Dallas Knows More About Evictions Than Ever Before, Just in Time for a New Surge
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Before the pandemic, the city of Dallas knew very little about how many evictions were being filed. We now have the data. So what will Dallas do with what it has learned?
During the first month of 2022, Dallas landlords filed 2,056 evictions against tenants within the city limits. While these numbers are about half of what was filed during the same period in 2020, this is still the highest point in the pandemic. For much of January, the only American city where evictions were filed more frequently than Dallas was Houston, where about a million more people live.
City officials and housing advocates are watching this matter closely. There is concern that Dallasites fighting housing insecurity are more vulnerable than they’ve ever been during the pandemic, right as a patchwork of federal, state, and local protections begins to fray.
The nonprofit Child Poverty Action Lab began tracking eviction data on behalf of Dallas County during the pandemic. The data can be segmented by city and county, but it can also explore more granular trends, like by ZIP codes. Before it launched its Eviction Filing Dashboard, this data didn’t exist, and certainly wasn’t presented in a dashboard that allows you to see trends over time.
It is a gift: the city now has eviction data going back to 2017, allowing policymakers to see the problem before and during the pandemic. The hope is that it will inform new protections for this population after pandemic-related protections end.
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Violent crime is down in Dallas, and here’s why
Dallas has taken a multifaceted approach to reducing violent crime built on data, research, and community-based solutions.
- In 2021, violent crime in the Malcolm X & Marburg area fell 23%, outpacing the 18% reduction across the entire southeast patrol division and also outperforming the 9% citywide violent crime decrease.
- Dallas didn’t arrest its way out of violent crime which is remarkable. In 2019, police made 170 arrests in the Malcolm X and Marburg focus area. In 2021, police made only 69 arrests in that area.
When parents go to jail, children are the hidden victims
Dallas County has more children with parents behind bars than any of its peers across Texas.
- As many as 100,000 children a year in Dallas have parents behind bars. These children have a much higher risk of aggression and antisocial behavior, suspension and expulsion, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, suicide, and incarceration.
- With people of color representing 8 out of 10 of the incarcerated, Black and Latino children are disproportionately affected. They are 7.5 times and 2.3 times more likely than white children, respectively, to have had an incarcerated parent.
Yes, Dallas violent crime dropped in 2022, but the number of arrests is even more
CPAL analysis shows Dallas is getting safer while the number of arrests continues to fall.
- Reducing those arrests that do not make us safer is important: 80%+ of arrests are for nonviolent offenses and 75% of the jail population is pretrial, impacting thousands of children and families.
- A recent CPAL study showed Dallas County children are more likely than kids in any other Texas county to have parents in prison. At least 80,000 of them had a parent behind bars, according to the report.