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Dallas renters could see more clear communication about eviction notices and timelines, as well as in more languages than English, if the city adopts recommendations made by city staff.
Dallas’ Assistant City Manager Elizabeth Cedillo-Pereira has recommended three changes to the proposed permanent eviction ordinance. One is that the ordinance be publicly available in English, Spanish and Vietnamese.
Staff also recommends revising the notice of a proposed eviction and the fact sheet landlords would be required to give tenants facing eviction so people can better understand the legal jargon.
A significant recommendation would be to simplify the time period between when a tenant gets an eviction notice from their landlord and when they must contact the landlord and potentially work out a payment plan for any rent they owe.
The draft of the ordinance shared with council members on Friday follows the city council’s approval of a temporary ordinance in November that shortened the time landlords must wait to evict.
The temporary ordinance currently allows renters to claim that they fell behind on rent because of “unforeseen economic hardship,” replacing a provision for citing the impact of COVID-19, which reform advocates say is too hard to prove.
If a tenant can show they are seeking rental assistance, then they get more time to pay back payments owed to their landlord, according to the ordinance.
Mark Melton of the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center said Texas is one of five or six states without a right-to-cure law for tenants facing eviction.
The Lone Star State’s justice of the peace courts often are referred to by legal aid organizations assisting low-income renters as the “wild, wild west.” Melton says the landlord-tenant relationship dynamic is like a football field built on the side of a mountain.
“The landlords get to score touchdowns by running downhill, and the tenants are forced to run uphill,” he said. ” They never switch sides. It’s a completely unfair system that results in unrepresented tenants losing eviction cases they should have won at a rate of 82% of the time.”
A right to cure would give tenants a right to pay 100% of their rent and avoid eviction. Melton says this just makes things a little less unfair for renters.
The Apartment Association of Greater Dallas said in a statement that the permanent eviction ordinance draft doesn’t address the need for financial relief for landlords or tenants and adds confusion to Texas’ legal process.
“There remains an additional complexity to the patchwork of regulations that vary from city to city — a situation where a property on one street could have different regulations than a property the next street over,” said Jason Simon, the apartment association’s director of government affairs. “That’s why the state of Texas governs the eviction process through the Texas Property Code, which ensures that procedures are balanced, fair and equally and consistently applied statewide.”
Simon said that a real solution would be making more renters aware of their options and responsibilities instead of giving them more time to make payments. The association supports the enhanced Notice of Renters’ Rights in an effort to educate tenants on rental assistance resources, best practices for communication with property managers and more, the statement said.
Local eviction filings reached a five-year high last fall just as federal rent relief funds tied to COVID-19 dried up.
Dallas County landlords have filed on average 3,420 eviction cases per month since September, according to data from the Dallas-based nonprofit Child Poverty Action Lab.
According to the latest available data from the U.S. Census American Communities Survey, Dallas County in 2021 had more than 482,000 renter-occupied housing units.