Juan Pablo Garnham

In the state’s largest metropolitan areas, vaccine distribution centers like hospitals and pharmacies are more common in white, affluent neighborhoods.

Published in The Texas Tribune with Mandi Cai.

COVID-19 has been disproportionately deadly for communities of color in Texas. And advocates for those communities are worried that they will have more trouble accessing vaccinations than the white population because of where vaccination sites are located.

“We already saw huge disparities in death rates and people getting [coronavirus] infections, and there wasn’t availability of resources like health care for brown and Black communities suffering tremendously,” said Kazique Prince, interim executive director for the Central Texas Collective for Racial Equity, a nonprofit association based in Austin. “I’m very nervous and anxious that this [vaccination effort] is not going to work out for us.”

According to the Texas Department of State Health Services data, more than half of the fatalities in Texas due to COVID-19 have been Hispanic individuals and almost 10% have been Black people. Yet the state’s designated vaccination sites — mostly hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and pharmacies — are concentrated in more affluent areas where those facilities tend to be located.

In Travis County, for example, 88 sites have been designated to administer vaccines, and roughly three quarters are in majority non-Hispanic white census tracts. And in Dallas, the southern part of the city — where people of color predominate — has fewer distribution centers than the north, which tends to be more white and affluent. Out of 140 distribution sites in Dallas County only 10 are located in majority Black census tracts while 37 are in majority Hispanic census tracts.

For the full article, visit The Texas Tribune.

In a letter to the Japanese prime minister, Gov. Greg Abbott said that the company had all the permits needed, but later he had to backtrack. Legislators are expected to file bills to regulate high-speed rail projects during their next session.

Published originally in The Texas Tribune

DALLAS — Less than two months before the Texas Legislature begins its next session, the yearslong battle over a controversial high-speed rail project is expected to spark more legislative skirmishes.

And after years of public skepticism, Gov. Greg Abbott recently signaled his support for the project in a letter to Japan’s prime minister, although his spokesperson later said that Abbott’s office will “re-evaluate this matter.”

Last month, Abbott sent a letter to Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga saying: “This venture has my full support as Governor of Texas, and I am hopeful that final negotiations of this project with Japan can be concluded so that construction can begin. Public support and momentum are on our side, and this project can be completed swiftly.”

The Oct. 2 letter also included a significant error. Abbott told Suga that the company developing the high-speed rail line had “all the necessary permits to begin construction.”

The Texas Tribune found that Texas Central, the Dallas- and Houston-based company in charge of the project, is far from receiving all permits needed to build the 240-mile line, which would stretch from Dallas to Houston and cost around $20 billion, according to the company. When contacted by the Tribune with this information, Abbott’s office said it would review the matter.

“From the beginning of this project, the Governor made clear that he could support this project if, and only if, the private property rights of Texans are fully respected,” Abbott spokesman John Wittman told the Tribune on Oct. 7.

“The Governor’s team has learned that the information it was provided was incomplete. As a result, the Governor’s Office will re-evaluate this matter after gathering additional information from all affected parties,” Wittman added.

Read the full article in The Texas Tribune.

Many Southeast Texans were already struggling through a pandemic and its parallel recession. Then came Hurricane Laura and officials’ evacuation orders.

Published originally in The Texas Tribune

After fleeing her home in Vidor to escape a dangerous hurricane, Susan Collier sat in a hot camper trailer in Killeen on Friday with $4 to her name. Her family’s 2004 Lincoln Aviator sat outside with almost no gas.

Money has been tight for Collier, her two kids and her partner since the coronavirus pandemic’s economic wallop took away her job. But after Hurricane Laura struck the Gulf Coast as a deadly Category 4 storm, she was even more desperate. She missed her home 280 miles away, was sweating in 100-degree weather, and had just lunch meat and bread to feed her children.

“We evacuated on a tank of gas and $50 dollars. Now we have no money,” the 44-year-old said Friday. “Right now I don’t even know how I’m going to go home, how I’m going to feed my kids.”

For many of the thousands of Texans who had to evacuate, Hurricane Laura added another tenuous layer to lives that have already been disrupted by a pandemic and its parallel recession. According to the Texas Workforce Commission, the number of people who have filed for unemployment in Orange County, where Collier lives, has almost quintupled since the pandemic began, compared with the same period last year.

Collier, like many others, had relied on unemployment benefits and a support network of family and friends to find jobs or borrow money. But as the pandemic has worn on, those friends and relatives were also feeling the effects of a prolonged financial crisis as evacuation orders were issued.

“There’s a segment of each community that lives in survival mode, paycheck to paycheck, and they are the ones most impacted from a crisis like this,” said Janie Johnson, CEO of United Way of Mid & South Jefferson County. “If their car has a problem or they have a flu and have to be off work for a week, they go from survival mode to financial devastation. And it takes more of them to get back on their feet.”

Collier lost her job as a home nurse in April, and her partner, Donald Bass, hasn’t been able to get a lot of work as a carpenter since March. She used to get $600 a week in extra unemployment benefits that Congress approved during the pandemic, which she used for paying bills. But those funds expired, and Collier is among the Texans who didn’t make enough money to qualify for a new $300 weekly additional payment meant to partially replace the original $600.

For the full article, visit The Texas Tribune.

Since Sept. 17, court citations include information on how to apply for protections. But some eviction cases had already begun. And the moratorium will only delay proceedings for some renters.

Published originally in The Texas Tribune.

Photo by Shelby Knowles for The Texas Tribune

At her eviction trial conducted via video conference on Sept. 23, Amanda Murray asked Tarrant County Justice of the Peace Ralph Swearingin Jr. for more time to give her landlord more than $4,000 in back rent.

Murray had just found a job as a medical assistant and thought she could maybe get the money before the beginning of October.

“Is that an option? I don’t know,” the North Richland Hills resident said, hesitating. “I’m just, I’m at a loss.”

Swearingin pointed her toward rental assistance programs and suggested that she could negotiate a deal with her landlord after he issued his ruling. What the judge didn’t tell Murray was that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had recently issued a nationwide moratorium on evictions for many Americans through Dec. 31.

At the end of Murray’s hearing — one of more than 60 that were scheduled in Tarrant County that day — Swearingin ruled in favor of her landlord and gave her one week to move out.

The information about the moratorium was on his court’s website. But Swearingin said in an interview after the hearing that the details on how to proceed during a hearing weren’t initially clear. The CDC order didn’t include a requirement to inform tenants about it. The judge also explained that the state’s code of judicial conduct limits how much information he’s allowed to give people with cases before him.

“It gets to a point where you could make an argument that you’re advocating for one party or another,” he said.

The order was announced Sept. 4. But for two weeks after, justices of the peace applied it in a range of ways, according to housing advocates who have been monitoring evictions and The Texas Tribune’s observations of hearings. Some justices of the peace explained in detail that tenants could be protected. But others, like Swearingin, didn’t mention it during the earlier hearings, although he says he is doing it now.

For the full article, visit The Texas Tribune.

Since Gov. Greg Abbott declared a public health disaster in March, almost one-third of Harris County’s evictions have been filed in the justice of the peace precinct covering the southwestern portion of the county.

Published originally in The Texas Tribune

Photo by Pu Ying Huang for The Texas Tribune

Hilda Ramírez says she’s never missed paying rent. Even when the pandemic started and she couldn’t work for two months in the kitchen of a Houston restaurant, she managed to cobble together enough money from her siblings to pay for her two-bedroom apartment in Gulfton.

But two months ago, as Texas steered into a recession and the pandemic continued raging, Ramírez’s siblings also started having financial problems and couldn’t help her out. That’s when she started falling behind.

Last week, Ramírez got a letter from the management company telling her that she owed more than $2,000, including late fees, and that she had to leave. On Thursday, staff from the building came to her apartment.

“The manager came saying that I needed to get my stuff out because I haven’t paid rent,” the mother of four girls said in Spanish. “To be honest, I don’t have anywhere to go.”

And Ramírez is far from alone.

Since Gov. Greg Abbott declared a public health disaster in March, landlords have filed more than 2,600 evictions in the Harris County justice of the peace precinct that takes cases from Gulfton and the southwestern portion of the county, according to data from the consulting firm January Advisors. That’s almost one-third of all evictions filed in the county since the pandemic began.

The two justices of the peace for Harris’ Precinct 5, unlike some of their counterparts elsewhere in the county, resumed eviction proceedings in mid-May as soon as they were allowed.

For the full article, visit The Texas Tribune.

Without money to pay rent, facing pressures from landlords and afraid of courts, people without legal immigration status have limited options.

Written with  Meena Venkataramanan for The Texas Tribune.

Photo by Pu Ying Huang for The Texas Tribune.

The coronavirus pandemic pushed María and her family from a small two-bedroom apartment in southeast Houston into homelessness in less than a month. Her boss cut her hours in a clothing warehouse in mid-March as business slowed. Without enough money to pay rent, she packed her belongings and found another place to live even though there was a statewide moratorium on evictions.

“When I couldn’t find how to pay, I just had to leave,” said María, 47, who is an undocumented immigrant. “I didn’t want to be in debt, and I couldn’t go to court.”

María asked that she be identified by a pseudonym out of fear that immigration authorities could seek to deport her.

On paper, an undocumented tenant has the same rights as anyone else during the eviction process. But housing attorneys and tenant and immigration advocates say undocumented immigrants are frequently hesitant to exercise those options. Their fear of the legal system and lack of access to government-funded financial help prompt many to self-evict, or prematurely leave the property. And as a result, many turn to a network of nonprofits and religious organizations accustomed to helping vulnerable people who keep the Texas economy humming. But those groups say their ability to assist is being stressed by the many people who were swiftly left without work due to the coronavirus pandemic’s economic wallop.

Zoe Middleton is the Houston and Southeast Texas co-director at Texas Housers, an affordable-housing advocacy group. She said that because Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are allowed in courthouses, undocumented renters avoid going inside these buildings out of fear of being deported. There have been cases in Texas in which undocumented immigrants were arrested in courthouses while appearing for cases unrelated to immigration.

“I think the fear that concerns most of the undocumented tenants that I’ve spoken to is that somehow the [eviction judges] will collude with ICE or that their documentation status will be used against them by their landlord even if they try to remain on the property,” she said. “So they choose to leave the property so they don’t risk detention and deportation.”

Many renters in Texas found temporary relief in eviction moratoriums, federal pandemic relief payments, unemployment checks and rental assistance programs. Undocumented migrants, though, either don’t qualify for such aid or are afraid that merely seeking it will alert immigration authorities to their presence in a country whose president has called some immigrants “animals,” makes racist remarks and consistently tries to create barriers for migrants.

In many of Texas’ largest counties, evictions in June were lower than they were for the same month last year. In Harris County, where María lives, eviction filings were down about 67%. Local moratoriums, rent assistance programs and other government aid have helped renters stay afloat for the time being. Still, housing advocates forecast a historical increase in evictions statewide due to the unprecedented unemployment COVID-19 swiftly spurred.

For the full article, visit The Texas Tribune.

The Golinelli family is among many Texas households navigating working in a pandemic while trying to keep high-risk older relatives safe from the coronavirus.

Published originally in The Texas Tribune.

Photo by Leslie Boorhem-Stephenson for The Texas Tribune.

The moment Alexander Golinelli calls every evening to say he’s almost home, his wife, Claudia Golinelli, springs into action.

She brings a clean T-shirt, a clean pair of shorts and flip-flops to the garage for her husband, whose work as an electrician potentially exposes him to the coronavirus while he’s in people’s homes and businesses. Alexander Golinelli parks his car, changes into clean clothes, leaves his dirty work shirt and jeans in the garage, and goes straight to the shower.

It’s a carefully crafted routine, designed to keep everyone in their home from getting sick — especially Claudia Golinelli’s 82-year-old mother, Luz de María González, who has Alzheimer’s disease.

“We try to take care of each other,” said Claudia Golinelli, a Salvadoran who’s lived for 16 years in the United States and in Garland since 2006. “We avoid coming into the house with shoes. Outside I have a bucket with a mix of chlorine, vinegar and water. Everyone that comes in needs to spray themselves.”

Having multiple generations of one family in a single household has long brought financial benefits to low-income Texans who can save money on rent, utilities, and child and elderly care. But during the COVID-19 crisis, it is also a challenge: At-risk seniors have to share common spaces with relatives who are essential workers needing income to pay the bills and kids who have been home-schooled for more than two months.

“Brown and black folks tend to live in intergenerational households. So young people get infected, they seem to be OK, but grandparents in that household won’t be as lucky,” said immunologist James Hildreth, from the Meharry Medical College, to The Wall Street Journal.

For the full article, visit The Texas Tribune.

Before the pandemic, mom-and-pop stores at the Latino-oriented mall La Gran Plaza, in Fort Worth, saw crowds of thousands every day. Now, tenants are worried about evictions and not making ends meet.

Published originally at The Texas Tribune

Photo by Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune

FORT WORTH — As Texas restaurants and retail stores began welcoming customers back through their doors last week, a few dozen people walking the hallways of this city’s normally bustling La Gran Plaza shopping mall passed reopened stores whose windows featured quinceañera dresses, Mexican ranchero boots and cellphones. Signs on the food court tables banned sitting. Only five or six restaurants were open.

In the center of the 1.2 million-square-foot mall, a stage where mariachi bands normally perform remained empty. A light blue neon sign overlooking the atrium asked, “Are we having fun yet?” as speakers blasted salsa, rancheras and Latin pop. No one was dancing.

A few storefronts away from a movie theater that sat dark, a padlock hung from the door handles of Maricruz Ávila’s sporting goods store, Pasion Deportes. The soccer jerseys, Mexican hats, sneakers and colorful Mexican dresses in her store’s windows hardly got any looks from shoppers.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic effectively ground Texas’ economy to a monthlong halt, Ávila was struggling to pay her rent and other fees on time. By the start of May, she owed $5,000 for rent, late fees, maintenance and insurance. The $1,400 she gave her landlord in April wasn’t enough to gain access to her store in time for Gov. Greg Abbott’s reopening of the state economy so she could begin earning money to pay back the debts and afford upcoming payments.

“I was already in a really bad economic situation,” she said. “I’m a single mother, I don’t have anyone to support me, I don’t have any work, and they still locked me out.”

For the full article, visit The Texas Tribune.

Hundreds of people walked the streets of Dallas on Thursday to count how many homeless residents live in the area. Similar counts are planned in other cities this month. The results will be key to finding solutions for vulnerable Texans.

Published originally at The Texas Tribune

Photo by Leslie Boorhem-Stephenson for The Texas Tribune

DALLAS — Just after 9 p.m. Thursday night in a muddy, undeveloped lot blocks from downtown Dallas’ interchange of Interstates 30 and 45, Kris Oliver kneeled in front of a half-opened tent.

He could barely see the faces of two people inside. With a calm and cautious voice, he started asking a long list of questions that he read from his cellphone.

“How many of you are there? … Have you been interviewed already? … Are you a female? … Tell me your birthday. … Are you a veteran? … What’s your race? … Have you ever been in foster care?” he said, getting mostly mumbled and monosyllabic answers.

As one of the hundreds of volunteers carrying out the area’s annual homeless census Thursday night, Oliver asked strangers sleeping outside several questions that touched on intimate topics like mental health, consumption of alcohol or drugs, domestic violence and HIV status.

“It feels a little awkward to get through the questions. Some are really personal,” said Oliver, the chief financial officer of the social service organization CitySquare. “They are important to understand their situation, but at the same time, we want to respect their privacy.”

It was one of many challenges he and other volunteers experienced Thursday. But the answers they got are key to understanding the impact — and causes — of homelessness in Dallas. The Point In Time Count, as it is called, is mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and is conducted across the country each January. Volunteers in Fort Worth and San Antonio also fanned out across those regions to conduct similar counts Thursday. Austin volunteers will do the same Saturday. The Houston area’s count will be next week.

For the full article, visit The Texas Tribune.

The city already has some of the worst poverty and segregation rates in the country. Now increasing rents are leaving low-income households struggling to keep up with the cost of living.

Published originally in The Texas Tribune

Photo by Robin Jerstad for The Texas Tribune

In the 40-minute bus ride across San Antonio that Barbie Hammond takes to work, there’s one topic of conversation that keeps coming up: the cost of rent.

“A lady that I talk to on the bus told me she had to move because of the rent increases,” the 57-year-old said. “And I told her, ‘Well, when Christmastime came, I got a note saying that the next month there will be a $60 increase in my apartment.’”

Hammond isn’t alone. According to census data compiled by the company Apartment List, between 2008 and 2018, median rents increased from $860 to $1,002 in the San Antonio area. That 16.5% jump was more than the increase in the New York City region and almost the same as in the Los Angeles area.

Similar increases happened in the Dallas (18.7%) and Houston (16.1%) regions, but there’s something that makes the San Antonio area unique: While rents have been growing, wages have stagnated. Renters’ median incomes grew from $35,718 to $36,959 during the same period. That 3.5% increase was a third of the percentage growth seen in the Houston area and a fourth of the growth in the Dallas region. Those rent and wage figures were all adjusted for inflation.

The situation has people like Hammond, who is a certified assistant nurse, living paycheck to paycheck.

“I haven’t seen a pay increase in … I can’t even remember,” Hammond said. “Most of the jobs here are not gonna pay me more. San Antonio needs to catch up.”

Historically, rents in the United States grew hand-in-hand with wages. But after the Great Recession, housing prices started outpacing income. In Texas, the state’s continued population growth has created more demand for housing, which has raised prices. And in San Antonio, a city with some of the worst poverty and segregation rates in the country, low-income households are having trouble keeping up with the cost of living.

For the full article, visit The Texas Tribune.