November 23, 2022 – Dallas Observer – Jacob Vaughn
Chantel Hardaway is a single mother of seven living in North Texas. On July 27, as she lay in a hospital after giving birth to a son, a Dallas County justice of the peace court took up her eviction case, and because she didn’t appear, the court ruled in the landlord’s favor.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Hardaway said. Eventually, someone put her in touch with lawyer Mark Melton.
Ever since, Melton and his nonprofit Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center have been doing what they can to keep Hardaway and her family off the streets and out of emergency homeless shelters. The nonprofit was able to stall the family’s eviction for a while, but eventually had to move them into a hotel, where they’ve been staying for the last six weeks.
“They took care of me and my children. They told me to just trust them and they wouldn’t let me fall,” Hardaway recalled. “I didn’t understand at the time because I’ve dealt with so many people trying to get over on me. So … I had to just step out on faith and learn to trust someone because this was a new situation for me and my children. It was something that I thought that I would never have to face.”
This is part of a different approach advocates have been deploying to combat homelessness. Called diversion, it boils down to doing everything possible to keep people out of emergency shelters. The thinking is that putting people up in a hotel for a few days or trying to negotiate with a landlord to buy more time on unpaid rent is far cheaper than letting someone get evicted and end up in a shelter.
As the state of evictions enters a new post-pandemic normal, housing advocates aren’t sure what to expect next. That’s why they’re using strategies like diversion and rushing to implement more safeguards for tenants facing evictions.
The Child Poverty Action Lab has been tracking evictions in North Texas throughout the pandemic. So far this year, Dallas County landlords have filed nearly 60,000 evictions. The city of Dallas accounts for about 37,000 of them. A federal eviction moratorium enacted during the height of the COVID pandemic spared many people from getting kicked out of their homes, but it expired last year, and the number of filings have seen an upward trend since.
Ashley Flores, senior director at Child Poverty Action Lab, has been watching it in real time.
“Once the federal eviction moratorium was lifted in August of 2021, we really saw eviction filings rise pretty steadily and more steeply than we had before,” Flores said. “August 2022 was actually, for Dallas County, a record-breaking month. There were 4,355 evictions filed in August for Dallas County, and that’s the highest one-month total we’ve got in our data set going back to January 2017.”
September and October saw fewer eviction filings, and it’s hard to say exactly why. One factor that could have contributed to fewer evictions in October is that justice of the peace courts, which handle eviction cases, were closed for the last four days of the month. It’s even harder to say what comes next.
“Pre-COVID, there was a pretty predictable seasonality in eviction filing patterns,” Flores said. “So, we always saw a big jump in January, and then evictions would kind of fall in the spring. Then they would start to climb back up in the summer, and there would be another peak late summer, early fall. And they would decline in the winter, jump back up in January, jump back down … But COVID really disrupted that pattern.
“We can’t say if we’re sort of returning to some of that seasonality or if we’re entering a new normal as far as eviction filing patterns are concerned.”
Whatever is around the corner, advocates want to be prepared.
“We’re at a sort of unique point in time,” Flores said. “During COVID we had so many new resources that came to Dallas for eviction prevention. We had rent relief, we have new legal aid efforts. So, all of this infrastructure was stood up in kind of record time, really, to support renters in need. Now, as the federal rent relief winds down, and we’re sort of approaching a new normal, I think we’re sort of at a transition where we need to consider what comes next. What should a permanent eviction prevention infrastructure look like? We’ve learned so much over the last couple of years about renter needs and housing instability that we’re really at the point where it’s time to plan for what comes next, and how do we sustain all this good work that has been started.”
As people work to set up that permanent infrastructure, others are trying out new strategies, like diversion, which is essentially doing everything possible to keep tenants from ending up on the streets or in emergency shelters. It has proven far cheaper than letting people slip into homelessness.
Family Gateway, a nonprofit focused on getting families into affordable housing, has run the numbers. From January to September, the nonprofit was able to keep 350 families out of emergency shelters through diversion. About half of those families needed only Family Gateway’s time to help them come up with their own solutions.
“We often find that those in trauma are not able to access the ‘executive function’ part of their brain but are in ‘fight, freeze, or flight’ mode and just need someone to help them process and think through alternatives to shelter, call family they are embarrassed to call to ask for help, etc.,” Ellen Magnis, president and CEO of Family Gateway, told the Observer by email.
Other families needed financial help raning from $1,000 to $5,000. That assistance could go toward a deposit on a new apartment, late rent or paying for transportation out of state to family members willing to take tenants in.
“So, tallying up the total amount we expended on the diverted families (including staff time) and dividing by the number of diverted families, this averaged to $1,275 per family,” Magnis said.
That’s cheaper than the average shelter stay for a family. It costs about $160 a night to place a family in a shelter. That covers their meals, case management, education support for the kids, unemployment support for the adults and a slew of other things. Families are in shelters for an average of 77 days, costing a total of more than $12,000.
“We would far prefer to pour resources into helping families avoid shelter … than to take every family seeking shelter services into a shelter,” Magnis said. “No matter how good the shelter, it is traumatic for families to live in a communal setting. We also don’t want shelter to become a ‘normalized’ experience for families. We want families to rely on their own resources as much as possible. Shelter is the most expensive intervention we offer, so we want to use it wisely and effectively.”
Meanwhile, people like attorney Mark Melton are trying to help set up permanent protections for tenants in Dallas. He has been assisting tenants facing eviction throughout the pandemic. Today, he does so through the nonprofit he started with his wife, Lauren, called Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center. The nonprofit offers free legal representation to tenants in Dallas facing eviction. Melton also wrote a temporary Dallas ordinance two years ago that provided more protection to people facing eviction by giving them extra time before being thrown out of their homes.
Every moment counts when you’re down on your luck. Melton knows this from experience. In 1999, the Meltons arrived in Dallas after leaving behind a broken life in Tulsa. He was 21 years old with two children when he and 5,000 other workers were laid off from their jobs at a company called Commercial Financial Services. The Meltons, who weren’t married at the time, didn’t have college degrees or job prospects. For the next few months, they tried to make ends meet but eventually ran out of money. They lost their house and one of their cars.
Selling what they could, they gathered about $1,500 and everything they could pack into their Honda Civic and headed to Dallas with the kids. They thought more opportunities awaited them in the city.
The family of four hunkered down in a 450-square-foot apartment, and Melton found a job making cold calls trying to sell oil and gas investments. The Meltons eventually enrolled in college, living in student housing and working odd jobs while they took as many classes as they could. After all the struggle, Melton made it into the law program at Southern Methodist University and got hired by the law firm Hunton & Williams when he graduated. It took the family about eight years to get back on top after losing everything in Tulsa.
Now, Mark and Lauren Melton work to try to prevent people’s lives from getting turned upside down like theirs did. Often, all people need is a little more time. (Lauren Melton is taking classes at the University of North Texas to get a degree in nonprofit management and hopes to attend law school next.)
Before the pandemic, landlords could issue eviction notices to anyone who was a dollar short on rent. The notice would usually say the tenants had three days to leave the property. That often scared people into leaving voluntarily, but it also started the eviction process. From there, the eviction could get a hearing in court, and if the judge ruled in favor of the landlord, a constable would come knocking on the door to remove renters and all their belongings.
Things were different under Melton’s temporary eviction ordinance. It gave people 21 days from the initial eviction notice to provide proof that they had been financially affected by the pandemic, causing them to fall behind on rent. If they did that, they had 60 days from the initial notice to avoid eviction. During that time they could negotiate a payment plan with the landlord, apply for rental assistance or find a new place to stay.
If the tenant did everything right and the courts handled the eviction case correctly, which doesn’t always happen, Melton said, the tenant would get the extra time to avoid ending up on the street.
Over time though, the ordinance became less effective, and few people got the full intended benefit from it because it became harder for tenants to prove that COVID-19 was the reason they were behind on rent. So, people were getting only an extra 21 days to avoid eviction in most cases. A recent change to the temporary ordinance rectified this, and a permanent ordinance could be brought to City Council for consideration by the end of this year.
The changes to the temporary ordinance give tenants 10 days from their initial eviction notice to prove they’ve applied for rental assistance. If they do that, they get a full 60 days from the initial notice to avoid eviction. The ordinance now includes what’s called a right to cure, which requires landlords to accept late rent in the first 10 days after the initial eviction notice. A bill filed by state Rep. Nicole Collier ahead of the upcoming legislative session looks to provide tenants a right to cure across the state. Under Collier’s House Bill 673, landlords would be required to accept late rent in the seven days after the initial eviction notice.
This is something that would ideally make it into Dallas’ permanent eviction ordinance as well. The city is still trying to decide what a permanent ordinance would look like, but Melton said it would make sense to provide tenants with at least enough time to get their next paycheck and settle late rent. To him, tenants should have always had these kinds of protections.
“In my view, I just want to be very clear, there needs to be additional tenant protections on a permanent basis as quickly as possible,” Melton said. “I don’t think there should be any scenario where there’s not some ordinance in effect at all times that’s providing some limited protections to tenants, because the system right now is just a stacked deck against them, and they need all the help they can get.”
Nathaniel Barrett, a Dallas landlord, said that while he sees how the ordinance could help some tenants, it could come with some downsides. Barrett owns and operates a dozen Dallas apartments in buildings with two to five units each.
“Any time it becomes harder to evict a tenant for nonpayment, landlords will have to apply stricter requirements,” Barrett said. Shorter lease terms, tougher rental history and reference requirements, he said, “are all ways I imagine landlords will respond in a tight rental market.”
“It’s not that the ordinance is irrelevant. It may help a subset of people who just needed a little more time to put together the funds to catch up on rent,” he said. “Landlords, though, given the increased risk of having a non-paying tenant for as long as three months will absolutely respond with stricter screening.”
Barrett predicts tenants with bad rental history and evictions on their record will bear the brunt of those tighter restrictions.
Melton counters that people also suggest that if the city implements too many tenant protections in Dallas, landlords won’t want to do business here. “I don’t know if they think if all these units are just going to evaporate or something, but they won’t,” Melton said. He tells those people to look at New York, which has extensive tenant protections. “Landlords are still making a fortune up there,” he said. “They didn’t go away. They’re building more units. So, even in an environment that is, we’ll say less than moderately regulated … there’s still plenty of opportunity for landlords to make money. In fact, most of them did just fine during the pandemic.”
He added: “Rents are going up, they’re making more money. Everything’s great for them, while at the same time, tenants are getting priced out of places to live and inflation is going crazy and they can’t buy groceries. So, you know, there’s a world of hurt sitting out there.”
On Nov. 20, Melton said he and his organization found a home for the Hardaway family. He posted a photo on social media of one of Hardaway’s children. “Lauren and I spent time with this kid today,” Mark Melton wrote. “For the last six weeks, he’s been living in a hotel three blocks from my house.” He said the hotel stay was made possible by people’s donations to the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center. “This week, he got to move into a house in a school district where he’ll receive a fantastic education. He’s going to be fine.”
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