Low Income Renters in Texas Are In Trouble

Evictions are reaching record highs in Harris County as COVID era rental assistance sunsets across the city. Not all cities have been hit as hard as Harris County, however. Evictions in Harris County are at record levels never seen before. This not only hurts renters, who are obviously left without an affordable housing option and a place to live, but landlords as well, who are struggling to make ends meet in a brutal housing market. Housing policy should be one of the most important issues in the upcoming race for mayor, and we should ask our elected officials to do more to deal with the high number of evictions in Houston and Texas.

David McClendon of January Advisors helped bring this issue to attention. The main ways in which David thinks we can help our abnormal eviction problem are through policies such as extending rental assistance programs, and adjusting how eviction cases and eviction courts are handled. These are policy positions that can help in the short term, but longer term, we have a larger problem.

Housing policy is one of the issues that takes up most of my mental bandwidth these days because I truly believe it to be a pressing issue in the city that I have grown up in. People often say that Houston has the "best" housing policy of any of the big cities. Unfortunately, that leaves a lot of people in power ignoring the housing problems we do face. We are unique in the way we code our land use and our lack of zoning, that’s true. At the same time, we face the same housing market issues that other big cities face, just in different ways. This latest eviction data just goes to show that. There is a huge chunk of Houstonians being evicted, and we must do something about it in the long term. Houston is a large city, and it seems to only be getting bigger. It’s time to sit down and think about how we allocate our housing resources in and around the city and county.

Houston is not the only city working on this, though. Other cities in the Texas Triangle have had similar problems with evictions as rental assistance has run out in the past few months. We also need to address this issue of skyrocketing evictions statewide.

The number of people being kicked out of their homes in Houston and the rest of Texas is a complicated issue that needs a multifaceted solution. While the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the problem, it is not the only cause of eviction. We need to demand more from our elected officials to address the issue of eviction levels in Houston and Texas. This includes putting in place policies that protect tenants from being kicked out, helping tenants who are having trouble paying rent with money, and making more (affordable) housing available. By working together, we can lower the number of people who are kicked out of their homes and make sure that everyone has safe, affordable housing.

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