Consider the homestead exemption, because many people don’t. The spectrum of awareness is bookended on one side by homeowners who have had one on file so long that they forget about the thousands of dollars it saves from their tax bills each year. The opposite end is packed with tens of thousands who have not considered it for some other reason, be that because they don’t know what it is, or they have a problem with their title, or they don’t speak English and the Dallas Central Appraisal District’s application isn’t in Spanish. These taxpayers account for about 57,000 domiciles across the county, a little over 12 percent of all housing units considered to be owner-occupied.

That is how, since 2023, Dallas County taxpayers paid local taxing districts an estimated $310 million that they didn’t need to, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by the housing team of the Child Poverty Action Lab. Consider what that means: a tax burden higher than it should be for many residents, a disproportionate number of whom, the data show, are lower-income earners. In Dallas, historically affordable neighborhoods have begun seeing significant annual hikes in property values over the last decade.

“The exemption is the tool that brings the most relief with regard to property taxes,” says Stephanie Champion, the chief of community development and policy for the nonprofit Builders of Hope, which makes educating residents about the exemption a foundational part of its anti-displacement strategy. “Property taxes are one of the leading reasons why we’re seeing folks lose their homes.”  

To receive the exemption, state law requires the applicant to own their home and reside in it as their primary residence. Rental properties don’t qualify. The exemption reduces the taxable value of the home that would have otherwise been calculated in their tax bills. Up to $140,000 of the home can’t be taxed for the school district. Other local taxing units, like the city of Dallas, can also offer up to 20 percent exemptions of the home’s total value. Qualified applicants—homeowners who are 65 and older, disabled, or veterans—can stack a second exemption to save even more.

It also limits annual value increases to no more than 10 percent, calculated from the amount the home was assessed for the year the exemption was filed. That benefit is critical because it somewhat blunts the extreme spikes shouldered by neighborhoods near new development.

An analysis of tax appraisals by the real estate data firm Cotality found that property taxes in Dallas County rose an average of 32.7 percent between 2019 and 2024. It declared Dallas to be the county with the third highest median property tax payments in the country, behind only Tarrant County and Washington’s King County, which includes Seattle. As Dallas becomes more expensive, registering qualified people for exemptions quickly has become a priority for neighborhood associations and community-minded nonprofits.

“Our work really started with trying to tackle property taxes and do the appeals, because values were going up and the land was going up like crazy,” says Natalie Breen, the chief operating officer of the 125-year-old nonprofit Wesley-Rankin Community Center in West Dallas. “So much of this goes back to a need to educate about the homestead exemption, because so many people don’t know what it is or that they can access it.”  

West Dallas lived through what an analysis of Zillow data identified as the fifth-highest leap in average home prices across all of Texas a few years after the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge opened to traffic in 2012. That neighborhood is a good illustration of the impact of the homestead cap. The CPAL analysis highlights a home in the 75212 ZIP code, about a mile east of Wesley-Rankin. Appraisal district records show it is currently being taxed on a value of $117,585 rather than its estimated market total of $246,830 because it has had a homestead exemption on file since 2005. The analysis found this homeowner saved more than $4,300 last year with the exemption. 

Newcomers to the program are entitled to two years of refunded tax payments. The home value is also capped at whatever its valuation was two years prior, which is why it behooves homeowners to get the exemption as soon as they can to protect against potential tax increases. (Appraisers can still tax on the perceived value of improvements or renovations, however.)

Determining exactly who needs to apply for an exemption has long been a difficult exercise. This is public information, but identifying all qualifying homeowners required poring through thousands of public property listings on the Dallas Central Appraisal District’s ancient website. Two new interactive mapping tools created as part of the CPAL report attempt to make these figures accessible. (The Lab Report is a local journalism project published by the Child Poverty Action Lab. Our newsroom operates with editorial independence.)

One map, which catalogues the entire county, shows the scale of what housing researchers call the “exemption gap,” which, in Dallas County, includes about 57,000 households. The affluent are taking advantage of the exemption at a higher rate than those with lower incomes. About 40,000 of those are located within low- and very-low-income Census tracts. Based on the available data, the “take-up rate”—the total eligible participants who have an exemption on file—is 81 percent in majority Hispanic Census tracts, 86 percent in majority Black, and 94 percent in non-Hispanic white tracts. 

This second mapping tool tries to empower helpers to be more strategic. It zooms in, allowing searches by addresses and specific neighborhood geographies. It identifies each home lacking an exemption where the owner’s mailing address matches the property address. For years, advocacy organizations had to invest significant labor to find the correct people to educate about their right to the exemption. More often, organizations like Wesley-Rankin would distribute flyers advertising information sessions and hope those homeowners show up while relying on word-of-mouth.  

“The tool can map where the need is. We can say, ‘Man, we’re doing great in Los Altos, but we need to step it up in Bickers Park,’” Breen says, referring to neighborhoods within West Dallas. 

While Wesley-Rankin has long offered resources and education to its neighbors, the 2017 assessment increases jolted the organization. Affordability became a critical concern among homeowners whose property values hadn’t budged in decades. The center’s staffers began partnering with tax experts like father-and-son Toby and Will Toler who walked residents through the exemptions and the importance of protesting their taxes each year. Still, they felt late to the game, reacting to a crisis instead of getting ahead of it.

“There are so many things I wish we could have done to be more preventative,” Breen says.

As apartments shot up along Commerce Street and Singleton Boulevard in the following years, and a new 250-acre park along the Trinity River levees began finding funding, Wesley-Rankin partnered with Builders of Hope to launch what it calls the Homestead Preservation Center. Education around exemptions and property tax protests often introduces the organization to homeowners with more complex needs, like residents whose titles are still in the name of a deceased family member. Attorneys and tax experts are provided to work through these “tangled titles.”  

The center began in 2024 and has since served 536 households through exemption filings, housing education workshops, property tax appeals, heirship clinics with SMU law students, tax relief support, and estate planning services, says Johana Miranda, Wesley-Rankin’s housing program specialist. Everyone who has participated reports that they have remained in their homes, Miranda says. According to Champion, the center has saved homeowners an annual average of $2,000 per household.  

“The position we’re in now,” Breen adds, “helps us help other neighborhoods to be more preventative and do things a little bit differently.”

Some of those are across town in Oak Cliff. The Southern Gateway Public Green Foundation, the nonprofit that is overseeing fundraising and construction for Halperin Park over Interstate 35E, takes seriously how its development will affect surrounding homeowners. While the vision for the deck park came following the success of Klyde Warren Park, its location couldn’t be more different. Klyde Warren bridged downtown with the booming Uptown; Halperin will be a slice of greenspace that reconnects the east and west Oak Cliff residential neighborhoods severed by the freeway in 1959. These are largely working-class communities filled with proud legacy residents, some of whom are on fixed incomes.

April Allen, the foundation’s president and CEO, says the organization baked neighborhood preservation into the park’s early planning stages. Its Community First Plan includes a focus on protecting and adding mixed-income housing around the park, and it has already hosted property tax information sessions similar to Wesley-Rankin’s work in West Dallas. It’s also planning to partner with the UNT Dallas College of Law for estate planning and heirship work.

Allen says the organization has used the new mapping tool to identify about 4,500 homeowners in the two ZIP codes surrounding the park—75203 and 75216—who appear to qualify for an exemption but do not have one on file. The foundation will soon post a job for a full-time employee to manage this outreach. That staffer would split time between park headquarters and the nearby Cedar Crest Community Center, whose nonprofit operator, Behind Every Door Ministries, also partners with organizations that provide healthcare and banking services.

“It’s very difficult to force people to choose between growth and development in their neighborhood and the amenities that come with it, which they all want, and the corresponding tax burden,” Allen says. “The [property] appreciation is good for homeowners. That in itself is not a bad thing; it helps build generational wealth. But the tax burden is where things get tricky.”

Ten years ago, the sudden assessment increases in West Dallas caught many by surprise. Neighborhoods where homes were on the tax rolls for as little as $50,000 began a rapid ascent that forced many residents to weigh whether to fill prescriptions or pay their taxes. Miranda brought up a man whose exemption expired after his mother died and he wound up owing $400 a month in property taxes. “He had to consider using that money either for utilities or groceries or trying to save up for his tax bill,” she says. With Wesley-Rankin’s guidance, he got his paperwork in order and the exemptions returned his bill to zero. 

Smaller neighborhood groups are also learning how to help. Veronica Alonzo, the president of the Ruthmeade Place Neighborhood Association, a community filled with one-story bungalows just below 12^th Street in Oak Cliff, is using the mapping tool to plan block walks. “If the only thing that would make some of my neighbors move to another part of town is the affordability piece,” she says, “and we can help them with that, I’d want to do it, right?”

About a mile south, Juan Saenz took over as president of the Polk/Vernon Neighborhood Association a few months after he moved into his home in 2024. He has found 26 houses that appear to qualify for a homestead exemption; he suspects quite a few of those have title problems that will need to be sorted out. He’s in touch with SMU law students. “Change is inevitable,” he says, “but it doesn’t have to be dramatic and fast and painful. I just want to guide it along and have our current residents guide the direction of the neighborhood.”

Higher assessments often lag behind new development. While the Santiago Calatrava-designed bridge over the Trinity River into downtown opened in 2012—and the warehouses at its edge transformed into a restaurant park called Trinity Groves the next year—the impact to the surrounding property values didn’t show up on tax bills for another five years. What’s also changed in the last decade is awareness and education and endurance. Even the Texas Legislature is paying attention; voters approved a law increasing school district exemptions from $100,000 to $140,000 in 2025, and lawmakers are already signaling a desire to add to it. 

Halperin Park will open in Oak Cliff this spring. Other major capital projects are planned across the city in the next 10 years. And while the exemption does not benefit tenants—Dallas is 58 percent renters, many of whom are increasingly cost-burdened—the tax break is a right of relief for many Texas homeowners, especially those who are feeling increasing pressure as the market stampedes toward where they live. 

Matt Goodman is the co-founder and editor of The Lab Report. [email protected].

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The Lab Report Dallas is a local journalism project published by the Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL). Its newsroom operates with editorial independence.

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