July 22, 2022 – The Dallas Morning News – Sharon Grigsby
Mark and Lauren Melton’s small but mighty army — the only bulwark preventing Dallas County renters from unjustly being thrown out on the streets — looks forward to the day it loses far more of these eviction cases than it wins.
The county’s 10 justice of the peace courtrooms overflow daily with hundreds of vulnerable folks who, left to fight the system on their own, have almost no chance of keeping a roof over their head.
But when lawyers from the Meltons’ Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center show up, they win 97% of the time. The pro bono team possesses no magical superpowers, but it’s susses out what juices the eviction process.
The landlords’ longtime gamble — knowing that fewer than 3% of tenants show up with legal representation — is that the odds are in their favor to cut corners, fudge facts and pull off unlawful maneuvers.
“By having our lawyers there, we replace that equation with a 100% chance of accountability,” Mark told me. “Now they have to give the tenants the limited protections the law gives them.”
Mark and his nonprofit’s five full-time eviction lawyers represent every tenant they can find. By year’s end, the Meltons expect to hire enough attorneys to cover every eviction docket every day.
Why are they so eager to post a losing record? That will be evidence that landlords have changed their bad behavior around fair housing practices.
What began two and a half years ago as Mark’s bighearted triage in the paycheck-killing early days of the pandemic is proving itself a strategy for systemic change in Dallas County and perhaps nationwide.
Mark’s working theory is that unlawful eviction is completely fixable by saturating the JP courts with highly trained lawyers. His message everywhere he goes: “We will represent 100% of everyone who is in this room if you don’t already have a lawyer.”
Of course, tenants should pay their rent, and landlords should have an avenue to evict those who don’t. But Mark’s research and experience, based on his team helping about 10,000 individuals since March 2020, shows that too often it’s the rights of the landlords, not the tenants, that are protected.
Simply giving renters proper notice allows them more time to figure out next steps for their families and belongings. That, in turn, reduces reliance on shelters and other publicly funded safety nets.
Alan Cohen, whose Dallas-based Child Poverty Action Lab regularly shares data and strategies with the Meltons’ nonprofit, is a big backer of Mark’s “saturation theory.”
“Through his cases, Mark sees how the system actually is operating on the ground versus the way the policy is written,” Cohen said. “There’s a gap and it’s too often hurting the little guy.”
Both in the courtrooms and on the streets, the Meltons’ relentless crusade is fueled by their own life stories.
Mark went to work at 17 in Tulsa, Okla., married young and thought himself on top of the world — until his employer declared bankruptcy and this father of two young children couldn’t find another job.
Out of money and his savings depleted, Melton received the dreaded eviction notice, a day he still recalls as one of complete and utter desperation.
With no real plan, he and his first wife sold everything and drove to Dallas. He got through college while working two jobs and at last graduated with a law degree from Southern Methodist University.
Today Mark, a tax attorney, is a partner in Holland & Knight.
Lauren also married very young and eventually started fresh in Dallas with her daughter.
Now CEO of the eviction advocacy center, her work helping others began in Denton as a volunteer alongside her mom at the local food pantry and later with her own church group.
Her career in a restaurant chain that regularly gave back to the community also gave her opportunities to lead philanthropic efforts. “From a very early age, I saw the other side of things and what was so often invisible to the rest of us,” she told me.
Lauren and Mark, who married five years ago, pack a powerful one-two punch. She makes sure no one’s immediate needs are overlooked, whether that’s a child’s first toy or an already-due rent check, while he finds the best legal strategy to get that family to a better place.
The Meltons stumbled into this work when, in the first weeks of the pandemic, Mark used Facebook to answer questions he was hearing about evictions. He soon recruited more than 250 volunteers to help tenants who faced losing their homes.
As it became more difficult to find lawyers with the time and inclination to do the emotionally demanding work, Mark founded the center in January 2021 and hired the first full-time staff lawyer.
The effort is 100% privately funded, much of it by the Meltons themselves, and neither Mark nor Lauren draw a salary from the nonprofit.
Following their work in recent months You’ll find both Meltons wherever and whenever residents are at risk of losing their homes — often in the middle of the night.
Just after 1 a.m. Tuesday, Mark got a text from a resident of a 16-unit apartment on Meyers Street in South Dallas. The Meltons know this barely inhabitable property well because a few weeks earlier they had stepped in to slow an eviction process there.
Mark acknowledges the apartments are a hotbed for violence but has effectively argued that people for whom the $800 rent is their only housing option deserve a process that protects their legal rights and recognizes their humanity.
It’s no surprise that when a fire broke out just before midnight Monday and damaged four units there, the stressed residents’ first call was to Mark and Lauren.
The couple drove over immediately and, once firefighters and police pulled away, what remained were 20 hot, hungry and desperate residents looking to the Meltons for what to do next.
Even the couple’s substantial contact list couldn’t turn up an immediate answer. After what felt like a million phone calls, the best they could do before leaving at 4:30 a.m. was to order food and water for those they left behind.
“It was so hard to finally walk away without finding a solution,” Lauren said. The couple was back a few hours later and spent most of the day, along with the Red Cross and Dallas’ Office of Emergency Management, tracking down housing for the Meyers Street tenants.
Chaotic days like this one — on top of all the legal work — are the norm.
The Melsons scour shelters for beds, pay for extended-stay hotels, rehome pets and buy groceries for many of their clients. They recruit volunteers for moving days, collect furnishings for new apartments and assist with enrolling children in new schools and daycares.
The center mails cards detailing its free services to each person in Dallas County who was sued for eviction the previous day. The team approaches tenants in the courthouse before eviction dockets and the eviction advocacy center is the go-to name provided by other Dallas nonprofits and government groups.
As Mark points out, 55% of the hundred-plus cards the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center mails daily represent a single mother with children. “For those of you already on high ground, we could use some help down here in the neighborhoods built below sea level,” he recently wrote on Facebook.
Like the Meltons, Ellen Magnis, whose Family Gateway shelters provide life-changing support to homeless parents and their children, sees an increasingly grim picture for 2022 because the COVID eviction bans are gone and families are increasingly unable to pay their rent.
The stats she shared with me for the first six months of 2022 are double or more what they were for the same time in 2021: the number of families living in cars or other uninhabitable locations, the number facing evictions and the number needing to get into a shelter right now.
“Families specifically have entered a world where they cannot sustain themselves, often despite their best efforts,” she said.
“More people are falling through the cracks than ever before, and it is an honor to serve alongside Mark and his team to try to catch as many of them as we can.”
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