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Dallas Knows More About Evictions Than Ever Before, Just in Time for a New Surge

D Magazine - By Matt Goodman - February 2022

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Here is an excerpt:

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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