Every few months, we flip the mirror and ask the same questions of our publication that inform each of our stories: What’s working, what’s not, and why? Our journalists end each month with full notebooks, a collection of little notes we hope will lead to bigger stories that explain how North Texas is operating and who is benefiting. In recent weeks, we’ve been discussing ways to share more of what we’re learning about the subjects we cover while we’re out reporting in the community.
Above the Fray, our new monthly column — the one you’re reading right now — is our effort to give readers more insight into important developments, here and elsewhere, that help us better understand where we live. What can you expect? Studies, research insights, neighborhood news bites, big announcements, council or commissioner court votes, federal or state legislation that could have impact locally.
I’ll be in your inbox and online the last Wednesday of each month. Have a tip? Feedback? Dinner recommendation? I’m always an email away.
What happened to the childcare tax?
Walker Moore says he often reminds his fellow organizers of the word “perdure,” which, he tells them, means “to endure over an incredibly long period of time.”
The last year explains why. Moore, the lead organizer for Dallas Area Interfaith, helped align his roughly 30 congregations and schools with the United Way and a few childcare providers to form the Dallas Childcare Works Coalition. The group collected more than 4,750 signatures in support of adding a special tax rate increase to the November ballot to make childcare accessible to more parents. County commissioners had until August 11 to agree to send it to voters for consideration. Supporters packed the gallery during commissioner’s court in May and sent so many emails staffers asked them to lay off.
But the special tax — a 3-cent rate increase that would have raised about $132 million a year — wasn’t added to an agenda for discussion before the deadline. Despite the coalition’s work, voters won’t get the chance to weigh in on whether they want to fund childcare.
“I’m looking at the list now. This wasn’t just one commissioner’s district or one demographic,” Moore says. “Catholic, Baptist, Jewish, Protestant. It’s schools, Black congregations, white, Latino. It’s most of the ZIP codes in Dallas County. It tells me there was a huge appetite in Dallas County.”
Commissioners instead voted 3-2 to ask voters to approve a tax increase to pay for additional support services to reduce homelessness, a separate, politically savvy initiative that started at least six months after the childcare push reared up. County constituents probably see the effects of homelessness each time they leave their homes. Childcare can be a harder sell.
Moore has nothing bad to say about investing in housing or homelessness; after all, one of Dallas Area Interfaith’s priorities for 2026 was to urge officials to find ways to bring down the cost of housing.
But childcare was their big swing. The tax was designed to provide a sustained funding source to offer “scholarships” for families right as the Texas Workforce Commission began warning about rising childcare costs and stagnant or declining public funding that will likely mean thousands of parents won’t receive the benefit.
What comes next? Moore says the group will do some soul-searching “at what we missed and what else can be done.” But he wants to prove the coalition’s power this November. He’s analyzing voter turnout in precincts near the congregations and schools affiliated with Dallas Area Interfaith. Where can they do better? Where can they establish new voting blocs? There is an immigrant congregation in West Dallas, for instance, located in a precinct with 3,500 registered voters but “fewer than a third of them vote.”
“This was the first time they were in a fight like this,” Moore says, “the first time they’ve gone from spectators to participants.”
“Perdure” dates to the 15th century, a Middle English word defined by some dictionaries as to “continue to exist,” with no endpoint. For Moore, it’s a reminder of the work that always remains.
The city’s budget cuts include eviction assistance.
Mark Melton, the tax attorney who founded the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center, has had a complicated summer. His pro bono attorneys, stationed in Justice of the Peace courts in Dallas and Harris counties, represented more tenants facing eviction in July (1,114) than they ever have in a single month. Then came August, when he learned he suddenly needed to find $1 million.
The city appears to be reneging on a line item that council members approved to fund eviction assistance, which was included in last year’s budget. A $1.3 million county grant has helped Melton scale and operate his organization. The new money was the city’s way of pitching in. Upon learning of the funding being added to the budget, Melton started hiring, achieving his goal that each JP court in Dallas County have a free attorney for tenants at the ready. “I had a reasonable expectation we would win that award and therefore planned accordingly,” he says.
But the city never awarded the million dollars, and now the money has vanished from its proposed budgets for the next two years.
“I want people paying attention so that they know somebody did this and they need to fix it before they finalize this budget,” he says. “If I don’t replace that money, we run out of cash in December.”
The city is facing a $51 million shortfall next year. In the parlance of Dallas’ budget book, the city manager is looking to “advance efficiencies.” That means everything from planned layoffs and sudden furloughs to library consolidations have either been enacted or are on the table. Ditto eviction help.
Landlords filed more than 50,000 evictions in Dallas County in 2024, the most in 25 years of available data, according to the Child Poverty Action Lab. (The Lab Report is a local journalism project published by CPAL. Our newsroom operates with editorial independence.)
It costs Melton $2.5 million a year to staff the 10 courts in Dallas County. Because his organization doesn’t accept public funding that requires means testing, like income or residency verification, its lawyers can represent anyone who shows up needing help. No other organization in Dallas can match that scale, hence his “reasonable expectation” of winning the money.
The city’s “request for proposal” — an RFP — process for the $1 million launched in February. Melton applied days later. In April, a procurement staffer emailed that he’d won — half. He asked where the other half went. The staffer responded that he would talk to the staff in the housing department. Then came crickets until June 24, when staff told the City Council, whoops, the language in that RFP was missing critical “performance criteria” that required a rewrite. A city spokesperson referred to that meeting in response to The Lab Report’s questions about the issue.
Council approved canceling the solicitation, rejecting both bids, and sending out another with the new language. But this never happened, and now the funding has been reduced to zero while the city digs out from its budget hole.
“You have tens of thousands of tenants in Dallas County who are dependent on justice coming out of these courts,” Melton says, “and they only get it if we’re there.”
Now nearly six years since incorporating the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center, demand hasn’t slowed. Its attorneys are on pace to represent a record 10,000 tenants by the end of the year. It has doubled its staff since 2024, now employing 36.
Like any good social services organization operating in Texas, the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center knows it must make a business argument to convince local governments to spend tax dollars supporting its work. A 2024 study by Waco’s Perryman Group found Melton’s organization saves state and local taxpayers $40 million on healthcare, criminal justice, and shelter expenses when it provides free eviction services to 5,000 tenants.
That’s his argument to the city, that $1 million generates a significant return on investment while helping thousands of North Texans by ensuring their landlords follow the law. The budget cycle ends with a City Council vote in October.
“We built this thing, man,” he says. “I want to protect it and ensure it survives.”
The Lake Highlands apartment conundrum, cont’d.
The tax man came to Lake Highlands at the end of last year, which is beginning to cause significant disruption for the people who live in some of the aging apartment complexes flanking I-635.
There are 20 in City Council District 10, mostly clustered around Forest Lane and Audelia Road, whose owners used a loophole in state law to pull them off the tax rolls without permission from the cities and counties in which they’re located. The Legislature closed that loophole in its last session, eliminating the exemption and freeing local appraisal districts to come collect.
Tax records indicated that the owners of these apartment buildings suddenly owed a collective $13 million. I wrote about this problem last December, a few months after Council member Kathy Stewart began voicing concern for the people who live in these properties. “The financial stability of these apartment complexes is upside down,” she told her colleagues last October.
Now they’re being returned to lenders and sold in foreclosure auctions. The Dallas Morning News recently reported about the foreclosure sale of the 239-unit complex on Forest called The Baxter. Its new owners told residents they had 30 days to move to a sister property — The Bernard, also bought at auction — or receive notices to vacate. Other properties are also changing hands as their owners struggle to stay above water with the new tax burden. Receiving the exemption was a last-ditch effort to salvage any remaining equity in their investments.
“The dominoes have fallen,” says David Ellis, the president of the Dallas Housing Finance Corporation, who flagged the problem to Stewart. “That happened as a direct result of the appraisal district not giving those exemptions.”
Stewart estimates there are about 7,000 units spread across these complexes that rent to low- and middle-income residents. Many of them are families. And now those tenants face the consequences of someone else’s business decision.
“A lot is up in the air in District 10,” Ellis says.
Lab Notes.
Quick scenes from around North Texas.
The Forest Theater’s famous green tower will shine again in South Dallas on Nov. 1. The 5:30 p.m. unveiling event is open to the public, a moment Forest Forward CEO Elizabeth Wattley and her team have been working toward for nearly a decade. Expect about 100 events a year between the renovated 1,000-seat concert hall and the new 200-seat theater and dance studio on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Students at the adjacent MLK Arts Academy — which just graduated its third class of 8th graders in May — will be able to use its facilities.
Forest Forward has also acquired several contiguous residential and commercial lots surrounding the theater, which it plans to transform into mixed-income housing and rentable commercial space. And, in response to the community’s request, the first freshly brewed Starbucks coffee available in South Dallas. Attendees are asked to “wear your best version of black” to the Nov. 1 event. More info here.
The Bridge Homeless Recovery Center, the largest shelter in Dallas, welcomed its new CEO this month. Annam Manthiram spent her August embedding with every department, from intake to outreach teams that operate beyond its walls. Manthiram most recently served as the North Texas Food Bank’s chief engagement officer and has worked with people experiencing homelessness at CitySquare and HopeWorks in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She follows David Woody, who I spoke with in June ahead of his retirement after nearly eight years leading the organization.
Residents in West Oak Cliff watched closely as City Hall determined how to rezone their community, near Clarendon Drive and Hampton Road. The three-year process ended in 2025 with a rezoning that protected the existing auto shops along Clarendon. In early August, J&E Express helped organize a block party that unveiled the first in a series of murals that will be painted on the many mechanic shop walls along the corridor. The mural, painted by artist Issy Martinez, features the Virgin Mary, clad in a striking rouge dress, holding her hands out above figures representing those who work and live here. Close to 1,000 people packed Clarendon throughout the afternoon block party. See the mural here.
That’s what’s above the fray this month. The column returns on Sept. 30.
Matt Goodman is the co-founder and editor of The Lab Report. matt@labreportdallas.com