On the Front Line of the Dallas Eviction Crisis

The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center expected 2025 to be a big year. Landlords in Dallas County filed just shy of 50,000 evictions in 2024, the most of any year on record.

DEAC, as it is abbreviated, staffs Dallas County’s Justice of the Peace courts with pro bono attorneys who represent clients facing eviction. Last November it won a $1.3 million grant from the county to scale its operation. That meant Mark Melton, the tax attorney who founded the nonprofit during the pandemic, could finally achieve what he envisioned nearly five years ago.

He called his goal “saturation theory,” the idea that each of the county’s 10 Justice of the Peace courts will always have an attorney at the ready when someone arrives for their eviction hearing. Too often, landlords had not given tenants the required legal notice that they were being evicted. 

Tenants were not showing up to court with lawyers, and they were unfamiliar with the legal arguments they needed to make to have their eviction dismissed. DEAC’s goal is to represent as many of these people as possible. In its first year, its attorneys won 96 percent of their cases, mostly by proving the landlords had not followed the law.  

The county’s grant—it includes two one-year renewals at the discretion of commissioners—doubled the organization’s revenue, which was enough to hire another three attorneys, three legal assistants, and an intake administrator. This pandemic project had become a small but mighty legal practice with 26 total employees right as the need became most significant.

And then came House Bill 32. 

Filed by state Rep. Angie Chen Button (R-Richardson) in the spring during the last legislative session, the bill attempted to give landlords permission to evict without notice and no longer required a court hearing for tenants if there were “no genuinely disputed facts.” (The onus was on the tenant to move quickly to inform the judge of these “disputed facts.”) Another provision in the bill targeted DEAC’s funding. It tried to force local governments to match the amount of money it gives to nonprofit legal aid organizations with relocation services.

Melton called this a “poison pill.” It was hard enough to get a grant, but now this bill was attempting to force local governments to double their spend. He was in Austin most weekends, lobbying against the bill’s provisions. The organization’s chief legal officer, Stuart Campbell, also testified. Meanwhile, the rush of clients needing representation in Dallas didn’t stop while legislators went about their business. For the first time in his life, Campbell says he broke out in stress-induced hives.

Things are less calamitous today. (And the skin condition is gone.) Two of the provisions Campbell and Melton considered most egregious in the bill were removed before the Senate’s version passed, including that “poison pill.” Dallas County commissioners just renewed the center’s grant for $1 million. Campbell, 33, now oversees the attorneys who set up tables outside the courts and offer their services to thousands of people who would likely otherwise lose their homes. With each of the Dallas courtrooms staffed, the organization is expanding to Houston, which is located in the most populous county in Texas.

I wanted to know more about the organization’s expansion plans here and abroad, what it’s like scaling these services at a time of great need, and some of the reasons behind all these filings. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

TLR: The county’s data show that Dallas County landlords last year filed more evictions than any year since those numbers began being tracked, in 2017. 

Campbell: We’re feeling it.

And your attorneys set a monthly client record in August, when DEAC represented 718 tenants. So we have this increase in total filings, but you also have more attorneys in eviction courts. I’m curious as to whether you’re seeing more clients because of your growth, or because there have been more filings.

It’s both. There are two things in play. One, there is a significant increase in eviction filings. Two, if you look across eviction data in any state at any time, the summer months are going to be the highest peak months of the year. So already June, July, August are going to be big months, regardless of any general increase, but when we reached saturation, there was also a massive increase of evictions across the board. Based on economic trends, I don’t see that changing anytime soon. 

So you really scaled up just at the right time to meet this. 

Yeah. It’s amazing to see the work we’re doing and the impact we're having, which happens to be at the most tragic times for the people who need our help. Unfortunately, we’d have a better society if our jobs didn't exist. I wish we could work our way out of a job. That’s kind of built into saturation theory, right? We get lawyers in all the courts. That's the first step. The second step is we force compliance with the law. We started with a 96 percent win rate, meaning 96 percent of the clients we represented were not evicted. Now on a good month we’re at 60 percent; on a bad month, it’s in the mid 50s. So we’re still winning over half of our cases but our win rate has significantly decreased, which we see as a benefit. That means the law is being complied with.

You’re saying that, when you started, most landlords had not followed the law before they filed an eviction.

Right, a lot of our defenses depend on whether or not the person was given the right constitutional notice required by the statute.

And now you’re in every court, acting as a check on the landlords. So do you see a direct correlation with how landlords are now following the rules? 

One-hundred percent. A landlord has told us, ‘we changed our entire policy because of the 50 cases you made us lose.’ Attorneys for these landlords come more prepared now because we’re there. And if a DEAC attorney is present in the courtroom, the judge is going to be a little bit more strict. 

There have been significant positive changes, like in South Dallas, where the judge has helped us facilitate a settlement process with landlords. Our goal at DEAC is to help avoid the ultimate tragic outcome of eviction, which is forcible displacement. And the second goal is, if possible, to mitigate the damage that an eviction filing and judgment will do to someone’s tenant history and credit score that could prevent them from finding another place to live. 

When I profiled Melton for D Magazine last year, I was surprised that most of your clients are being evicted for the first time. Is that still the case? 

Without a doubt. If I had to guess, repeat clients are probably under 10 percent of our total. 

What does that tell you, considering you’re seeing record numbers of clients this summer? 

It tells me that no one is immune to poverty. If you would take a survey of my entire staff, one of the most common stories that we see is, look, I'm working two jobs. I’ve got a family, but my mom, my cousin, my sister, my dad, my kid broke their right arm, or needed a test done, or needed to buy pills. A one-time medical expense will put people into that cycle of poverty. Another version of that is death. Grandma died, no one could pay. Instead of paying my rent this month, I had to pay $3,000 for a funeral or for a cremation.

There is no rental assistance. I was in court just yesterday and had a client who is 67 years old. It’s her first time ever in eviction court, she’s struggling financially, and she was in tears with me, like, she’s stunned that there was no safety net for her.

That’s the ironic thing looking back at the pandemic. We had this emergency, but there were federal and local dollars available for rent relief as that sort of safety net. We had moratoriums. But it’s now 2025 and we’re trending higher than we ever have without any of the resources that were available then. How do you prepare for that demand as an organization? 

It’s trying to find the resources to hire more people and more people to do more things, too. We would like to hire a social worker to deal directly with referrals to other services or act as a caseworker. We have a legal assistant who came from that world, so we have an informal process. But more direct representation or ancillary services would be ideal. Whenever you’re seeing such a high influx of cases and the nature of those cases is getting worse and worse, some of these cases are going to be particularly disgusting. 

‘Worse and worse’—do you mean by the amount they owe in back rent? Or the reason they ended up in court? 

There is significant data on how when the economy sinks and wages are impacted, that when people who are already vulnerable are suffering from economic factors, crime increases and domestic violence skyrockets. We’re already seeing it. Just last week, we had three cases of really disgusting violence. This takes a toll on somebody, right? We have one attorney who represented over 100 cases a month for the last three months. So she did over 300 cases in the summer months. Normal is about half that. 

But then to add, you know, walking into court with someone who’s battered and bruised—it’s all right in front of you. So hiring more people is one thing, and to have extra resources to hire more people is significant, but maintaining and caring for our current employees is more important. 

Do you have any indication of what’s fueling this? 

So, properties that are for the working poor, or those who are under the working poor in terms of socioeconomic status, are generally managed by private equity. This is almost exclusively firms that are outside of Texas, right? New York, California, Delaware, sure. We get some from Colorado too. We get some from foreign investment; China, Germany, places like that. 

To them, everything is just a spreadsheet, an algorithm that spits out a profit number. What we end up seeing is that turnover for property management is insane. In the span of 12 months, we’ll have three different property managers and all those people have to relearn the eviction process. So they will make errors, and then we will capitalize on those errors when they don’t comply with the law. 

But really—and I'm stealing this from Mark [Melton]—the only way to fix the housing crisis is through government intervention. The market cannot fix this, and this is coming from Mark, someone who very much believes in market forces. He’s come to the conclusion, a conclusion that I’ve settled on long ago, that the only way to fix it is through government intervention. We have to have some sort of permanent, supportive housing for people who need it, and lower income housing for the working poor. That’s the only way to do it.

In the meantime, you’re now catching more of these clients in each court, largely because of the county’s $1.3 million gift to DEAC. How has the operation changed now that you’re in more places? 

The courts that we didn’t have staff in full time were 3-2 in North Dallas, 4-2 in Grand Prairie, and 2-1 in Garland. Before we had full saturation, we would look to see where we would have the highest impact. The whole point is to help as many people as possible. We would say, well, there’s 91 cases in one court, and five cases in another. So we’re obviously going to the first. We’d have a presence in all the courts, but it was never consistent. Now we have a presence in every court, every single day. 

Melton was particularly outspoken about his “saturation theory” goal. Your organization got a lot of media attention, and your presence in court changed how landlords operate. Fast forward to the last legislative session, and state Rep. Button, who represents a portion of Dallas County, filed a bill that included what you have called a “poison pill” provision, because it dictated how local governments can fund you. It had the support of the Texas Apartment Association. While that provision didn’t make it into the bill that passed, do you view DEAC’s presence in these courts as the reason that was included? 

Absolutely. Directly because of us. Legal aid organizations have been around since the 1960s. Now, all of a sudden, DEAC shows up and is representing people en masse in Dallas, and they now want to defund all of legal aid. We know that was because of us. 

The Texas Legislature has a long memory—are you preparing for this to return in 2027? 

We’re not thinking about it right now, but we are aware of that fact. I’m not meaning for this to sound partisan, but this is just the nature of the Legislature. It wasn’t the Democrats that saved us. Republicans stepped up and said, ‘No, this is bullshit,’ right? Very conservative Republicans stepped up and said, ‘No, this is bullshit.’ And so yes, I am worried about what might happen in 2027 but some of the things that were in that bill—the lack of due process, trying to kill legal aid—are an affront to even the conservative legislators. I’m not terribly fearful of that coming again. Now it could, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it does, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it met the same outcome. 

Melton and yourself both traveled to Austin to speak with legislators and testify against this bill. Do you believe DEAC made inroads with legislators who now see your point of view? 

For the past 30 years, both Republican and Democratic legislators have only heard one side. Before us, there was really only one organization, Texas Housers, that was doing this work. And they’re fantastic. I love them. They were our partners this year and helped us a lot, but they were really the only advocates. It was the Texas Apartment Association, the Realtors, the home developers, these multi-billion dollar industries against an outfit of, what, three policy analysts? What has happened in this session, we have built those relationships now. We know the senators. We know the representatives on both sides of the aisle who listen to us, because now they’ve heard us. Not only have they heard Housers, but there’s us. And we brought a whole bunch of people with us. That’s why those testimonies lasted so many hours, both in the House and the Senate. We’ve made those connections and now they actually see both sides of the story. 

DEAC’s other big news was that you’re expanding to Houston and Harris County. Why is it the right time to expand? 

We’ve been asked to expand into different areas and cities and counties before, but we always said no, not until we hit saturation in Dallas. And now that we’ve done that, we’ve started looking elsewhere to see where we can have a larger impact. And there's no place in the state, almost in the country, where we can have a larger impact than Houston, because Houston has almost doubled the eviction filings of Dallas. 

Harris County has about twice the population of Dallas. 

Yeah, so if Dallas is averaging around 40,000 [evictions each year], Houston is looking at the high 80s, maybe low 90s. [Editor’s note: There have been about 77,000 filings in the Houston area over the last 12 months, according to the Eviction Lab.] Ultimately, it was the commissioners court’s decision to have us expand down there. I’m nervous but incredibly excited. We just put the job posting up yesterday. 

How does that make you feel? After spending almost five years building this, you finally get attorneys in every JP court and you’ve gotten to the point where you can expand it to another significant market. 

It makes me feel incredibly proud of our team to see that other counties have taken notice of it. Other elected officials have seen what's happening in Dallas, and this would’t have been possible without the Dallas County Commissioners Court. We have some good champions for eviction deferral and eviction defense in Dallas County, and this wouldn’t have been possible without them. 

Roughly half of the cases end in a default judgment because of the tenants who don’t show up to court. But If tenants are showing up to court, at least 15 minutes before court, the odds that we represent you is close to 100 percent, if you want. That’s how we’re getting to the 718 figures in a month, because we’re representing every single person who shows up. 

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

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