The Houston Housing Crisis Is Not a Headline. It Is Your Kitchen Table.
If you opened this page tonight, you are probably not reading it casually. You are reading it because something in the numbers the Kinder Institute just published looks like your life. Maybe it is the rent increase that arrived in March, the one that pushed you past the line where housing costs more than a third of what comes in. Maybe it is the homeowners insurance renewal that jumped ten percent in twelve months, and you are trying to figure out which bill you will not pay this month to keep the policy active. Maybe you live east of I-69 or south of TX-288, in Third Ward or Fifth Ward or Sunnyside, and the home your family has owned for two generations is now on a list of neighborhoods where Black homeownership fell sixteen percent in a single year. Maybe you came home from work to find an eviction citation taped to your door, and you have five days to answer, and you do not know what an answer is. Maybe you are a parent whose child has been coughing for months in a rental with water damage behind the walls, and you are starting to wonder if the place you are paying for is making your kid sick.
Whatever brought you here, we want to be honest with you before we go any further. Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm — is a personal injury and wrongful death firm. We do not handle eviction defense. We do not represent tenants in landlord-tenant disputes. We do not bring Fair Housing Act cases. If you are facing any of those problems, this page will not be the place that solves them, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can do is tell you exactly what the 2026 Kinder Institute report says, explain what it means for your family, name the specific resources that exist in Houston for people in your situation, and tell you the one narrow but real way the firm’s actual practice intersects with this crisis: when an insurance company treats your homeowners claim the way insurance companies sometimes treat claims, and when a housing condition crosses the line from inconvenience into injury. Both of those are areas we have spent decades handling, and we will explain them clearly. We will also tell you, in plain language, when to call us and when to call someone else.
That is the deal. Now let’s get to what you came here to learn.
What the Kinder Institute’s 2026 State of Housing Report Actually Found
The Kinder Institute for Urban Research, based at Rice University, released the 2026 edition of its State of Housing in Houston report in June. The full report is not a policy pamphlet — it is a data document, built from U.S. Census Bureau figures, Harris County appraisal records, eviction filing data, insurance market reports, and surveys of Houston families. The headline finding is the one you have probably already heard: more than half of Houston renters are now cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than thirty percent of their gross income on housing. The precise figure is fifty-two-point-six percent citywide and fifty-one-point-two percent across Harris County as a whole. To put that in human terms, if you walked into a room with one hundred Houston renters, fifty-two of them would tell you that housing is eating more of their paycheck than the federal government considers affordable.
Cost-burden is not a new problem in Houston, but the report makes clear that the gap has widened sharply. Over the past five years, average rents in the Houston metro have climbed at a rate that has outpaced growth in renter income. The result is that the affordability problem is no longer concentrated only among the lowest-income households; it now stretches into what used to be considered middle-income renting families — nurses, teachers, first responders, administrative workers, service industry employees. When the average two-bedroom rent in Houston has climbed past fourteen hundred dollars a month (per Houston Apartment Association data), a household earning the median renter wage in the region is now spending more than thirty percent of its income just on rent, before utilities, before food, before transportation to work.
The second finding is the one that should make every elected official in this city uncomfortable. Between 2023 and 2024, Black homeownership in the city of Houston fell by sixteen percent. Sixteen percent in a single year. The Kinder Institute researchers were careful to note that this was not uniform across the county: Black homeownership actually grew by more than three thousand households in areas outside the city limits, in places where the housing stock is newer and the institutional investor presence is thinner. Inside the city, the decline was concentrated in a specific geography: neighborhoods east of Interstate 69 (US-59) and Texas State Highway 288. That is the corridor that includes Third Ward, Fifth Ward, Sunnyside, and parts of South Houston — communities that have been majority-Black for most of the last century and that have been on the wrong end of Houston’s disinvestment story since long before the Kinder Institute existed.
The third finding is the one that directly hits the household budget. The cost of homeowners insurance in the Houston region rose by more than ten percent in a single year — a rate that outpaced the actual rise in home values themselves. The researchers linked the increase to a combination of factors: extreme weather risk along the Gulf Coast (every hurricane season is now a reinsurance pricing event), higher construction and repair costs, and the growing frequency of claims filed after storms. For a family paying property taxes, a mortgage, and insurance on a Houston home right now, the insurance line is the one that has moved the most in the shortest time, and it is the one with the least transparency. The carrier tells you the premium went up. The carrier does not tell you, in the renewal letter, exactly which line item in their model changed by how much.
The fourth finding is the one that ties the whole report together. Eviction filings in Harris County remain at a level researchers describe as roughly one filing for every ten households countywide. In 2024, with the post-pandemic emergency rental assistance programs largely wound down, the filing volume returned to the elevated levels that made Harris County one of the highest-eviction jurisdictions in the country. Most of these filings are processed in the Harris County Justice of the Peace courts under Texas Property Code Chapter 24, and the statutory deadlines for a tenant to respond are measured in days, not weeks.
The Geography of the Crisis: Why East of I-69 and South of TX-288
If you have lived in Houston for any length of time, you already know that the Kinder Institute’s geography is not a surprise. The neighborhoods east of I-69 and south of TX-288 — Third Ward, Fifth Ward, Sunnyside, parts of South Houston, the area around Hobby Airport — are the historic heart of Black Houston. They are also the neighborhoods that, for almost a century, have been treated by the mortgage and insurance industries as though they were the riskiest zip codes in the region, even when the actual loss data did not justify the pricing. The HOLC redlining maps from the 1930s literally shaded these neighborhoods red and marked them “D — hazardous,” and the downstream effects of that classification — the denial of FHA-insured mortgages, the refusal of conventional lenders to underwrite, the inflated insurance premiums, the disinvestment in public infrastructure — compounded across generations. The wealth that built white suburbs in West Houston, Memorial, and Meyerland came in significant part from the federally subsidized mortgages that were denied to Black families in Third Ward and Fifth Ward. That wealth gap did not close when redlining was outlawed. It is still widening.
Courtney Johnson Rose, the Principal Broker at George E. Johnson Properties and one of the housing experts quoted in the Kinder Institute’s coverage, named the mechanism plainly:
“Due to the lack of generational wealth in the Black community, there are no parents or grandparents that can help with a down payment, or help you avoid student loan debt.”
That is the single most important sentence in the entire report. It is not a complaint. It is an accounting. When the federal government subsidized white homeownership for thirty years and denied it to Black families for the same thirty years, the resulting wealth gap is what shows up as a sixteen percent decline in Black homeownership in a single year, in 2024, when institutional investors entered the market with cash. The same families who were locked out of the mortgage market in 1960 are now competing for the same homes with private equity funds that can close in fourteen days, all-cash, no inspection. The economic distance between the two buyers is not a mystery. It is the legacy of policy.
And Ms. Rose named the second driver with the same clarity:
“When you look at where that focus of institutional investors is and where they like to buy, we are finding that that is detrimental to Black homeownership in this core city because an average Black homeowner cannot compete with the institutional investor.”
Institutional investors — large private equity firms, real estate investment trusts, and iBuyer platforms — have been systematically purchasing single-family homes in the Third Ward, Fifth Ward, and Sunnyside corridors. They buy in cash. They close fast. They then convert the properties to rental units, which removes them from the homeownership market permanently. Every house that becomes a rental is a house that a would-be first-time Black buyer will never get to purchase. The Kinder Institute data shows this is no longer a theoretical concern; it is the documented mechanism behind the sixteen percent decline.
The Insurance Spike: Why Your Premium Keeps Climbing
The ten percent annual increase in homeowners insurance is, for many Houston families, the most immediately painful part of the report — because unlike the macro-level homeownership data, the insurance number shows up as a direct debit from your bank account every month. There are three forces driving it, and each of them is real even if the carriers will not itemize them in your renewal letter.
The first force is the Gulf Coast itself. Houston sits fifty miles from the Gulf of Mexico, on a flat coastal plain that takes the brunt of every hurricane that makes landfall between Corpus Christi and Lake Charles. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 dropped more than fifty inches of rain on parts of the city. Hurricane Beryl in 2024 knocked out power for more than a million households. Each major storm produces thousands of homeowners claims, and each claim cycle is now factored into the reinsurance pricing that flows down to your local premium. The carriers do not describe it this way in your renewal, but the math is straightforward: the higher the probability that a major storm will hit your zip code in any given year, the more the reinsurer charges the primary carrier, and the more the primary carrier charges you. The result is that Houston-area premiums are now multiples of what they were a decade ago, and the gap is widening every renewal cycle.
The second force is construction cost. After Harvey, the cost of building materials and skilled labor in the Houston region spiked and never fully retreated. The cost of replacing a roof after a storm is materially higher than it was in 2015, and the carriers know it. That is why the same policy you bought five years ago now costs more: the carrier is not necessarily insuring your house for more (unless you have increased the dwelling coverage), but the replacement cost has gone up, and the premium has followed.
The third force is the claim frequency. The carriers price policies based on the probability of a claim being filed, and in a market that has been hit by repeated major weather events, that probability has gone up. Some of the increase is justified by the data. Some of it is the carrier loading premiums to compensate for the cost of doing business in a market where claims are administratively expensive. The consumer has very little ability to tell the difference. What the consumer sees is a renewal that costs ten percent more than the year before, with a letter that does not explain which of the three forces drove the increase.
And here is where the homeowners insurance market stops being a general consumer issue and starts being an issue our firm has spent decades handling. The same insurance playbook that runs through every other line of coverage — auto, commercial, life — runs through homeowners insurance too. The difference is that most homeowners do not know it is a playbook, because they have never had to file a claim before, and they assume the carrier will treat them the way they would treat a neighbor. The carriers do not. We will tell you exactly what they do, and exactly how to respond.
The Insurance Company’s Playbook: What the Adjuster Is Doing Before You Realize a Game Is Being Played
Our associate attorney Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance defense firm before he came to our side. He sat in the rooms where the claims strategy was built. He knows what is about to happen to you not because he read about it in a trade publication, but because he helped design it. Here is the playbook, play by play, and the counter for each one.
Play One: The “Are You Okay?” Recorded-Statement Call. Within forty-eight to seventy-two hours of a major loss, you will get a call from someone with a friendly voice who says they are calling “to check on you and to get a quick recorded statement so we can process your claim.” The adjuster will sound concerned. They will use your first name. They will tell you they are “here to help.” What they are actually doing is creating a recording that can be used to lock in your description of the damage at a moment when you have not yet had a contractor inspect the property, when you do not yet know the full scope of the loss, and when you are still shaken. The recorded statement becomes the baseline. If three weeks later you discover water damage behind the walls that you did not see on day one, the carrier will point to your statement and say you did not mention it. Counter: do not give a recorded statement. Tell the adjuster you will cooperate in writing, that you need time to assess the full scope of the damage, and that you want to consult with a lawyer before any statement is taken. This is your right under Texas law. The carrier cannot deny your claim for refusing a recorded statement, though they will try to make you feel like they can.
Play Two: The Lowball First Offer. Once the adjuster has visited and produced their own estimate, you will receive a written offer that almost always undervalues the actual cost of repair. The estimate is built on the carrier’s preferred pricing database, not on what your contractor will actually charge. The line items are minimized. Items that should be covered (code upgrades, debris removal, temporary living expenses if you are displaced) are often omitted entirely. The offer is designed to be accepted by a homeowner who is overwhelmed, who needs the money now, and who does not know what the actual repair will cost. Counter: do not accept the first offer. Get your own contractor to produce a written, line-item estimate. Document every category of loss separately. If the carrier’s number is less than eighty percent of your contractor’s number, the gap is not a rounding error — it is a strategy.
Play Three: The Documentation Runaround. This is the play that wears people down. The adjuster requests one more form. Then another. Then an additional inspection. Then a conversation with the supervisor. Then a request for the receipts you already sent. Each request resets the clock on payment. Under the Texas Prompt Payment of Claims Act, Tex. Ins. Code Chapter 542, an insurer must accept or reject a claim within fifteen business days of receiving all requested documentation, and must pay the claim within five business days of accepting it. If they miss those deadlines, they face statutory penalties and attorney’s fees. The runaround is designed to push you past the point where you have the energy to invoke Chapter 542. Counter: put every communication in writing. Send a letter confirming every phone call, with the date, the time, and the substance of what was discussed. Keep a log. When the carrier asks for documentation you have already provided, send a copy with a note that says “second request — please confirm receipt.” When the deadline passes without payment, file a complaint with the Texas Department of Insurance and consult with a lawyer about a Chapter 542 bad-faith claim.
Play Four: The Preferred-Vendor Trap. The carrier will offer to put you in touch with one of their “approved” or “preferred” contractors. The framing is helpful — “we have vetted these contractors for you.” The reality is that the preferred vendors have agreed to charge the carrier’s preferred rates, not market rates, and they are incentivized to keep the scope of work small. Counter: you have the right to choose your own contractor. The carrier cannot condition payment on the use of a preferred vendor. If they try, that is a red flag that the claim is going to be fought, and you should consult with a lawyer before taking another step.
These four plays are not unique to homeowners insurance. They are the same plays that run through every line of coverage, which is exactly why Lupe’s defense-side experience matters on the plaintiff side. The firm’s insurance claim practice exists for the moment when the playbook has run and the homeowner has been pushed past the point of being able to fight alone.
When a Housing Problem Becomes a Personal Injury Case
Most of the Kinder Institute report deals with the housing affordability crisis as an economic problem. We want to be honest with you about the smaller but more serious part of the crisis: the moment when a housing condition crosses the line from inconvenience into injury. This is the narrow but real territory where our firm can actually help. If you or a family member has been physically harmed by a condition in the place you live — or the place you lived before you were forced out — the same Texas personal injury law that governs every other injury case governs yours. The deadline is the same, the rules are the same, and the firms that handle these cases are the same.
The categories we see most often in Houston housing cases include the following. Toxic mold exposure in rental properties with chronic water intrusion or storm damage that was not properly remediated — a condition that can produce serious respiratory illness, particularly in children, the elderly, and anyone with a compromised immune system. Lead paint exposure in older rental properties, particularly in properties where a child under six resides and the landlord has failed to disclose or remediate — a condition that can produce permanent neurological damage in children and is subject to a specific federal regulatory framework (HUD/EPA Lead-Based Paint Disclosure Rule, 42 U.S.C. § 4852d). Carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty furnace, water heater, or other fuel-burning appliance in a rental property — a condition that can cause brain damage or death and that often gives rise to a wrongful death claim when it kills. Structural collapse of a balcony, stairway, deck, or ceiling that the landlord knew or should have known was unsafe. Fire caused by faulty electrical wiring or appliances in a rental property. Slip and fall on broken stairs, missing railings, or unmarked hazards that the landlord had notice of and failed to repair. Bedbug infestation that has produced documented physical harm (not merely the presence of the insects, but the bites, infections, and in some cases the toxic exposure to pesticides used in failed eradication attempts).
In each of these scenarios, the legal framework is the same as it would be for any other premises liability case in Texas. The standard is whether the landlord (or property owner, or property manager, or in some cases the entity that performed negligent remediation) knew or should have known of the dangerous condition and failed to take reasonable steps to address it. The damages are the same categories you would see in any other injury case: medical expenses (past and future), lost wages (past and future), pain and suffering, mental anguish, and in the most serious cases, punitive damages where the landlord’s conduct rose to gross negligence. Wrongful death cases add funeral and burial expenses, loss of earning capacity, loss of companionship and society, and — in Texas — survival damages for the decedent’s pre-death pain and suffering.
The deadline is the one we most want you to internalize. In Texas, the personal injury statute of limitations is two years from the date of injury, under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003. That clock starts running on the day the injury occurred, not the day you finally figure out what is making you sick, not the day you get the medical diagnosis, and not the day the landlord finally admits fault. If your child has been coughing for four months in a rental with water damage and you have just learned that the diagnosis is mold-induced asthma, you may feel like the case just began. Under the law, it began on the day of first exposure, and you have two years from that date to file suit. Do not wait. If the deadline passes, your right to seek compensation is gone, and no amount of sympathy from a court will bring it back. The firm’s toxic tort practice exists for exactly these cases.
What a case like this is worth depends entirely on the facts. A documented toxic mold case that produces permanent lung damage in a child will be valued in the millions. A carbon monoxide case that produces a persistent vegetative state will be valued in the seven figures or higher. A slip and fall that produces a broken hip in an elderly tenant will be valued in the high five to low six figures. A bedbug case that produces only temporary bites and no lasting harm may not be worth pursuing at all. The firm’s managing partner Ralph Manginello has spent more than twenty-seven years evaluating these cases against the Texas evidentiary record, and we will tell you honestly whether the case is worth pursuing. The financial value of any case depends on the facts of that case, and past results do not guarantee future outcomes. What we can tell you is that across the firm’s practice areas, we have recovered more than fifty million dollars for Texas families since 1998, and that we handle premises liability and toxic exposure cases on a contingency basis, which means you pay nothing unless we win.
The Eviction Landscape in Harris County: What One in Ten Households Actually Means
If you have been served with an eviction citation in Harris County, you are not alone, and you are not facing a process that is designed to give you time to figure out your next move. Texas Property Code Chapter 24 sets the procedural clock, and the clock is short. Once the citation is served, you generally have five days to file a written answer with the Justice of the Peace court listed on the citation. If you do not file an answer within that window, the landlord can take a default judgment against you, which can lead to a writ of possession and your removal from the property within days after that. The court is not required to give you a second chance, and most JP courts in Harris County process eviction dockets at volume.
What this means in practical terms is that the most important thing you can do after being served is to find legal help within forty-eight hours, not within two weeks. Lone Star Legal Aid (713-652-0077) provides free legal representation to qualifying tenants facing eviction in Harris County. Houston Volunteer Lawyers operates a pro se clinic that can help you prepare your answer even if you are not eligible for full representation. The Houston Bar Association’s Lawyer Referral Service can connect you with a private attorney who handles landlord-tenant matters. The Law Foundation of Harris County, the Texas RioGrande Legal Aid office in Houston, and the University of Houston Law Center’s Civil Clinic are additional resources. The point is that the help exists; the obstacle is reaching it before the five-day deadline runs.
There are defenses to eviction that many tenants do not know they have. If the landlord failed to maintain the property in a habitable condition — no working heat, no running water, mold, pest infestation, structural hazards — Texas Property Code Chapter 92 imposes specific duties on the landlord, and a tenant’s failure to pay rent can, in some circumstances, be excused or reduced by the landlord’s prior breach. If the eviction is based on a non-renewal that the tenant believes is retaliatory for having made a repair request or a code complaint, there may be a defense under Tex. Prop. Code § 92.331. If the landlord failed to follow the proper notice procedures, the case can be dismissed on procedural grounds. These defenses are technical, and they require someone who knows the local JP court practice to raise them effectively. We are not that firm. We are telling you this so you know the defenses exist and so you call the right people to assert them.
Your 72-Hour Playbook: First Steps by Situation
Different problems require different first steps. The list below is not legal advice for your specific case, but it is the framework we would give a family member if they called us at midnight.
If you have been served with an eviction citation in Harris County: Do not ignore it. The five-day clock is real. Call Lone Star Legal Aid at 713-652-0077 or the Houston Volunteer Lawyers pro se clinic as your first call. Do not move out before the court has ruled. Do not give the landlord a written statement or sign anything without reading it. Take photographs of every condition in the unit that may be relevant — damage, repairs needed, anything the landlord promised to fix. Preserve every text, email, and letter from the landlord. Bring all of this to your legal aid appointment.
If your homeowners insurance claim has been denied, delayed, or underpaid: Do not accept the first offer. Do not give a recorded statement. Do not let the carrier rush you into using one of their preferred contractors before you have had your own contractor evaluate the damage. Put every communication with the adjuster in writing, with date, time, and substance. Keep a separate file for the claim. If the carrier misses the deadlines under Tex. Ins. Code Chapter 542, file a complaint with the Texas Department of Insurance (tdi.texas.gov) and consult with a lawyer about a bad-faith claim. This is the area where our firm can help directly.
If you or a family member has been physically injured by a condition in the place you live: Seek medical care first, today. Document the condition with photographs and video before any cleanup or repair. Preserve every communication with the landlord or property manager. Identify any witnesses — neighbors, other tenants, contractors who have visited. Do not sign any release or settlement with the landlord or their insurer without consulting a lawyer. Remember the two-year Texas statute of limitations under § 16.003. Call our firm or another premises liability firm as soon as you are medically stable. We handle these cases on contingency — no fee unless we win.
If you believe you have been discriminated against in housing because of race, disability, familial status, or another protected class: Document everything in writing with dates, names, and what was said. Preserve all advertisements, listings, communications, and applications. File a complaint with HUD within one year of the alleged discrimination (the federal Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. § 3601 et seq., gives you two years to file in federal court, but the HUD administrative complaint must be filed within one year, and HUD refers meritorious complaints to the Department of Justice). Contact the Houston Fair Housing Center (houstonfairhousing.org) for free local assistance. The Supreme Court confirmed in 2015 that disparate-impact claims under the Fair Housing Act are cognizable, so a policy or practice that has a discriminatory effect on a protected class can be challenged even without proof of intent. We are not the firm to bring this case, but the Houston Fair Housing Center and Lone Star Legal Aid are.
If you are trying to buy a home and losing to institutional investors: This is a systemic problem, not a case we can litigate for you. But there are local programs that can help. The City of Houston’s Homebuyer Assistance Program provides down payment and closing cost assistance to qualifying first-time buyers. The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs runs the My First Texas Home program. The Harris County Community Services Department has a similar down payment assistance program. The nonprofit Avenue CDC, the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation, and the Third Ward CDC all run homeownership pathways in the neighborhoods where the Kinder Institute data shows the steepest decline. These programs do not solve the macro problem, but they are real resources for individual families.
Where Houston Families Can Get Real Help
We want to be specific, because vague referrals are not useful when you are facing an actual deadline.
For eviction defense and landlord-tenant disputes, the first call is Lone Star Legal Aid at 713-652-0077. They handle eviction defense, public benefits, housing conditions cases, and consumer issues for low-income Texans. The Houston Volunteer Lawyers pro se clinic helps unrepresented tenants prepare their court filings. The Houston Bar Association’s Lawyer Referral Service can refer you to a private attorney who handles landlord-tenant matters at modest fees.
For housing discrimination, the Houston Fair Housing Center (houstonfairhousing.org) provides free local testing, investigation, and advocacy. They can help you file a HUD complaint, and they can represent you in administrative proceedings. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (hud.gov) accepts Fair Housing Act complaints online or by phone (1-800-669-9777). The Texas Workforce Commission Civil Rights Division handles complaints under the Texas Fair Housing Act.
For insurance disputes, the Texas Department of Insurance (tdi.texas.gov) accepts complaints about claim handling, delays, and unfair settlement practices. Their Consumer Protection Division can be reached at 1-800-252-3439. The TDI cannot represent you in a lawsuit, but a documented TDI complaint strengthens your position in negotiation and in any subsequent bad-faith case.
For homeowners insurance claims that have been denied or underpaid, and for premises liability cases where a housing condition caused injury, that is where our firm enters the picture. Ralph Manginello has spent more than twenty-seven years in Texas courtrooms handling these cases. Lupe Peña brings years of defense-side experience to the plaintiff side, and he is fully fluent in Spanish. We offer free consultations, and we handle these cases on a contingency basis — no fee unless we win. We serve Houston families in English and in Spanish. Hablamos Español.
The Firm: When We Can Help, and When We Cannot
Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC — was founded in Houston in 2001 by Ralph Manginello, a trial lawyer with more than twenty-seven years in courtrooms across Texas. Ralph’s background is unusual: he was a journalism major at the University of Texas at Austin, a former starting point guard on a New England prep school championship basketball team, and inductee into the Cheshire Academy Athletic Hall of Fame, before he went to South Texas College of Law Houston and became a plaintiffs’ trial lawyer. He has tried cases in state and federal court, including federal court in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He has recovered more than fifty million dollars for Texas families since 1998 (firm-stated; past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes). His practice focuses on the cases that happen when someone else’s bad decision takes a piece of your life — truck wrecks, refinery incidents, brain injuries, wrongful death, insurance bad faith, and premises liability.
Lupe Peña is the firm’s associate attorney and the reason the firm can speak credibly about the insurance playbook in this article. Lupe spent years as an attorney inside a national insurance defense firm — the same kind of firm that represents the carriers you are dealing with when your homeowners claim gets denied. He sat in the rooms where the strategy was set, where the reserves were calculated, and where the decision was made to fight your claim rather than pay it. He now fights on the other side. He is a third-generation Texan, a graduate of St. Mary’s University and South Texas College of Law Houston, and he is fully fluent in Spanish. If you call our firm and you speak Spanish, you can work your entire case with Lupe in your language. We are proud of that, and we mention it because it matters.
What we handle: car accidents, eighteen-wheeler and commercial vehicle wrecks, motorcycle crashes, wrongful death, brain injuries, workplace injuries, workers’ compensation claims, refinery and offshore injuries, construction accidents, toxic tort and premises liability, and insurance bad faith claims. The intersection with the housing crisis we have described above is in two places: homeowners insurance claims that have been handled in bad faith, and personal injury cases arising from housing conditions (mold, lead, carbon monoxide, structural collapse, fire, and similar hazards). For those cases, we offer free consultations and contingency fee representation. Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911.
What we do not handle: eviction defense, landlord-tenant disputes, lease review, FHA litigation, real estate transactions, mortgage disputes, or property tax protests. For those matters, we have named the resources above. We will not take your money for a housing case we cannot properly handle, and we will not pretend we are the right firm if we are not.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Kinder Institute’s 2026 State of Housing Report?
The Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University publishes the State of Housing in Houston report annually. The 2026 edition, released in June, documents that fifty-two-point-six percent of Houston renters and fifty-one-point-two percent of Harris County renters are cost-burdened (spending more than thirty percent of income on housing), that Black homeownership in the city of Houston fell sixteen percent between 2023 and 2024, that homeowners insurance costs in the region rose more than ten percent in a single year, and that eviction filings remain at roughly one filing for every ten households countywide.
What does “cost-burdened” actually mean?
The federal standard, used by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, defines cost-burdened as a household spending more than thirty percent of its gross income on housing costs (rent or mortgage payment, plus utilities). Severe cost-burden is defined as spending more than fifty percent. The Kinder Institute report’s fifty-two-point-six percent figure refers to cost-burdened households, not the more severe category. When a household crosses the thirty percent threshold, the remaining income is what has to cover food, transportation, healthcare, childcare, and every other necessity. Most financial planners consider spending more than thirty percent on housing to be a state of strain that leaves no margin for emergencies.
Why is homeowners insurance going up so much in Houston?
Three forces, all real: (1) Gulf Coast hurricane and storm risk, which has increased reinsurance pricing across the region; (2) higher construction and repair costs, particularly for materials and skilled labor in the post-Harvey era; and (3) higher claim frequency, as major weather events have become more common. Carriers combine these factors into a pricing model and pass the result on to consumers in the form of premium increases. The ten percent annual increase cited in the Kinder Institute report is an average; individual policyholders may see higher or lower increases depending on the age and condition of their home, the claims history, and the specific coverage in their policy.
Is Houston’s housing crisis affecting certain neighborhoods more than others?
Yes, and the Kinder Institute report is specific about the geography. The sixteen percent decline in Black homeownership between 2023 and 2024 was concentrated in neighborhoods east of I-69 and south of TX-288, in the Third Ward, Fifth Ward, Sunnyside, and South Houston corridors. The same report also shows that Black homeownership actually grew by more than three thousand households in areas outside the city limits, in neighborhoods where the housing stock is newer and the institutional investor presence is thinner. The disparity is geographic, historical, and policy-driven — the product of decades of disinvestment compounded by the recent entry of institutional buyers into the same neighborhoods.
What should I do if I have been served with an eviction citation in Harris County?
Do not ignore it. Under Texas Property Code Chapter 24, you generally have five days to file a written answer with the Justice of the Peace court named on the citation. If you do not file within that window, the landlord can take a default judgment. Your first call should be to Lone Star Legal Aid at 713-652-0077, which provides free legal representation to qualifying tenants in Harris County. The Houston Volunteer Lawyers pro se clinic can help you prepare your answer even if you do not qualify for full representation. Do not move out before the court has ruled, do not give the landlord a written statement, and preserve every text, email, and notice you have received.
What can I do if my homeowners insurance claim has been denied, delayed, or underpaid?
Do not accept the first offer and do not give a recorded statement without speaking to a lawyer. Put every communication with the adjuster in writing, including the date, time, and substance of any phone call. Get an independent contractor to produce a written estimate of the actual repair cost. Under Tex. Ins. Code Chapter 542 (the Texas Prompt Payment of Claims Act), an insurer must accept or reject a claim within fifteen business days of receiving all requested documentation and must pay within five business days of acceptance. If the carrier misses these deadlines, they face statutory penalties and attorney’s fees. File a complaint with the Texas Department of Insurance at 1-800-252-3439, and consult with a lawyer about a bad-faith claim. Our firm’s insurance claim practice handles these cases on contingency — no fee unless we win.
When does a housing problem become a personal injury case the firm can handle?
When a condition in the place you live causes documented physical injury. The categories we see most often are toxic mold exposure, lead paint exposure in children, carbon monoxide poisoning from faulty appliances, structural collapse of balconies, stairs, or ceilings, fire from electrical faults, and slip and fall on hazards the landlord knew about. The legal standard is whether the landlord or property owner knew or should have known of the dangerous condition and failed to take reasonable steps. Damages can include medical expenses, lost wages, pain and suffering, mental anguish, and in the most serious cases, punitive damages. Wrongful death damages are available where a housing condition has killed a family member.
How long do I have to file a personal injury case in Texas?
Two years from the date of injury, under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003. The clock starts on the date the injury occurred, not the date of diagnosis. If you miss the two-year deadline, your right to seek compensation is permanently lost, and no court has the discretion to extend it. If you are unsure when your claim accrued, call us for a free consultation as soon as possible.
Does the firm handle housing discrimination or eviction cases?
No. Attorney911 is a personal injury and wrongful death firm. We do not handle eviction defense, landlord-tenant disputes, lease review, Fair Housing Act litigation, real estate transactions, or property tax protests. For those matters, we refer Houston families to Lone Star Legal Aid, the Houston Fair Housing Center, the Houston Volunteer Lawyers, and the other resources named in this article. We are telling you this clearly so you do not waste time calling the wrong firm.
What is the firm’s consultation policy and fee structure?
We offer a free consultation, with no obligation. For the personal injury, wrongful death, insurance bad faith, and premises liability cases we handle, we work on a contingency fee basis, which means you pay no attorney’s fee unless we recover for you. Costs of litigation are advanced by the firm and reimbursed from any recovery. The financial value of any case depends on the facts of that case, and past results do not guarantee future outcomes. The firm has recovered more than fifty million dollars for Texas families since 1998 (firm-stated).
Do you serve Houston families in Spanish?
Yes. Hablamos Español. Lupe Peña is fully bilingual, and we can work your entire case in Spanish, from the first phone call through the resolution. This matters because Houston’s housing crisis is concentrated in neighborhoods where Spanish is the primary language, and the families in those neighborhoods are too often failed by legal systems that assume English.
How do I reach the firm?
Call 1-888-ATTY-911, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The consultation is free, and the conversation is confidential. If we are the right firm for your case, we will tell you. If we are not, we will tell you that too, and we will point you toward the resource that is.
A Closing Note: What This Page Is, and What It Is Not
This page is community-awareness content. It reports on a significant piece of public research about Houston’s housing crisis, names the legal resources that exist for families in different kinds of trouble, and explains the one narrow but real place where our firm’s actual practice intersects with the crisis: when an insurance company handles a homeowners claim in bad faith, or when a housing condition causes a physical injury that the law will compensate. It is not case-acquisition marketing. It is not a promise that we will handle your eviction or your FHA complaint. We are not the right firm for those problems, and the right firms are named above.
What we want you to take away is this: the data in the Kinder Institute report is real, the experience it describes is shared by more than half of Houston’s renters and by specific communities in ways that reflect decades of policy choices, and the resources for getting help are real too — but you have to reach them inside the deadlines the law imposes. An eviction citation has a five-day answer window. A homeowners insurance dispute has statutory deadlines under Chapter 542. A personal injury claim has a two-year statute of limitations under § 16.003. None of these clocks pause because you are overwhelmed, grieving, or scared. They run anyway.
If you are facing one of these problems, the first step is to make the call. For housing and eviction issues, that call is to Lone Star Legal Aid. For insurance disputes, it can be to our firm. For an injury caused by a housing condition, it can be to our firm. For everything else, it is to the resource that is built for your situation. We are not the only firm in Houston, and we are not the right firm for every problem. We are the right firm for the cases we have spent decades handling, and we are honest about the rest.
Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911 if we can help. The consultation is free, the conversation is confidential, and the page is here whenever you need it. Hablamos Español.
This page is informational content about the Kinder Institute’s 2026 State of Housing Report and the resources available to Houston families facing housing-related legal issues. It is not legal advice for a specific housing dispute, and Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC — does not provide representation in eviction defense, landlord-tenant matters, Fair Housing Act litigation, or housing discrimination cases. For those matters, consult a legal aid organization or a private attorney who handles housing law. For insurance bad faith and premises liability cases arising from housing conditions, we offer free consultations and contingency fee representation. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.