On Dallas County’s streets, the government’s failure to deliver public benefits is more than abstract policy debate. It’s life-or-death for kids who age out of foster care every week.
Forty-six of these vulnerable young people are homeless right now because they cannot receive the federal housing funds for which they qualify, according to reporting by The Lab Report. Bureaucratic inertia between state and county employees has resulted in this aid being gridlocked in paperwork and communication breakdowns for months. That means the 46 kids are left to sleep in shelters, encampments, or on a friend’s couch instead of living in a safe, stable place paid for by the government.
The Foster Youth to Independence, or FYI, vouchers cover at least 70 percent of each month’s rent for kids exiting foster care who, after attaining housing, can focus on college, job training, or steady employment. They can begin to build credit, establish roots, and form connections in their community.
But without a place to live, their options are limited, and mostly bad. Some resort to returning to a family that the child welfare system previously determined to be unsafe. Others wind up with people who don’t have their best interests at heart. Tonight they might sleep in a co-worker’s car, tomorrow on public transportation, the next—they have no idea.
“These kids are at such risk. It’s very easy for them to be human-trafficked or harmed by predatory individuals,” says Nicole Binkley, CEO of the Transition Resource Action Center, which assists young people moving out of foster care. Despite the risks they face, “time and time again, bureaucratically, getting these vouchers into their hands just has fallen through the cracks,” she says.
Based on about a dozen interviews and reviews of more than 50 documents and emails, here’s why the housing assistance remains unavailable: Since 2024, the work necessary to put the vouchers in play has lurched along with more stops than starts. Officials, staffers, and lawyers have banged their heads against each other only to fall back into the growing bureaucratic quagmire. No one took charge and consistently stayed on top of the process to ensure it crossed the finish line with kids being issued housing vouchers.
For more than a year, Dallas County, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, and Empower, the contractor responsible for foster care case management in nine North Texas counties, traded questions, clarifications, and corrections. Finally, last August, county commissioners unanimously approved the necessary agreement for Empower to receive the vouchers.
Yet today—eight months after the commissioners’ vote—former wards of the state still can’t access the help. Only after The Lab Report began asking questions last month did the bureaucratic gears, which most recently ground to a halt in January, begin to move again.
The bungled startup of the voucher program is the latest foster care breakdown in North Texas. Last month, a Dallas County court approved the state’s request that a third-party receiver be appointed to oversee Empower’s case management after the deaths of two babies and ongoing concerns about the health, safety, and welfare of children under its watch. George Cannata, a Child Protective Services regional director, is supervising Empower’s operations for at least 90 days from the March 18 court order.
No local official is more frustrated about the system’s shortcomings—most recently the inability to get homeless kids housed—than Dallas County Commissioner Andy Sommerman. “Layers of paperwork, redundant approvals, and endless pauses caused by lack of diligence have created delays that these young people simply cannot afford,” he says.
Those on the waiting list include a hard-working youth who landed a good job at a nursing home but often has trouble finding a place to shower, much less to sleep. Another is a young woman shuttling at night between shelters and a friend’s car, yet determined not to miss her community college classes and shifts at a fast-food joint. She tries to stay optimistic that soon she’ll have a permanent home, but some days she’s tempted to give up.
Foster kids’ difficulties securing housing is so pervasive the National Foster Youth Institute has labeled the child welfare system “a highway to homelessness.” An average of one out of every four youth in foster care will be without housing within four years of leaving the system. Forty-seven Dallas County young adults aged out in fiscal year 2025. The Transition Resource Action Center says its records don’t show how many of the 46 on its current housing list left foster care last year, but most of them are between the ages of 20 and 22.
To counter this crisis, the federal government began the FYI voucher initiative in 2019. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development allots up to 50 vouchers annually to each public housing agency in the program. Young people between the ages of 18 and 24 who are homeless or in danger of losing housing are eligible. The vouchers remain in place for at least three years. In some cases, they can be extended another 24 months.
Although Texas has transferred many foster care responsibilities to regional contractors like Empower, the Department of Family and Protective Services still controls the FYI vouchers. In six years, the department has signed up more than 40 public housing agencies across the state to disperse these vouchers, which represents housing assistance for another 2,000 foster kids each year.
While Tarrant County’s housing authority and several other North Texas entities regularly get the assistance into kids’ hands, Dallas County has remained stuck on the state’s “vouchers coming soon” list.
Imagine you are one of those 46 Dallas County kids on the waiting list who have no home to go to tonight. Through no fault of your own, you are deprived of a government benefit that was created to help you—all because adults can’t, or won’t, do their jobs.
“Layers of paperwork, redundant approvals, and endless pauses caused by lack of diligence have created delays that these young people simply cannot afford.”
Dallas county commissioner andy sommerman
“We have young people that are really, really trying,” says Portia Johnson, the resource center’s director of housing and grant compliance. “When you don’t know where you’re going to lay your head and have a level of peace, it really disrupts the other areas like jobs and school.”
Johnson can’t clear the voucher roadblocks, but her team helps with the documentation and paperwork required to get kids on the waiting list. This is one of the many support services the resource center provides for young people between the ages of 18 and 24.
(In Texas, teens usually age out of foster care on their 18th birthday; some are able to stay in the system until they are 21 or 22 by meeting specific education or work requirements.)
After the Texas Legislature voted in 2017 to privatize foster care, the state began transferring case management to regional contractors like Empower. In turn, the Transition Resource Action Center started coordinating with those providers to try to ensure that young people aging out of the system receive after-care services such as housing, job coaching, and mental and physical health referrals. The resource center works with Empower in Region 3E’s nine east-side North Texas counties, including Dallas and Collin. It coordinates with the provider Our Community Our Kids in Tarrant and nine other counties that make up Region 3W.
Empower is responsible for sending the Transition Resource Action Center referrals for all the young people in Region 3E whom it believes will need services. Names should arrive when a teen is 17 and a half years old to ensure the resource center can plan for the youth’s needs, but Binkley says that often doesn’t happen, which leaves the staff scrambling to help kids at the last minute.
Binkley recalled the meeting Sommerman led last June to try to get the housing vouchers circulating. Also at that meeting were representatives from Empower and the state Department of Family and Protective Services as well as Dallas County’s Health and Human Services and its housing agency. “We all walked out of the meeting believing a plan of action was in place that all were on board with,” Binkley says.
Empower responded to The Lab Report’s request for an interview with this statement: “Empower has been at the table and supportive on this subject but is not driving implementation; DFPS [Department of Family and Protective Services] is. Given that, we believe it would be best if you spoke to DFPS regarding the matter.”
Department of Family and Protective Services spokesperson Marissa Gonzales confirmed the department has worked on the voucher program with Dallas County and Empower since 2024. She cited “stops and starts” throughout the process as well as a pause while the state sought guidance from the federal government on whether her department or Empower is the official child welfare agency for this program. The eventual decision was that the state is the lead and Empower is in a secondary role.
Since the commissioners’ vote in August, Gonzales says, a number of changes have been made to the agreement—each time triggering another round of reviews by all parties. According to Sommerman, the changes have ranged from minor items, like revising the contract period from one to two years, to more complex issues, such as the removal of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” language in accordance with executive orders signed by President Donald Trump and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
The most recent communication breakdown came in January, when the Department of Family and Protective Services sent an update to its Dallas County contact without being aware the staffer had been reassigned to another job. It took more than three months for someone to notice. “We discovered this issue recently while meeting with a Dallas County commissioner and moved quickly to get the updated document in front of the right people,” Gonzales wrote in an April 3 email.
Sommerman was more blunt about what happened since county commissioners assumed in August that they had cleared the logjam: Repeated and unnecessary interventions and language changes by lawyers and bureaucrats, followed by the process being dropped with no one willing to pick it back up.
“If we are serious about helping these young Texans succeed, we must confront the reality that bureaucracy is not neutral,” Sommerman says. “In this case, it is a barrier and barriers can be removed.”
He ended with a question: “Do we have the will to do so before more young people fall into darkness?”
All parties now seem eager to respond “yes” to Sommerman’s question. The Department of Family and Protective Services and Empower signed the final document this month and it’s set for approval next Tuesday at commissioners court.
After that vote, the Transition Resource Action Center can connect the unhoused kids on its waiting list to the Dallas County Housing Agency to complete their FYI voucher application and attend a briefing on the program’s requirements. At that point, they receive their vouchers and begin apartment hunting.
For young people navigating adulthood alone, a priceless safety net is close to finally being in place. As Sommerman says, “a voucher delayed is not just a piece of paper held up—it is rent unpaid, a deposit unmet, a safe place out of reach.”
Getting here didn’t need to be this hard.
Sharon Grigsby is the co-founder and senior writer of The Lab Report. sharon@labreportdallas.com.
