As more renters struggle to afford housing, Texas landlords are filing more evictions than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic — and tenants have few, if any, protections to keep them housed.
Landlords filed more than 177,000 eviction cases in the Houston, Dallas, Austin and Fort Worth areas in 2023, according to records tracked by Eviction Lab , a research center based at Princeton University that tracks eviction filings. The figure represents a slight uptick from 2022, the first full year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal government’s nationwide eviction moratorium. In Houston and Fort Worth, eviction filings have consistently exceeded pre-pandemic levels for nearly two years.
“Cities in Texas used to be some of the more affordable ones in the country,” said Adam Chapnik, a research specialist at Eviction Lab. “It’s not like that anymore. A lot of renters are facing this new reality and the laws don’t exist to protect them.”
Some $1.8 billion in federal rent relief flowed to Texas over the course of the pandemic, helping more than 265,000 families keep a roof over their heads. Now that money has all but run out. Texas shuttered its statewide rent relief program last summer along with a sister program aimed at diverting tenants from eviction. Most local governments, too, have closed their rental assistance programs for lack of federal funds.