A Dallas study reveals that most tenants facing eviction aren’t repeat offenders.
The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center found that 84% of its 2025 clients had not faced eviction in the previous year.
The finding matters because it suggests that most eviction cases stem from temporary financial shocks rather than from a chronic inability to pay rent.
Mark Melton founded the advocacy center, which represents thousands of Dallas residents annually. When he testified in Austin about tenant rights last year, lawmakers questioned whether legal aid simply delayed inevitable evictions.
“Aren’t you just delaying the inevitable?” they asked him, the Dallas Observer reported.
That skepticism prompted Melton to investigate. He built a database analyzing the center’s thousands of 2025 clients, cross-referencing them with eviction records from the prior 12 months.
“That’s a pretty natural assumption to make,” Melton said about the lawmakers’ doubts, per the Observer. “So I was curious at that point. OK, it’s a fair question. What’s the answer?”
The data revealed that only 4% of clients had three or more evictions within a year. This low recidivism rate aligned with findings from the Child Poverty Action Lab and Princeton University’s Eviction Lab.
“If it were really just the lazy deadbeats being lazy deadbeats, you would expect a higher recidivism rate,” Melton said. “The fact that most of these people don’t repeat does indicate that these are shocks to their personal economic systems.”
The center doesn’t screen clients or impose eligibility requirements. This allows lawyers to represent nearly “an entire docket” in court, according to Melton.
Most clients describe unexpected emergencies that derailed their budgets: car repairs, sick children causing missed work, or childcare problems.
These setbacks can devastate families already living paycheck to paycheck.
“There’s just this bias in the public eye that wrongfully assumes people who are in eviction court getting evicted are there for a good reason, and they kind of had it coming,” Melton said.
The timing data provides additional insights. In repeat eviction cases, landlords filed new lawsuits an average of 93 days after the previous case.
That’s significantly longer than the typical 21-day gap between missed rent and initial court filing. Melton interprets this as evidence that families temporarily stabilize before facing another crisis.
“You have a whole population of people that really are just kind of in a bad situation because inflation’s high, and their budgets are stretched, and they’re trying their best, and something just went wrong,” he said. “And from a policy perspective, it makes sense to help those people.”
The center wins most cases on technical grounds, such as improper tenant notification. While this might seem like exploiting loopholes, Melton argues that due process matters in eviction proceedings.
He believes the data shows most tenants need “just a little more time” to catch up on rent. The 90-day gaps between repeat filings suggest households can “figure something out” when given breathing room.
Melton plans further research into factors driving repeat evictions. Identifying at-risk renter characteristics could inform better policy approaches.
“We’re sitting here in a lot of cases making policy based on the 3% of the population [that repeatedly offends] and not the 97% that’s just having an economic shock in their budget,” Melton said. “I think it’s very interesting data that shows these are one-off cases. There’s just a bunch of them because the situation is really dire out there.”
Understanding who these tenants are — and aren’t — could reshape how policymakers address the housing crisis.
