"Rent Relief Delays"

INVESTIGATIVE CATEGORY

WOAI-TV
05/10/2021

The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs bungled the launch of a $1.3 Billion rent relief program while tenants and landlords were struggling to avoid an eviction crisis. The agency would not respond to requests for information and would not do interviews. We were forced to request reports submitted to the legislature to learn how bad the delays were. Our original report and the follow-up story below were written using two such reports we obtained from the oversight committee. Following our initial story Housing and Community Affairs finally began posting information about the fund on its website streamlined the application process. We pressed the agency on specific cases, like that of the landlord in our stories, to finally get relief distributed to several of our viewers. We also tracked the agency's slow improvement in follow-up stories.

LINK to main content online
LINK to follow up story from June 15th, 2021.

Submitted by Jaie Avila.