A state law will prohibit homeowners associations from discriminating against tenants using rental vouchers. The practice is more widespread than lawmakers realized.

By Sarah Holder and Kriston Capps

August 31, 2023, 4:25 PM UTC

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When a homeowners association in the suburbs of north Dallas took steps to push out tenants like Evora Sykes who receive government rent assistance, housing advocates and lawyers took notice.

Sykes had relied on a federal housing voucher to afford her home. But after the Providence homeowners association said it would prohibit Section 8 tenants, she and her two kids moved out.

Providence Village, an 8,400-resident town, made headlines because of the local HOA prohibition’s disproportionate impact on Black residents, and has since reversed the policy. But other HOAs in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex have been quietly introducing and maintaining their own bans on renters with Section 8 vouchers, according to a Bloomberg CityLab investigation. The practice has been more widespread than previously known: At least 15 HOAs comprising thousands of homes in the Dallas area have at one point restricted voucher users.

Several of those bans remained in effect when a new law was passed on June 18 to invalidate them. Five of these communities, including Providence, have something else in common, besides their manicured lawns and sapphire swimming pools: They were developed by Huffines Communities. The real estate company was founded by identical twin brothers with deep ties to the Republican Party in Texas — and a history of opposing choice for tenants who receive housing aid.

Under the new law, homeowners associations in Texas will be prohibited from discriminating against tenants based on their source of income. Passed after public reaction to the Providence HOA’s policy, the reform is a rare win for Texas tenants.

After the law goes into effect Sept. 1, finding these policies and making sure they are removed may be quite a challenge. The law doesn't outline any enforcement mechanism. Chris Turner, the Democratic representative who introduced the bill, says he did not know how many HOAs had such bans in place statewide.

Even with these new tenant protections, HOAs whose developers have a long history of effectively advocating for income discrimination are already finding other ways to keep out unwanted renters. Turner acknowledged that the law does not address broader rental restrictions HOAs have applied, and said it was something that he would “look at” in the future.

These practices potentially exclude voucher holders from parts of the metro area where opportunities for upward mobility are greatest. For families with vouchers who moved out or never applied to rent in the first place, the damage of these policies cannot be easily undone; the result is to extend decades-old patterns of segregation into communities that are brand new.

A Huffines Communities development first came under the spotlight for its rental practices in 2018, after a community association for a 1,500-acre master-planned community in Kaufman County, called Heartland, introduced a Section 8 ban. The HOA was promptly sued by civil rights attorneys Laura Beshara and Mike Daniel, on behalf of the nonprofit Inclusive Communities Project.

The housing advocacy organization argued that Heartland’s ban had a disparate impact on Black voucher holders, who made up the majority of current and potential future tenants using housing assistance. Heartland argued that its ban was race-neutral, and a judge dismissed the case on procedural grounds. (In August 2023, Heartland submitted updated leasing rules that did not include a Section 8 ban.)

Undeterred by the legal scrutiny of Heartland, the HOA in Providence Village introduced its own Section 8 ban in June 2022. According to reporting at the time, homeowners in the 2,300-home community, who were mostly White, had started blaming housing-subsidized tenants, who were mostly Black, for local crimes. The HOA board voted to bar landlords from renting to voucher holders, a violation punishable with a $300-a-week fine.

Advocates for affordable housing say this kind of policy has a disproportionate impact on tenants of color, who make up the majority of severely cost-burdened renters nationwide, leading to a form of modern redlining. More than 95% of the heads of households in Providence Village that used housing vouchers in 2022 were Black; across the seven counties served by the housing authority DHA Housing Solutions for North Texas, 87% of tenants using rental assistance are Black and 82% of households are headed by single women — like Sykes, a single Black mother of two.

Beshara and Daniel started filing fair housing complaints on behalf of several Providence Village renters, and in August 2022, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development launched an investigation into the HOA and whether its rental rules discriminated against Black residents.

“They’re achieving with this rule what they could have achieved in earlier days with just a simple ‘no Black tenant’ rule,” Daniel told CityLab last year.

HUD declined to comment on the investigation, which is still ongoing. “We are encouraged by the numerous states and localities that have passed source of income protection laws, and will continue to make renter protections a top priority,” HUD Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public and Indian Housing Richard Monocchio said in a statement.

As HUD worked through the case, Providence was forced to pause enforcement of its rental restrictions. In June 2023 the community officially removed the language banning Section 8 renters from its charter, according to community governing documents filed with the county clerk. And come Sept. 1, bans like it will become unenforceable statewide.

But the impact of last year’s ban lingers. Nearly 50 families using vouchers have moved out or were relocated since last summer, while another 30 families moved in.

All of Beshara and Daniel’s clients chose to move, a tall order for voucher holders anywhere but especially when looking for another “high-opportunity” neighborhood in the suburbs. “Trying to find decent and safe housing in an opportunity neighborhood with resources and schools and available housing for voucher tenants is difficult,” said Beshara. “It’s been a huge challenge for all these families who have had to start over.”

Staying, however, felt even more untenable for tenants who had become the targets of threats, online attacks and increasingly overt racism. For a sense of the climate, Beshara pointed to public comments on the legislation banning source-of-income discrimination at HOAs, where Providence Village residents shared venom-laced complaints about their Section 8-dependent neighbors. Posting under their names on a government forum, residents described the HOA as being overrun with criminals due to HUD’s voucher program and warned that federal housing assistance would destroy their community.

Although the local police chief, Richard Brooks, confirmed that some of the incidents mentioned by commenters had indeed occurred — such as a drive-by shooting and a fire at a park — he said none had taken place since he joined the department over nine months ago, and that the police department does not track the homeownership status of suspects. Violent crime in Providence Village has been low and stayed low for years, he said. “It’s people making connections that aren’t necessarily there.”

One local landlord, Matthew Berke, says that the fear-mongering is more a reflection of racist attitudes toward renters. Berke is the founder of High Opportunity Neighborhood Partners, a real estate company that rents exclusively to Section 8 voucher-holders. HON Partners, which owns around 20 units in Providence, sued the HOA board over its ban. It argued that by interfering with the company’s ability to rent to Section 8 tenants, the HOA caused them economic damage. “What we focus on is racial discrimination that is laundered through a rental ban,” said Berke.

Board members for the Providence HOA declined to be interviewed but provided a statement that confirmed that the rental prohibitions are no longer in effect and that the HOA will comply with Texas state law. The board further stated that the restrictions “never resulted in the eviction of any Section 8 tenants” and were an “effort to combat the unprecedented uptick in egregious crimes in our community committed by Section 8 tenants.” The statement said that reports to HUD went unresolved.

“Our residents urged us to take action and while our mission has always been to remain welcoming to all, we could not sit back while our families were in danger,” reads the Providence HOA statement. “We will continue to fight for our homeowners every day because every resident deserves security and comfort in their home and community.”

The legislation banning source-of-income legislation in HOAs passed with rare bipartisan support, and got a nod of approval from lobbyists for landlords and the real estate industry. Now HOAs will have to adjust their covenants accordingly.

But advocates warn that despite the narrow ban, broader restrictions on rental properties and landlord activity can have the same segregation effect. These rental rules, including caps on the number of properties owners can rent out, are the next frontier for Texas HOAs looking to control their community’s population.

While Providence took out its Section 8 ban this year, it held onto rules that keep out larger landlords, mandating that owners have to live in their home for 24 months before renting it out and can only rent one property at a time. (The HOA declined to respond to a question about the reasoning behind this rule or whether it would have a disproportionate impact on people of color.) At least six other Huffines HOAs had a one-home cap on landlords, including two HOAs that don’t have a known Section 8 ban. (Two described explicit rental zones where the rule didn’t apply.) Three of them also had a year-long wait period before leasing that single home.

Dallas finds itself at the epicenter of this conflict between Texas homeowners and renters in part due to shifts in federal policy. Housing advocates, federal authorities, landlords and tenants have spent years litigating the use of vouchers in the city’s affluent suburbs. Modest victories for tenants and their allies have opened up new opportunities for voucher users, with the potential to ease racial and economic segregation. Those wins have also led to a backlash from some HOAs.

Back in 2009, the Inclusive Communities Project sued HUD over the formula it used to calculate the value of Section 8 vouchers for the Dallas area. As a result of a settlement, HUD adopted a new formula: Authorities used average rents across ZIP codes to set the value of vouchers in the Dallas area in 2011. This change meant voucher holders could theoretically move into higher-rent neighborhoods with better schools, parks and amenities.

This shift also comes amid exceptional growth in Dallas and a flourishing market for rental options. The DFW metro area leads the nation in single-family homes for rent, topping the charts in 2022 for the construction of so-called build-to-rent homes.

“Not only are you seeing more people with vouchers rent in low-poverty neighborhoods, you’re seeing less of them in high-poverty neighborhoods,” says Alicia Mazzara, deputy director for housing equity and data analysis at the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The Dallas housing authority says it has seen a 10% increase in the past year or so in the number of clients moving into single-family homes as opposed to multifamily properties. “That could be [because of] space, it could be families wanting to have their children in high performing schools,” said Brooke Etie, vice president of the Housing Choice Voucher program for DHA, the housing authority.

But another factor has been the entrance of owners and developers like HON Partners, which buy to lease specifically to voucher-holders.

Indeed, homeowners have characterized some of their rental restrictions as an effort to keep out those private investors. In addition to public comments opposing the state discrimination law that explicitly describe voucher-holders as lazy and entitled, several Providence Village residents posted comments that describe landlords as greedy investors who invaded the housing market, driving up property taxes with inflated rental prices.

The Providence HOA board shared in a statement that “existing homeowners are also rightfully concerned about their ability to continue to afford the property taxes for their homes in this community as a result of Section 8 housing being steeply overvalued by investors in order to turn sharp and rapid profits.”

Behind Providence are the Huffines brothers, who represent an emerging Republican political dynasty in Texas politics. Don Huffines, a former Dallas-based state senator, challenged Governor Greg Abbott in the gubernatorial primary and lost in 2022. As a candidate, Huffines pledged to build his own border wall and declare gender-affirming care for minors to be child abuse, positions Abbott later adopted. Huffines also refused to fire a staffer who was reported to be a prominent figure in the White nationalist movement. Phillip Huffines, co-founder and co-owner of Huffines Communities, lost a bid for state senate in 2018 in a record-setting $8.5 million primary campaign but picked up an endorsement from the House Freedom Caucus. The brothers, whose mother used to sew a “P” and “D” on their shirts to help classmates tell them apart, founded their real estate company in 1985.

In the state legislature, Don Huffines has fought for bills that preserve property owners’ ability to refuse tenants paying with government assistance. But what he couldn’t accomplish as a lawmaker, Huffines was able to achieve as a developer. At Providence and several other residential communities built by the company, renters had been unwelcome by covenant for years.

Heartland was the first Huffines development to attract legal scrutiny, and Providence the first to make national waves. Other Huffines HOAs have followed the same playbook. At least five out of nine operating HOAs developed by Huffines Communities, representing more than 6,500 homes (and growing) and spanning thousands of acres, have codified bans against Section 8 renters. One of them is Inspiration, a Huffines development that opened in 2015 with 1,600 homes and advertises private cul-de-sacs, rolling hills and homes within walking distance of local George W. Bush Elementary School — a “perfect escape from the fast-paced city life.” Their rules outline how they plan to keep it that way, with restrictions on basketball hoops, “noxious or offensive activity” — and as recently as 2020, Section 8 renters.

Another Huffines property still under construction, Solterra, established a Section 8 ban in its original community charter, but it did not appear in a 2022 update.

While it’s not clear who initiated all of these Section 8 bans, in several cases, Huffines Communities subsidiaries or Huffines family members themselves approved or submitted documents enshrining these bans into HOA rules.

Neither Phillip nor Don Huffines responded to multiple requests for comment. Huffines Communities did not respond to requests for comment.

HOAs are ubiquitous in Texas, and restrictions on rental properties are widespread in their governing documents, so the Huffines Communities properties are not alone. A review of property records showed that at least 10 other HOAs in Dallas and Tarrant counties have banned Section 8 renters outright in the past, including at least four HOAs in communities developed by Arlington, Texas–based D. R. Horton, the largest homebuilder in the US. (D.R. Horton did not respond to a request for comment.)

However the Huffines HOAs stand out for the developers’ efforts to advance legislation in the state capital to block tenant protections at the local level — before the state took action to protect them instead.

As a state senator, Donald Huffines co-authored a bill to block any local mandates that would require landlords to accept tenants with housing vouchers. Abbott signed that bill into law in 2015. A separate bill drafted by Huffines at the time would have gone further, preventing municipalities from passing any ordinance stricter than state law, overturning an existing Austin law and thwarting a similar Dallas effort to tackle housing discrimination.

“To me, tyranny from your neighbor or from your local government or from a dictator in a foreign country is still tyranny,” Huffines said then, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Meanwhile, Huffines’s more sweeping preemption bill, which did not gain traction at the time, served as a precursor to the so-called Death Star preemption bill signed by Abbott in June and blocked this week by a judge. If implemented, the law would have important ramifications for tenant protections across Texas.

The impact of the state’s HOA legislation will depend in part on how effectively Texas is able to track and enforce against the practice.

“However many there are, I hope they have all stopped by now,” says Turner, the Democratic representative who introduced the bill. “And they certainly need to stop it by September the first.”

A representative for FirstService Residential, the company that manages three of the five HOAs developed by Huffines that have had rules targeting voucher holders, said in an email that “all HOA’s go thru a process to update their documents after legislative sessions and these properties will as well.”

The law’s impact will also depend on where HOA policies go next, and whether homeowners continue to reinforce old barriers. State laws can change, federal regulations can adjust, but the community rules governing HOAs can adapt even quicker.

After leaving Providence Village last year, Sykes moved to a new Dallas-area neighborhood with its own HOA that for now has felt more welcoming. She still pays for part of her rent with a voucher, but she is planning for a future where she won’t have to. For Sykes, the Section 8 program has been a “stepping stone for me to prepare myself for what I truly want. And that is homeownership.”

Graphics by: Marie Patino

Edited by: Nicole Flatow, Rachael Dottle

With assistance by: Eugene Reznik

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