Amid high rents, eviction filings in major Texas cities soar above pre-pandemic levels

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 prepandemic 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.

That has left vulnerable renters in a pinch at a time when they're under more pressure than ever from the state's high housing costs. As the Texas economy boomed in the pandemic era and demand for housing skyrocketed, rents in the state's major urban areas increased by double digits.

A record 2.1 million renters, more than half of the state's renters households, are “cost-burdened,” a recent Harvard University report found — meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, leaving them with fewer dollars to spend on household costs like food, health care and transportation. Those most affected by Texas' rising rents are low-income earners, who face a dire shortage of affordable housing and have seen their options for cheap rental housing further diminished amidst the state's economic boom.

“Renters are no better off in the state of Texas than they were before the pandemic,” said Ben Martin, research director for Texas Housers, a research and advocacy group.

In a state with some of the country's weakest protections for renters, lawmakers last year didn't extend relief to tenants. Texas legislators left renters out of a $12.7 billion property tax-cut package that included $5.6 billion in direct relief for homeowners, though proponents of the legislation have argued the tax cuts landlords will see on their rental properties will trickle down to tenants.

Lawmakers also barred cities from enacting additional tenant protections, a move aimed squarely at rules in Austin and Dallas that gave tenants more time to make good on their rent before their landlords filed