Why some Texas cities and counties had to return millions of dollars meant to help renters during the pandemic

Demonstrators gathered outside the Harris County Courthouse in Houston on Aug. 21, 2020, to protest evictions. A new Texas Housers report found that differences in staffing, political support and community outreach impacted how effective cities and counties were in distributing federal funds to assist renters during the pandemic. (Credit: Pu Ying Huang for The Texas Tribune)

In the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, the risk of mass evictions prompted the federal government to appropriate a historic amount of funding to help state and local governments keep low-income renters housed. In two installments, Texas cities and counties received nearly $1 billion for rental assistance, an unprecedented sum.

But much of that money had a deadline by which it needed to be spent. A report released Tuesday by Texas Housers, a housing policy and advocacy group, found that Emergency Rental Assistance programs around the state varied widely in their success at distributing those funds — resulting in more than $30 million of aid lost when the federal government took it back.