As Fort Worth’s home affordability hits a ‘crisis,’ here’s how some are living the dream

Amber Sanders looked around her new bathroom and beamed.

“I haven’t had privacy for the last 13 years of my life; I’ve always shared a bathroom with my children,” she explained, unable to hide her giddiness. “This is one of the best parts of the house.”

Sanders, 34, and her two boys moved into their first home Feb. 13. She grew up about a mile south, bouncing between rentals before purchasing the property in Stop Six with the help of the Housing Choice Voucher homeownership program. The federal initiative, finalized in 2000, helps aspiring property owners with below average incomes cover the daunting range of expenses involved with buying and keeping a house.

Housing advocates praise the vouchers as one of the few proven programs keeping the dream of homeownership alive for the city’s least privileged. But what are its potential limits?

To dream and to own

Owning a home seemed a fantasy not too long ago, Sanders said. For an ever-growing number of Fort Worth residents, it still is.

A family earning the median income can no longer afford a median priced home in Fort Worth, according to the city’s 2023 Housing Affordability Strategy. City officials have labeled the collapse in affordability a “crisis.”

The problem is especially acute in the city’s southeast, where property values are spiking even as wealth levels stagnate. The median price of a single family home in the city’s poorest neighborhoods jumped almost 60% between 2016 and 2021.

Public housing advocates view federal homeownership housing choice vouchers as a rare bridge across the gaping affordability gap.

“Programs like this aid in creating pathways to economic independence and breaking generational poverty,” said Deana Boussard, the director of client and customer service for Fort Worth Housing Services, the city’s public housing authority.

The agency began distributing homeownership vouchers in 2003. It has helped 250 families buy homes since, Broussard estimates.

The program’s requirements are specific and stringent. The vouchers are only available to aspiring homeowners who received rental vouchers for at least a year. Prospective purchasers must also be first-time homebuyers with full-time work and at least $2,000 in savings and $16,000 in annual income. Only after completing an exhaustive syllabus of financial literacy courses and securing pre-approval from a lender can the applicant begin looking for homes.

The exact value of the subsidy vary, depending on the applicant’s income, the value of the home (and the corresponding mortgage), and other factors. Housing choice voucher recipients must generally lay out 30% of their monthly adjusted gross income on home expenses.

“The demand for families to utilize the HCV homeownership option has been steadily increasing throughout the years,” Broussard added. “The desire to become homeowners has been fueled by the understanding that homeownership can be a conduit for creating generational wealth and financial freedom.”

The bridge’s gaps

Fort Worth Housing Services is among the quarter of public housing authorities nationwide that offer homeownership vouchers, according to the Urban Institute, a D.C.-based think tank. Fewer than 0.5% of issued housing subsidies are used to support home purchases (most are used to cover rent, not mortgages); by comparison, just over 2% of housing vouchers supplied by Fort Worth Housing Services support homeownership, the second highest rate in Texas and twice the state average.

Experts point to numerous, often intersecting currents limiting the scope and power of homeownership vouchers.

With rental assistance in high demand, many public housing agencies don’t have the cash or staffing capacity to spend on homebuying subsidies, Urban Institute researchers noted.

The researchers observed that homeownership vouchers are less commonly distributed in areas with more expensive rental markets (where low-income households are more likely to need help with rent).

High mortgage rates and pricier homes can also limit the vouchers’ potential.

“Many struggle to receive loan approvals to meet higher purchase prices,” the Urban Institute report added.

Finding the personal and financial footing to pursue a home can be an ordeal of its own.

Sanders, with the help of housing authority case workers, spent years budgeting and tidying her credit before convincing a bank to give her a mortgage. An unexpected medical bill almost derailed the process.

Some rental voucher recipients aren’t even aware they can get help buying a home.

“I never knew that the program offered to help me buy a house until they told me,” Sanders said.

Better advertising could boost the program’s usage, experts predict. But supplemental funding, they stress, could boost its utility.

“Pathways to homeownership for program participants may be hampered by a lack of external funding programs to leverage in addition to vouchers,” the Urban Institute team remarked.

Fort Worth, for its part, runs a separate homebuyers assistance program, offering owners-in-waiting up to $25,000 in funds to cover down payments and closing costs.

With tweaks and time, city officials and their partners hope the homeownership program will expand its impact.

“Nobody ever left me anything, so I wanted to leave something behind for my children,” Sanders reflected.

She isn’t alone.