HOUSTON – A little more than two months after applications for a pilot program to help low-income households in Harris County opened, people who applied for it will soon learn if they’ve been approved.
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Commissioner Rodney Ellis introduced the $20.5 million investment program called Uplift Harris back in 2023. The idea was to help struggling families through a $500 a month grant to support household needs.
Families were able to begin applying for the program mid-January with the disclosure that applicants must be 18 or older, have a household income at or below 200% of the federal poverty line, and live in one of 10 zip coded areas that include Acres Homes, Sunnyside, and Galena Park.
The Director of the Office of Planning and Innovation at Harris County Public Health, Brandon Maddox, said 82,500 people applied for 1,928 spots.
“Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve conducted the review, verification, and lottery to narrow down to those final 1,928 households,” Maddox said. “Applicants will be notified of their selection through their preferred method of communication.”
Once notified, Maddox said, the participants will have a four-week enrollment period where they either go in-person or online to share with county officials how they want to receive the dollars: direct to their bank accounts or through a reloadable debit card.
“We fully believe these people in Harris County will use the funds for ways that are going to be impactful to them,” Maddox said. “We see a lot of programs that we looked at in determining how to implement our program. For the most part, they spent their fund on housing, on food, rent, utilities, the basic cost of living that we know are increasing year-over-year and becoming harder for individuals to afford. The only restrictions that we have and will be part of the enrollment process, is ensuring the funds are used for legal means.”
The program is the fifth largest publicly funded guaranteed income project in the country. Applicants from 10 targeted ZIP codes will be randomly selected for the program. They can use the monthly payments from Uplift Harris to cover essential needs such as rent, groceries, transportation, housing, utilities, health care and other necessities.
According to the requirements, undocumented residents were ineligible to apply because the program is federally funded through the American Rescue Plan.
“For us, it’s unfortunate that people who live in fully undocumented households are not going to be able to receive this money. We would have liked to see that differently,” executive director of FIEL Houston Cesar Espinosa told KPRC back in January. “We are hopeful there are ways that people can apply that live in mixed-status households. The problem is that there hasn’t been outreach done, at least in this community.”
Judge Hidalgo also added that in the future, she would like to have an all-inclusive program.
HOW WERE PEOPLE SELECTED?
Brandon Maddox, Director of the Office of Planning and Innovation at Harris County Public Health: “Of the 82,500 applications that we received there is a screening system that ensures of those applications those that are eligible move to the lottery. There is a phase one and phase two lottery. Under phase one, it randomly selects around 6.000 people, I think we selected a little bit over to make sure we had 6,000 available in our pool of eligible applicants. But from there, those we call them ‘the lucky 6,000,’ had about a one in three chance of being selected in the final program. The phase two lottery then looks at those 6,000 and selects the final 1,928 to be selected. We do that so that all of the verification process that we make the initial application not as time consuming as it needs to be. For that second phase verification, that’s when individuals went in and uploaded additional verification documents to say they are who they say they are. And then of course, this final step, this final lottery going from 6,000 to 1,928 and into enrollment would be that final enrollment and verification process.”
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Learn more about Uplift Harris by clicking here.