeking funding from the Meadows Foundation to support activities within two of our major program areas:

1)     The Texas Housing Counselor—Providing a direct online service to low-income families seeking a home; and

2)     The Texas Housing Forum—Ending poverty housing through collaboration and coalition building.

1)     Texas Housing Counselor: Providing a direct online service to low-income families seeking a home.

Revive, update and expand the Texas Housing Counselor

The Texas Housing Counselor and Tenant Advisor are one-stop information centers for low-income families who need an affordable home or help in resolving problem with their landlord. Both sites are designed to guide the unsophisticated consumer through the maize of programs and laws to find a solution to their housing problem.

TxLIHIS originally developed the web sites with the help of a volunteer programmer and legal aid attorneys. Information provided by the Housing Counselor includes:

• Listings of subsidized rental housing available within a 20, 30, or 50 mile radius, including contact information and maps to each development;
• Maximum rents for different housing programs;
• Detailed information regarding regulations specific to each housing program in a simple, easy-to-understand format; and
• Advice about which program is best suited to the client’s needs.

On January 2, 2006, TxLIHIS’ offices were burglarized and our computers, including critical Housing Counselor equipment and software, were stolen. While we have backups, our web-based counseling services are not programmed to operate on current software. We have raised funds to replace the hardware, but need to hire a programmer and devote staff time to reprogramming the database and updating the extensive affordable housing listings.

Since the Housing Counselor became unavailable, our phone lines have been overwhelmed with calls from low-income families seeking an affordable home. Users of this site are mostly poor. For example, roughly two-thirds of the people using the Counselor to seek housing in Dallas reported an income of less than half of the area median income. The high weekly usage and the low incomes of Counselor users prove that this resource is highly valuable to low-income people. Until recently, more than 1,800 people in need of affordable housing consulted this website each week.

Moreover, since the Dallas-area affordable housing information was last updated, hundreds of units of subsidized housing have been demolished, and new public and privately owned affordable housing has been built.

Bringing the Housing Counselor back online is one of TxLIHIS’ top priorities. TxLIHIS is seeking funding from the Meadows Foundation to:

• Reprogram and restore the Housing Counselor and Texas Tenant Advisor websites;
• Update affordable housing information to reflect changes in housing stock across Texas, including housing opportunities that meet the specific needs of hurricane evacuees, with special attention to the Dallas-Ft. Worth area; and
• Improve the Housing Counselor and Tenant Advisor to be faster, more efficient, and user-friendly.

TxLIHIS will carry out the following specific activities to achieve our project goals:

a)      Contract with a skilled computer programmer to reconfigure the Housing Counselor’s and Tenant Advisor’s interface and migrate our server from the Mac OS 9 platform to the more current OS X platform. This will not only restore our Web services, but will take advantage of new software conventions, making the database faster and more efficient for low-income people who are often facing a housing crisis for which they need immediate answers.

b)     Collect data reflecting additions and changes to Texas’ stock of subsidized affordable housing, with attention to the Dallas and Ft. Worth area. Data collected will include rental rates, income, and other eligibility factors. This will include researching and gathering unique housing options for low-income Texans, including publicly and privately-owned housing designed or operated specifically for:

• Elderly individuals;
• People with disabilities;
• Families with children;
• Hurricane evacuee families.

c)      Work collaboratively with other organizations to broaden the reach of the Housing Counselor.

One of the principal challenges with the Texas Housing Counselor effective is keeping the database of available subsidized housing current.  When the Housing Counselor was first brought online in 2001 TxLIHIS devoted many staff hours to compiling and checking the data.  After several years the database desperately needed updating yet we lacked the staff resources to do so.

Drawing upon relationships with organizations and government entities, TxLIHIS has created a plan to establish a cooperative agreement among government and private nonprofit organizations to maintain a current housing database.  Participating entities at this time include the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA), the Texas State Affordable Housing Corporation (TSAHC) and United Cerebral Palsy of Texas (UCP).  We are negotiating to secure the participation of other organizations at this time.

TDHCA and TSAHC have agreed to maintain current listing of the properties they fund, which together comprise about 40 percent of the Texas subsidized housing inventory. UCP will also work cooperatively with us to update and maintain the Counselor in the long term. UCP AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers are currently working in Texas cities, including Dallas, to inspect subsidized apartments and evaluate whether they meet the needs of people with disabilities. UCP will make this data available, which will be invaluable to people with disabilities, available on our Housing Counselor. We will be seeking similar support from private and governmental organizations that have an interest in providing useful affordable housing information to low-income people, so that this project continues on a cooperative basis.

The remaining 60% of the Texas subsidized housing inventory is housing funded by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and city governments using federal block grants.  TxLIHIS staff will maintain and update this portion of the database as we explore similar cooperative data maintenance and sharing arrangements with HUD, USDA and cities.

There are many benefits to this cooperative arrangement. In exchange for using the information on the Housing Counselor to serve their clients, nonprofit and governmental organizations will provide current data on their affordable housing stock, thereby keeping the information on the site current. Involvement by other organizations will also help the Counselor reach a greater number of affordable housing consumers, as well as consumers with unique needs.