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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WIC Playbook
CPAL’s WIC playbook features prototypes designed to increase WIC benefit uptake in Dallas through human-centered design.
- The WIC program plays an important role in improving birth outcomes and containing health care costs. Every dollar spent on WIC leads to savings in health care costs from $1.77 to $3.13 within the first 60 days after birth.
- National data shows that in 2021, an average of 12.13 million moms, babies, and young children were eligible for WIC but only 51% actually participated.
Eviction less likely for Dallas County tenants who get a lawyer — but most don’t have one
CPAL's data analysis shows that eviction chances fall dramatically when tenants have legal representation.
- Law students at SMU observed nearly 1,300 eviction hearings across five of Dallas County’s ten justice of the peace courts from November 2022 to April 2023, representing about 10% of all initial eviction cases heard in those courts.
- Renters who had lawyers lost their cases just 7% of the time, whereas renters without lawyers lost their case – and, typically, their home — nearly 70% of the time.
Community Resource Explorer
The CRE uses data to visualize the assets and disparities that exist within and across Dallas neighborhoods.
- Centered on the two-mile radius around each school, the CRE illustrates how well school communities are resourced and ongoing needs for investment.
- The CRE indexes all the community schools in Dallas and evaluates their resourcing across categories such as economics, education, family, health, and community while also giving historical context to the data we see.