Photo by Stephen Montoya
Imagine finding out almost overnight that your rent has been raised without any warning. Would you still be able to pay your bills on time? For some Tarrant County residents, this scenario is all too real.
So real in fact that the City of Fort Worth released an article indicating that family homelessness in Tarrant County is at a critical level.
The article states that from July through September of 2022, an average of 162 families were homeless at any given time in Tarrant and Parker counties. Of that, 138 families, or 85 percent, were in Fort Worth.
In late October, Mayor Mattie Parker coordinated a meeting of community stakeholders and partners to talk about immediate ways to approach the situation.
One of those community stakeholders was Lauren King, executive director of the Tarrant County Homeless Coalition (TCHC), a local non-profit that works with over 40 partner agencies to help aid with homelessness.
“Around April of this year, we started to see the number of families who were seeking shelter go up,” King says. “We haven’t seen these kinds of numbers historically, plus our shelters were already filled to capacity and then some.”
For example, she says the local Salvation Army, which has the capacity to house 60 people, has had to raise that allotment to 250 people due to the current demand for families who are experiencing homelessness.
“It’s not like our system has just stopped working; we’ve actually housed about 20% more families in 2022 than in past years. But with double the inflow, we can’t keep up.”
Most of the metrics TCHC has acquired indicate that many families currently experiencing homelessness cannot afford to live in Tarrant County due to increases in rental rates.
In fact, King says the Dallas Fort Worth area had one of the most significant rent increases in the nation, which was only surpassed by Atlanta and Tampa Bay, Florida this past summer.
“Rent increase is huge,” she says. “Some families tell us that their landlord raised the rent from $300 to $500 but they still make $13 an hour, so now they cannot afford rent anymore. This leaves these families with little to no options.”
However, King pointed out that most people in this situation don’t go straight from their rental to homelessness. Instead, they look for motels, short-term rentals, or family with whom to stay.
Photo by Stephen Montoya
“It’s only after they are done floating around that many of these families somehow reach us,” she says.
King highlighted that access to childcare in the summer when school is out, is one of the main contributing factors to the increase in these numbers.
“Childcare is a huge contributor to many of these families who cannot afford a sitter or daycare so they can go to work in the summer,” King says. “In many of these situations, one parent is childcare, and the other parent is the earner.”
Another trend King says she is seeing is more multi-generational families seeking shelter. “We are seeing parents, grandparents, and children coming to us as a unit looking for resources.”
Currently, Parker, King, and Tarrant County leadership are investigating numerous potential solutions to the issues, including one idea that could involve buying a property that can be quickly used as a shelter and later converted to permanent housing, according to a press release.
“It’s a complicated problem to deal with,” Parker explains. “There’s probably going to be a series of short-term solutions that we need to come up with and long-term solutions.”
These options come in addition to months of investments in housing solutions. Fort Worth recently awarded more than $17 million in local, private, and federal funds to develop 128 permanent supportive housing units and is expected to invest $4.6 million more, as well as $8 million in homeless family units, totaling $29.6 million.
The City is reallocating federal funds to focus specifically on rapidly rehousing families.
This could mean affordable housing is on the horizon countywide.
Tarrant County is using $32.5 million in federal funds to develop 254 affordable housing units for people experiencing homelessness and is currently looking for developers.
“I consider this a crisis because of who it’s impacting — our families and children,” Parker said in a press release. “I’m not the only mayor in Texas with this problem right now.”
