Legal aid groups and housing advocates say there simply aren’t enough lawyers to keep up with the sheer volume of eviction filings.
A writ of possession is taped to the door of an apartment at the Life at Jackson Square apartments on April 11, 2023, in Houston.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.
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.
Lawmakers who pushed for the legislation and landlord groups argued that allowing cities to write their own eviction laws created inconsistent judicial standards across the state. Chris Newton, Texas Apartment Association executive vice president, said the law was “desperately needed to provide uniformity across the rental industry … as companies dealt with a patchwork of regulations across jurisdictions, resulting in increased costs of operations that impact property owners.
There’s at least one bright spot for tenants. Before the pandemic, it was rare for tenants facing eviction to have a lawyer represent them in court. That’s still true, but it’s more common now to find legal aid lawyers offering free legal representation at justice of the peace courts, which hear eviction cases.
“When tenants have legal representation, their outcomes tend to be a lot more favorable,” said Brianna Harris, Child Poverty Action Lab’s director of housing initiatives. Harris County commissioners in December allocated $4 million in federal pandemic relief funds to expand legal aid services across the county’s 16 justice of the peace courts, on top of a similar $4 million investment in March.
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