CENTRAL TEXAS — Families throughout Central Texas are without a home because of storm damages in their homes.
Renters in several apartment complexes in the Austin area are facing eviction from their apartments or hotels they have been staying in since the winter storm in February. Nonprofits are scrambling to find temporary housing for tenants at Douglas Landing Apartments in Austin and DoubleCreek Apartments in Round Rock.
Housing advocates tell Spectrum News 1 many of the families are minorities, undocumented workers or immigrants who are fearful to speak out.
We also spoke to several tenants at Douglas Landing who were afraid to talk on record because of fear of retribution from property management.
Ella Williams has lived at Douglas Landing for two years. While taking care of her granddaughter, she got a notice on her door from property management. It says that apartments with severe damage cannot be repaired in a reasonable time, so those tenants’ leases will be terminated.
“It’s not very clear on just who it’s specifying,” Williams said.
She says she doesn’t think she will be evicted because no one has notified her.
Her apartment has numerous problems from the storm, but none she considers “severe.”
Back in February, we were with a code inspector from the City of Austin who responded to a report of storm damage in her apartment. Inspector Lamont Howard issued the property owner a notice of violation.
Williams says maintenance fixed two paint bubbles in her ceiling but nothing else and she has damages in her home that haven’t been repaired since the day she moved in.
“To wait for more than a week, you know, two months and longer, is not called for,” she said.
And Williams is one of the lucky ones.
Austin Tenants Council housing advocate Solveij Praxis has been on the phone nonstop working to find shelter for Douglas Landing residents and other tenants who were evicted from hotels or about to be evicted from their apartments.
Praxis says the lawyers working with these families were suddenly told they had to be out of the hotels on Thursday, giving them less than 12 hours to find them a place to stay.
“Overall people are being failed, failed by the city, by the support systems involving the different nonprofits, including us, including the Austin Tenants Council,” Praxis said.
An Austin Code Department spokesperson says there are currently two eviction cases and storm damage related cases at Douglas Landing Apartments.
Praxis says they are working with far more tenants than that, and those are just the people who knew to call Austin Tenants Council.
“Right now hundreds of families are becoming homeless in Central Texas,” Praxis said.
Praxis says properties haven’t been providing people with timelines on repairs and leaving people in limbo, then telling tenants they have to move out, without enough time or support to find alternative housing.
“You know if people had just been given that, all of this could have been prevented, but instead people are in crisis and on the brink of homelessness if not already homeless,” she said.
While Williams is most likely not one of the families at Douglas Landing getting evicted, she says she can’t live in these conditions anymore. We tried to talk to someone at the leasing office, they told us we needed to contact the property owner. We reached out to them and have yet to hear back.
Texas law caters to landlords more than tenants, so technically landlords are not legally required to house tenants displaced by storm damages. Douglas Landing Apartments is a low income property under the jurisdiction of the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs.
A spokesperson with TDHC wrote in an email:
...under the Housing Tax Credit program, evictions or terminations of tenancy are prohibited for anything other than good cause. TDHCA does not determine good cause – that determination is the responsibility of the courts. While TDHCA cannot say how a court would rule in this situation, Texas Property Code Sec. 92.054 establishes that, “If after a casualty loss the rental premises are as a practical matter totally unusable for residential purposes and if the casualty loss is not caused by the negligence or fault of the tenant, a member of the tenant’s family, or a guest or invitee of the tenant, either the landlord or the tenant may terminate the lease by giving written notice to the other any time before repairs are completed. If the lease is terminated, the tenant is entitled only to a pro rata refund of rent from the date the tenant moves out and to a refund of any security deposit otherwise required by law.