The future of the state’s remaining protections for tenants is unclear. “And so landlords have to make their decision: Will they try to work with the tenant - and some tenants, I think, are on shakier footing than others - or do they just want to move on?”
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“Uncle Sam is out of money,” said Dana Karni, an attorney for Lone Star Legal Aid, which provides free legal services to low-income Texans including tenants facing eviction. But many of those programs, including the state’s, aren’t taking new applications as they use the new dollars to try to work through a backlog of applicants.Įven when landlords receive rent relief, it’s not a guarantee that renters will stay housed. In March, the Treasury Department took back $10 million from rental programs in nine Texas cities and counties - including Laredo, Dallas County and Hays County.Īt the same time, Treasury shoveled another $70.6 million to rent relief programs in Texas that it has deemed capable of efficiently distributing the funds -including the state program and those in Houston, San Antonio and Austin. That money has nearly all been spent - although some of it has been reclaimed by the federal government because locals couldn’t spend the money fast enough. Treasury Department has sent more than $3.7 billion to Texas to fund the state’s rent relief program as well as local rental assistance funds. Over the course of the pandemic, the U.S. Meanwhile, the state’s reserve of federal rental assistance dollars has all but emptied. “Unfortunately, from an owner’s perspective, when somebody's unable to pay their rent, depending on the circumstances, there aren't a lot of other options out there for them,” Mintz said. With rental assistance funds drying up, landlords often have no choice but to evict tenants, he said. In many cases, landlords have waited months for tenants to come up with back rent or for rental assistance funds to come through, said David Mintz, vice president of government affairs for Texas Apartment Association, a trade group of rental property owners.
“Where you were seeing evictions, gentrification and folks struggling to survive, it is exponentially so now and there are basically zero protections.” “We really believe that we're going to be seeing that number increase in a really radical way because the pressure points that are existing now are way worse than they were in 2019,” said Mincho Jacob, a spokesperson for Building and Strengthening Tenant Action, or BASTA Austin. Since city and county emergency orders banning most evictions in Austin and Travis County expired in December, landlords there have filed more than 2,500 eviction cases in roughly four months, according to figures from Eviction Lab - more than landlords sought in the 21 months between March 2020 and the end of 2021. Home prices there have skyrocketed amid the pandemic the median sales price of an Austin home surpassed $600,000 last month, according to the Austin Board of Realtors. Austin rents have shot up more than 21% since March 2020, figures from Apartment List show - faster than any other major Texas city. Until recently, Austin had some of the state’s strongest eviction bans to help the city’s poorest residents stay in their homes amid a housing market gone berserk. “We can't say for sure, but it feels like there's kind of a perfect storm of factors that are colliding,” said Ashley Flores, senior director of the Dallas nonprofit Child Poverty Action Lab. Now, Texas tenants who have struggled to make ends meet as COVID-19 ravaged the economy must go without the safety net constructed during the pandemic to keep people housed - while rents in many major cities have risen by double digits in the past two years and growing inflation makes it harder for struggling households to also pay for expenses like groceries and gas. The high rate of case filings comes after government bans on eviction have expired and the well of federal rent relief dollars has nearly run dry. Austin ranked eighth among the cities on Eviction Lab’s list, behind Las Vegas and Philadelphia. And in Austin, the number of eviction cases has soared since a local ban on most evictions ended last year.
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