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In 2025, the city of Dallas budgeted nearly $1 million toward an eviction advocacy program, although those funds never materialized. Now, officials have suggested scrapping the program entirely.
Dallas is going through a particularly difficult season this year. Facing a $51 million budget shortfall, officials are weighing significant reductions to the parks budget and have already begun laying off library employees. More layoffs are expected, and if the city proceeds with a proposal presented to the council last week, remaining employees may lose access to their copay health plan.
Part of the potential savings identified in City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert’s $5.66 billion draft budget for the upcoming fiscal year is a roughly $950,000 reduction in funding for an eviction advocacy program. Created last year to provide free legal representation to low-income Dallasites facing eviction through a public-private partnership, the collaboration never came to fruition because of, as a city of Dallas spokesperson told the Observer in an email, “a lack of funding.”
And now, the would-be program appears headed for the scrapyard unless council members vote to back it through a budget amendment.
Mark Melton is a tax attorney and founder of the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center. His nonprofit was one of the two vendors approved by the city’s procurement department for the program after a request for proposals was issued in early 2026 — the city’s fiscal year began in October 2025. He said his organization has counted on receiving the funding, but that uncertainty is now mounting.
“While I do maintain some level of hope, I’m very concerned because if it doesn’t happen, I have a million-dollar hole in a budget that I don’t have a million dollars to fill,” Melton said.
COVID protections and rising evictions
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the city received millions of dollars in federal relief funds for mortgage and rental assistance programs meant to stabilize a housing market shaken by furloughs and layoffs. The Office of Community Care (now reorganized under the Office of Housing and Community Empowerment) administered the city’s rental assistance program, under which Dallas renters were eligible for up to 18 months of rental assistance. The office has disbursed over $100 million in federal relief funds since 2020, according to the city’s dashboard.
Protections for renters also came in the form of a nationwide eviction moratorium ordered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in September 2020. A few months earlier, City Council approved its own eviction ordinance, requiring landlords to give renters 21 days’ notice of a potential eviction before posting a notice to vacate. After that, tenants had 60 days to prove hardship, apply for assistance and remedy outstanding rent.
As a result of assistance programs, evictions fell significantly in 2020. Monthly filings fell from over 4,000 in February 2020 to 191 in May, according to data tracking by Eviction Lab. The city and county also funded their own legal assistance programs for residents facing eviction.
“That was a function of government rent assistance and additional lawyers and courtrooms and protections for tenants during the pandemic that we had never had before and don’t have today, and so the one lesson we learned from the pandemic was those interventions worked,” Melton said. “The proof is in the pudding.”
However, as federal relief funds began petering out, rental assistance dried up and eviction protections expired. A judge ended the federal eviction moratorium in 2021, while the city of Dallas shortened the notice period before state legislation preempted the city’s action and eliminated the protections. In 2022, the city stopped accepting rental assistance applications entirely.
Eviction filings have since surged in Dallas County. In 2024, the Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL) reported 50,117 filings, the highest number in the 25 years the organization has tracked county data and roughly affecting 1 in 10 renters. At an April briefing, CPAL representatives told council members that nearly 28,000 eviction notices were filed in Dallas in 2025, and that filings have doubled since the end of COVID-era rent protections.
Saturation theory
Melton began the Dallas Area Eviction Center as an informal volunteer initiative in 2020, then founded it as a nonprofit in 2021. The organization provides pro bono representation for tenants facing eviction at justice of the peace courts in Dallas County. The goal is to provide a lawyer at each of the 10 JP courts in the county, allowing Melton and his team to reach a large number of tenants through what he calls “Saturation Theory.”
“[It] sounds crazy because how do you represent 50,000 people in a year?” Melton said. “The secondary thought that I had was, OK, all those evictions have to go through one of 10 JP courts in Dallas County. You can’t go anywhere else. So I don’t need to represent 50,000 people or be in 50,000 places at one time. I just need to be in 10.”
To date, the organization has represented over 60,000 clients. When it first started, his team had a win rate of roughly 97%, which Melton said was due to landlords filing improper notices and violating state law. That rate has since fallen to 58%, which he said is a win.
“Our goal one day is to lose every single case because we have trained the landlord community by creating accountability such that they will follow the rules, cross their t’s and dot their i’s,” he said. “And the tenant will then, even if we lose all the cases, still get the benefit of the time that they’re supposed to get for the soft landing.”
In 2024, Dallas County awarded the organization a $1.3 million grant as part of its Wrongful Eviction Prevention Program. Since then, the DEAC has provided legal assistance to more than 8,000 Dallas County residents through the county-funded program.
A 2024 study by the Perryman Group found that when eviction representation is provided to 5,000 tenants, city and county governments save $40.68M annually. That’s because, Melton said, staving off evictions provides stability, both economic and social.
“People are able to continue to work and be productive, and spend money at the grocery store and whatever else they’re doing,” Melton said. “They’re still earning and spending, which has an economic impact.”
What happened?
The city first began funding legal eviction advocacy for the Dallas Eviction Assistance Initiative in 2021 through a contract with Legal Aid of North Texas. Council members approved several subsequent extensions, with the last approved in 2024 and documented as expiring in January 2025. That’s where, presumably, the new program would have served as a replacement.
Melton said he lobbied council members and staff to include funding for an eviction advocacy program before last year’s budget was adopted. In its final approved version, the budget included $950,000 from the general fund and $50,000 in COVID-era federal relief funds, bringing the initiative’s total balance to about $1 million.
The first signs of trouble, Melton said, came when the city took months to put out a request for proposals after the budget was approved. DEAC then submitted its proposal, which was subsequently approved — with one caveat. Funding for the program he advocated for would be split 50/50 between DEAC and another vendor, which he said was counterproductive, as the other vendor could not have provided the same depth of service.
“That’s ridiculous,” Melton said. “I mean, imagine this way: if you needed someone to dig 100 ditches, and you had one group that literally already had people in the hole digging those 100 ditches, all 100 of them, and you decided to take half the money and give it to someone else who, at best, could dig 10, how does it make sense to split that?”
And then, in June, staff recommended that the city council reject both bids. Their reasoning, they said, was that performance criteria had not been added to the procurement process, as Tolbert told the council, “this is the first time that we’ve done this,” and “I think we’ve learned some things through this process.”
Melton said the decision came after he pushed back on the procurement process and staff told him they had concerns about the vendors’ ability to fulfill the contract, which didn’t make sense to him given his organization’s existing performance. A subsequent RFP was supposed to be put out after a reevaluation, but by that time, the city’s $51 million budget gap had become apparent, a hiring freeze had been announced and departments were being asked to identify up to 15% in cuts to their general fund budgets.
So, where did the money go? A city spokesperson did not respond to that question, but based on a briefing delivered to the city council’s finance committee yesterday, it ostensibly went to fill the widening gaps in the city’s budget over the last year: police overtime, public safety hiring and employee healthcare costs.
“If I’m looking at things to cut, the last thing I’m going to cut is the million-dollar expenditure that puts 10s of millions of dollars back into my budget by saving me downstream costs,” Melton said. “And this is one such thing, right? I can’t imagine that there’s any other program anywhere in the city budget that has the same return on investment as this one.”
Now, with Tolbert’s proposed budget expressly cutting $949,245 — roughly the amount originally allocated to the program from the general fund — the only hope appears to be a push by the council to restore it to the budget.
“Short of that happening, this thing’s dead,” he said.
‘A promise’
Council member Chad West said we have a “housing crisis” in April as staff briefed the council on high cost burdens for renters and homeowners, a lack of affordable housing and climbing eviction rates. Staff told council members at the briefing that roughly 50% of Dallas renters are cost-burdened.
In a statement, council member Gay Donnell Willis said she was looking into what happened with the procurement process and considering how to balance housing priorities with financial constraints.
“I’m currently looking at how the city can offer support to organizations that ensure the lawful process is followed when a resident receives a notice of eviction,” Willis wrote. “The budget is tight, but turning off the spigot of homelessness is a sensible investment.”
Bryan Tony, the executive director of the Dallas Housing Coalition, told the Observer that he was “disappointed” to learn that the subsequent RFP was never issued and that funding is now in jeopardy of being eliminated entirely.
“We’ll be watching closely the budget amendment presentation to see if there’s enough support among the council to reinstall that $1 million,” he said. Whether or not they do, there are a couple more opportunities before the final budget is adopted in October, so we’ll be ready to mobilize our numbers as needed.”
The City Council is set to meet for a budget workshop at 9 a.m. Wednesday at Dallas City Hall.
“You would have at least expected a promise to be kept in a new budget cycle,” Tony said.
