The need in Hood County and North Texas
The national numbers and the Texas numbers are not abstractions. They land here, in the county Mercy Manor calls home — a county that looks comfortable on a map and carries real, well-documented need underneath. Here is what the data shows, sourced and dated throughout.
Hood County at a glance
70,501
residents as of the 2025 estimate — up 14.5% since 2020, one of the faster-growing counties in North Texas. U.S. Census QuickFacts, 2025
45.4 / 51.1%
median age — older than the Texas median of 35.9 — and the share of residents who are female. U.S. Census ACS (Table B01002)
$88,160
median household income (2020–2024 ACS) — above both the Texas and U.S. medians. U.S. Census QuickFacts
The need behind an affluent county
An $88,160 median household income puts Hood County above both the Texas and U.S. medians. That number is real, and it is also exactly why the need here is easy to miss — a comfortable county average can sit directly on top of real, concentrated pockets of poverty, illness, and crisis that never show up until someone looks for them.
Poverty, measured two ways
8.0% of Hood County residents live in poverty, per the Census Bureau's Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates. A separate one-year American Community Survey estimate puts it at 6.2%, with a margin of error of ±2.2 points — a spread typical of a county this size, and a reminder to read any single county-level figure as directional rather than precise. (U.S. Census QuickFacts, 2025)
The uninsured
16.2% of Hood County residents under 65 have no health insurance at all. (U.S. Census QuickFacts, 2025) For a woman trying to get into treatment or mental-health care, that number is often the first wall she hits, well before distance or availability ever come into it.
Behavioral health
Among Hood County adults, 16% report frequent mental distress and 22% report having been diagnosed with depression. (CDC PLACES, 2024 data, via Texas Health Resources 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment) Those are county residents living ordinary lives alongside everyone else — not a separate population, just an undercounted one.
The access gap
Need is one thing. Somewhere to take it is another. In Hood County, the second one is nearly missing.
One shelter for the whole county
Mission Granbury's Ada Carey Family Violence Shelter is the only domestic-violence shelter serving Hood County — sheltering about 12 people per night. (Mission Granbury, via findhelp.org) That is the entire local capacity for a county of over 70,000 people. When it is full, or when what a woman needs is not shelter for a night but a year of structured recovery, there is nowhere else in the county to send her.
No detox, no residential recovery — anywhere here
There is no detox facility and no residential substance-treatment program located in Hood County. A woman who needs to withdraw safely, or who needs the kind of sustained residential program Mercy Manor is being built to provide, has to leave the county to find either one. The nearest cluster of options sits roughly 30–40 miles away — about a 45-minute drive — in the Fort Worth–Arlington metro, based on SAMHSA-indexed treatment-facility directories. For a woman without a reliable car, without gas money, or without someone to watch her children for the length of that trip, "somewhere else" can mean nowhere at all.
This is exactly the gap Mercy Manor is being built to fill: a residential recovery home located inside the county, not a referral to one thirty or forty miles away.
Undercounted by design
Hood County has no homeless count of its own. It falls inside the 215-county Texas Balance of State Continuum of Care, a region so large that a single point-in-time count stands in for hundreds of counties at once. That regional count found 10,081 people homeless in January 2024, 63% of them unsheltered — a pattern consistent with rural homelessness that hides easily inside numbers this size. (Texas Homeless Network, 2024) Combine that with the wide margins on county-level survey data noted above, and the honest conclusion is not that Hood County's need is small — it's that small counties are simply harder to see. We treat every county-level figure on this page as directional for that reason, and we say so rather than round the uncertainty away.
North Texas regional context
Hood County sits inside a wider North Texas region carrying its own documented burdens — the same region Mercy Manor expects to draw women from, and refer women back into, for services it cannot provide itself.
- Parker County, Hood's immediate neighbor, recorded one of the highest drug-poisoning death rates in North Texas in 2022 — 18.6 per 100,000 — as the broader regional rate climbed from 9.5 to 16.1 per 100,000 between 2019 and 2022. (Texas Health Resources 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment)
- Texas posted a 17.6% food-insecurity rate in 2023, and the Dallas–Fort Worth metro ranks 3rd among U.S. metro areas for the sheer size of its food-insecure population. (Feeding America 2025, via North Texas Food Bank)
- 161 Texans were killed by an intimate partner in 2024. (Texas Council on Family Violence, Honoring Texas Victims 2024)
None of these figures are unique to Hood County — they describe the region it sits inside. That is precisely why a woman's zip code should not determine whether she can find a year of structured recovery within driving distance of the life she is trying to rebuild.
A Hood County ministry, for a Hood County need
Mercy Manor was not founded to serve an abstraction called "North Texas." It was founded in this county, by people who live here, to answer a need that the numbers above show is real, local, and currently unmet by anything else inside the county line. One shelter with 12 beds and zero detox or residential-recovery facilities is not a gap that closes on its own.
A year of that recovery costs roughly $6,000 per woman — about $500 a month. For a woman who would otherwise be driving past the county line to find a bed that may not exist, that gift is often the difference between a place to rebuild and nowhere at all.
Meet the need in our own county
Our county, in full
The distance problem
Nowhere to go
The full picture
Why a year
Every figure, sourced
- U.S. Census Bureau. QuickFacts: Hood County, Texas. Population, growth, age, sex, income, poverty (SAIPE and ACS), and uninsured-rate figures. 2025 vintage / 2020–2024 ACS. census.gov
- Texas Health Resources. 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment. CDC PLACES behavioral-health data (2024) for Hood County; Parker County and regional drug-poisoning death rates. texashealth.org
- Mission Granbury. Ada Carey Family Violence Shelter. missiongranbury.org
- Texas Homeless Network. Unveiling the 2024 PIT Count: What We Learned About Homelessness Across the TX BoS CoC. 2024. thn.org
- SAMHSA-indexed substance-use treatment facility directories — used to establish that no detox or residential program is located in Hood County, and to estimate distance to the nearest cluster in the Fort Worth–Arlington metro. Distance stated as approximate.
- North Texas Food Bank, citing Feeding America. Texas Leads the Nation in Hunger; DFW Ranks Third Among U.S. Metro Areas. 2025. ntfb.org
- Texas Council on Family Violence. Honoring Texas Victims 2024 Fact Sheet. tcfv.org
Last reviewed: July 2026. Every figure is dated and linked to its source; county-level figures carry wide margins of error and we note them as directional; we refresh as new data publishes.
FAQ
Doesn't Hood County's income level mean the need here is small?
No — it means the need is concentrated rather than absent. Hood County's median household income is $88,160 (2020–2024 ACS), above both the Texas and U.S. medians, but 8.0% of residents live in poverty (Census SAIPE), a separate one-year ACS estimate puts it at 6.2% (with a wide ±2.2-point margin typical of a county this size), and 16.2% of residents under 65 are uninsured. (U.S. Census QuickFacts, 2025) An above-average county average can still leave real pockets of need easy to overlook.
What domestic-violence shelter services exist in Hood County?
One. Mission Granbury's Ada Carey Family Violence Shelter is the only domestic-violence shelter serving Hood County, sheltering about 12 people per night. (Mission Granbury, via findhelp.org)
Is there a detox or residential treatment facility in Hood County?
No. There is no detox or residential substance-treatment facility located in Hood County. The nearest cluster of options is roughly 30–40 miles away, about a 45-minute drive into the Fort Worth–Arlington metro. (Based on SAMHSA-indexed treatment-facility directories; distances are approximate.)
Why don't we have more precise local numbers for Hood County?
Small counties are harder to measure. Hood County has no local point-in-time homeless count of its own — it falls under the 215-county Texas Balance of State Continuum of Care, which counted 10,081 people homeless statewide in January 2024, 63% of them unsheltered. (Texas Homeless Network, 2024) County-level survey estimates here also carry wide margins of error, as with the 6.2% ±2.2-point poverty estimate above. We treat county-level figures as directional and will update this page as better local data publishes.