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When Mark Melton traveled to Austin last year to testify about the need for tenants’ rights and legal aid, the response he heard was, “Aren’t you just delaying the inevitable?”
The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center, which Melton founded, represents thousands of Dallasites facing eviction in court each year. A majority of cases that the Center wins are won on technical grounds, whether because a landlord failed to properly notify a tenant or due to some other procedural error. While Melton feels strongly about the necessity of due process in eviction proceedings, he also understands why skeptics jump to that “inevitability” conclusion.
“That’s a pretty natural assumption to make,” he said. “So I was curious at that point. OK, it’s a fair question. What’s the answer?”
Building a database so extensive that it slowed down his computer, the advocacy center analyzed the thousands of clients it represented in 2025 and cross-checked eviction data from the prior 12 months to determine how many of those clients had been repeat offenders in eviction lawsuits. Overwhelmingly, they found that most Dallasites they represented who faced eviction last year were not repeat offenders.
Nearly 84% of the center’s clients in 2025 had not experienced an eviction in the year prior, a number that Melton believes challenges the stigmas surrounding eviction. He added that the Center’s data was similar to findings from the Child Poverty Action Lab and Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, validating the study’s results.
“If it were really just the lazy deadbeats being lazy deadbeats, you would expect a higher recidivism rate. The fact that most of these people don’t repeat does indicate that these are shocks to their personal economic systems,” Melton said. “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.”
The Center does not vet clients or have eligibility requirements for representation, which Melton says allows lawyers to represent nearly “an entire docket” in court. While a background check process could potentially help weed out serial offenders, Melton does not believe that number is large enough to enact a policy that would bar the Center from representing as many people as it does.
Only 4% of the Center’s sample had three or more evictions within a 12-month period, the study found. A rent payment doesn’t suddenly go away when the Center represents a person, so Melton believes the fact that there aren’t more people who face repeated eviction notices within a one-year period shows that “something constructive” can happen when tenants have access to due process.
When Melton talks to individuals facing eviction, a majority share that unexpected emergencies played a role in their inability to make rent: a car needing new tires, an hourly worker taking a few days off to stay home with her sick children, or childcare falling through. Those “external shocks” can be the tipping point for a family with “a budget that’s already stretched to its limit.”
“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,” Melton said. “And from a policy perspective, it makes sense to help those people.”
He believes the data also shows that most people who are behind on their rent need “just a little more time” to get caught up. For individuals who faced multiple evictions, the court filings were submitted, on average, 93 days apart. The average length between someone being late on rent and the case showing up in court, on the other hand, is 21 days.
If the Center were winning on technicalities and delaying the inevitable, Melton said, you’d see landlords filing a proper eviction lawsuit within 72 hours of the first case closing. Then that person would return to court in about three weeks. Instead, the 90-day gap suggests to Melton that the households were able to “figure something out” and get back on track for a period before falling behind again.
He plans to dig deeper into the underlying factors leading to repeat offending and hopes to identify shared characteristics across the demographic that could be used to identify at-risk renters. Those findings could be especially useful in policy discussions the next time state legislators ask, “What’s the point?”
“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.”
