Originally published in the 2025 DRC Annual Report
With funding loss doesn’t just come frustration, it comes with real threats and danger for the people whose decisions are made for them. Housing is lost. Safety and stability are lost. Time, effort, and money invested in better futures are wasted. In 2025, DRC Housing Case Managers and 37 of their supported households received news that HUD was defunding their scattered-site housing program at the end of the year. Through no fault of their own, the stability they’ve fought to build was on borrowed time. With proactive collaboration and tenacious problem-solving, did the case managers find solutions before clients would face returning to the streets?
December 2024
DRC Program Manager Victoria Kaelin spent the past year securing stable housing for our most vulnerable clients through HUD. In just a few weeks, she and her fellow DRC Housing team members would learn that the HUD-funded program would be terminated in one year. DRC Housing knows relocation needs to start now!
37 households, due to no fault of their own, need to be transferred to different programs in order to avoid being forced back into homelessness.
January - April 2025
The DRC officially gets notified that HUD has defunded the program. DRC case managers start collaborating with the Tarrant County Continuum of Care lead agency, Partnership Home, to form an action plan to transfer clients to different programs, but with already limited housing inventory, only three are moved by March. During planning, the team is also met with more bad news that an apartment site that houses multiple clients is being permanently shut down in 2026.
May - July 2025
With extremely limited housing voucher opportunities being prioritized for the most vulnerable (ex. disabled, families with small children), it's time to think outside the box. DRC Housing partners with other service providers, like Recovery Resource Council, to host a roommate mixer in an attempt to consolidate clients into established programs. Unfortunately, the clients’ needs are still too widespread to be successfully matched together at this time. Service providers are helpless in waiting for any influx of vouchers. Only four are transferred to other programs.
August 2025
With more than 100 supported households in danger of returning to the streets in Tarrant County, service providers can finally breathe when some limited replacement vouchers start to become available. By the end of the summer, DRC Housing is sweaty and exhausted with more housing vouchers transferred and clients moved-in by DRC Housing case managers themselves! It is also during this time that case managers start to encounter pushback and fear of leaving their established homes from a handful of clients.
30 Households Remaining
September 2025
Move-ins gain momentum as eighteen more households are transferred to alternative programs by the end of the summer. Some clients are able to be rehoused with other service providers. DRC is able to pay move-in and application fees, due in large part to donors, but it still has some obstacles ahead. Some clients have to wait weeks in limbo as emegency client funds deplete. Some pivots are necessary to avoid homelessness as move-ins are stalled.
October - November 2025
DRC Housing is feeling the weight of the year, but they know they cannot slow down. The remaining individuals and families are still hoping to be saved. Some clients, however, meet the stress with denial. Victoria recalls having some extremely hard conversations with clients who couldn’t understand the urgency in needing to be rehoused. Those three households would, most unfortunately, return to the streets because its the only other home they’ve known. Five more households are relocated in time for Thanksgiving.
12 Households Remaining
December 2025
The holiday season slows the business of move-ins, but the DRC has no time left. And now, The Springs lets housing case managers know they are closing immediately, before the announced date. The four remaining clients need to be moved immediately. Only one is able to be moved before Christmas.
On New Year’s Eve, seven additional DRC staff are contacted. There are no days left now. Is it possible for them to help assist housing case managers in relocating the remaining three households? No answers needed, no questions asked. It is all hands on deck. Hands to grab bags. Hands to carry boxes. Hands to comfort pets while more hands sign leases.
When asked about the year, Victoria was optimistic. “With all the barriers we faced, those were great outcomes. We had very few people return to homelessness. [2025] tested everyone’s patience and skills. Clients were afraid of the possibility of returning to homelessness and losing everything they had built.”
“My biggest obstacle was that [clients] come to us when they’re in need, and we help build them back up again. We spent so much time helping them get better. So, to house them and get it taken away affects so much more than them; it affects us and everyone else who worked, and donated, and helped. It’s the [clients’] mental and emotional health, and ours,” Victoria remembers.
By the evening, dirty and tired, staff returned to their homes with the peace that clients were able to do the same. While most of Tarrant County was starting their nights and celebrating a year that turned out for better or worse, DRC Solutions was ending its year successfully.
