Housing Shortage in West Texas Means Critical Workers, Including CPS Caseworkers, Have no Place to Live
Share News:
While the city tries hard to keep up with the influx of new residents with new water towers, housing is still a tight market it Midland.
This report from the Texas Tribune tells a scary tale for troubled children and teens in the fast-growing areas of Midland-Odessa. It’s impossible to find housing in the oil-boom areas of West Texas, which means that critical workers, including state Child Protective Services caseworkers, have no place to live.
This has resulted in a necessary transciency for some staffers of the over-taxed CPS offices that oversee Midland and Odessa, which may mean that some cases and some children who are victims of abuse are slipping through the cracks:
Midland had the nation’s highest increase in median home value after the recession, according to a NerdWallet study last month that examined census data from 2009 to 2012 for 510 cities. The median home price in the Midland metro area last month was $283,100 — the highest in Texas, according to the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University.
“It is an overwhelming problem,” said John Specia, the family and protective services commissioner. “The rents have tripled or more. We have a number of people who want to transfer to other areas because it’s like getting an immediate boost in pay.”
The department has tried to fill vacancies by temporarily sending workers from elsewhere in the state to the Midland and Odessa area; offering new caseworkers $5,000 signing bonuses, a practice since discontinued; and giving all 153 workers in the area $500-a-month housing supplements. A typical rate for a one-bedroom apartment in Midland is $1,100 a month, Mayor Jerry Morales said recently.
With the housing supplement, Pacheco’s annual pay is about $49,000.
But Specia said the housing supplements had not “stemmed the tide” of workers leaving. Because of the nature of the work — the agency has 24 hours to investigate urgent reports that a child faces harm — “we don’t have the luxury of teleworking,” he said.
This definitely puts a face on the shortfall of available housing in the oil-rich areas of West Texas, which we hear about often but don’t really see the effects. I don’t really see a short-term fix for this problem, though. Read the whole piece on the Texas Tribune, which paints a very bleak picture.
2 Comments
Leave a Comment
My son is a welder in Odessa and he was living in a squalid trailer parked in the dirt outside city limits, because there was nothing available to rent. Even the crummy hotels are full of energy company employees.
When I showed up with a U-Haul to help him move to Lubbock I wanted to cry seeing how horrible his living conditions were. The trailer was a shamble parked in the dirt with tumble weeds, snakes and spiders everywhere. There were holes in the walls and the plumbing was broken. You drove past a cattle gate and weaved around the tumble weeds, no road, just driving in the dirt. His trailer was across a road from a truck repair shop that had oilfield trucks coming and going around the clock. Anywhere else, and this place would have been condemned by the city as uninhabitable. That piece of shit trailer was costing him $1,700 per month. My son was working to pay outrageous rent and decided he had enough. You know if there was a shortage of bottled water in Houston due to a hurricane, and if any retailer dared to jack the price up 10 cents, the district attorney and state attorney generals office would come after them for price gouging. Well its no different in the Permian basin; except it’s a slow moving economic hurricane and the landlords and local towns people are ripping off the workers and nobody cares. It just supply and demand. Where is the city and district attorney’s office? Where is the state on this? I am glad my son got out of there.
That is absolutely heartbreaking, Michael. I’m so sorry your son had to deal with this. It’s so crazy that we have the technology and know-how to build huge tent cities on military bases in the Middle East, but we aren’t applying that here in West Texas, where we really need safe, affordable housing.