Affordable Housing Board to Open 2027 Repair-Grant Rules to Comment

The Texas State Affordable Housing Corporation’s board will meet Nov. 10 and vote on whether to publish draft 2027 rules for the grant fund that pays for home repairs and housing counseling for the state’s poorest residents — the step that opens them to public comment.

The Texas Foundations Fund is small money doing specific work. It goes to nonprofits, not to individuals, and only for households at or below half the local median income. Two things qualify: repairs and accessibility work on owner-occupied homes, and the services that keep people housed — case management, mental health counseling, housing and financial counseling. The 2026 round put $1.25 million into 80 organizations; the program has invested more than $11 million since it began with a single $250,000 pot and five $50,000 awards. A separate track for disaster repairs carries $350,000 this year, capped at $30,000 per organization per disaster.

The draft 2027 guidelines have not been posted, so what they would change is not known. Last year’s cycle is the template: the board approved the draft Nov. 18, published a notice in the Texas Register ten days later, took comment until mid-December, adopted final guidelines in January and opened applications the week after. Staff told the board then that the 2026 draft carried no significant changes from the year before beyond dates, bar one — applicants would sign the grant agreement up front rather than after an award, because handling roughly 80 separate agreements afterward had become unwieldy.

The corporation is an unusual body: a nonprofit created by the Legislature in 1994 and run by five unpaid directors the governor appoints, which says it takes no money from the state budget and funds itself through its lending programs. Those are large. Between May and September it moved $1.40 billion in home loans, most of it through down payment assistance, with the average borrower paying about 6.7 percent. Directors will also take a second look at strategic plans for this fiscal year and next, an item that appeared on the October agenda with no materials attached.

If the board approves Nov. 10, the comment window should open within days. Whether the strategic plans surface in writing this time is the other thing to watch.

Meeting at a glance

Board members

• Lemuel Williams Jr. — chair; Austin; senior director of technology alliances, Atos.
• Valerie Vargas Cardenas — vice chair; San Juan; mortgage banking executive, Texas National Bank.
• David Lewis — Austin; president, Montlake Capital Management.
• David A. Rassin — Houston; general counsel and chief compliance officer, SAExploration.
• Ernest Richards — Dallas; managing director, Cohen Rothschild.

All five seats are filled. Governor Greg Abbott named Williams chair in January 2026 and in the same release appointed Lewis and reappointed Cardenas to terms expiring February 1, 2031. No term end dates are printed here: that release does not say whether Williams was reappointed, and his 2021 appointment ran to February 1, 2027, so the two public records can be read against each other. The corporation’s own site renders the vice chair’s first name as “Valeris”; the governor’s release and the board packet both say Valerie, which is used. The site also says appointments are made with the advice and consent of the Senate, which the statute as published does not state. Composition is set by Government Code §2306.554. Meeting contact: Rebecca DeLeon, (512) 220-1174.