3 November 24–30, 2022 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Month XX–Month XX, 2014 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER | Contents | Unfair Park | sChUtze | featUre | night+Day | CUltUre | Movies | Dish | MUsiC | ClassifieD | Buying Time for TenanTs Lessons learned during the COVID pandemic are helping create new strategies for stemming homelessness. By JacoB Vaughn C hantel Hardaway is a single mother of seven living in North Texas. On July 27, as she lay in a hospital after giving birth to a son, a Dallas County justice of the peace court took up her eviction case, and because she didn’t appear, the court ruled in the landlord’s favor. “I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Hardaway said. Eventually, someone put her in touch with lawyer Mark Melton. Ever since, Melton and his nonprofit Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center have been doing what they can to keep Hardaway and her family off the streets and out of emergency homeless shelters. The nonprofit was able to stall the family’s eviction for a while, but eventually had to move them into a hotel, where they’ve been staying for the last six weeks. “They took care of me and my children. They told me to just trust them and they wouldn’t let me fall,” Hardaway recalled. “I didn’t understand at the time because I’ve dealt with so many people trying to get over on me. So ... I had to just step out on faith and learn to trust someone because this was a new situation for me and my children. It was something that I thought that I would never have to face.” This is part of a different approach advocates have been deploying to combat homelessness. Called diversion, it boils down to doing everything possible to keep people out of emergency shelters. The thinking is that putting people up in a hotel for a few days or trying to negotiate with a landlord to buy more time on unpaid rent is far cheaper than letting someone get evicted and end up in a shelter. As the state of evictions enters a new post-pandemic normal, housing advocates aren’t sure what to expect next. That’s why they’re using strategies like diversion and rushing to implement more safeguards for tenants facing evictions. The Child Poverty Action Lab has been tracking evictions in North Texas throughout the pandemic. So far this year, Dallas County landlords have filed nearly 60,000 evictions. The city of Dallas accounts for about 37,000 of them. A federal eviction moratorium enacted during the height of the COVID pandemic spared many people from getting kicked out of their homes, but it expired last year, and the number of filings have seen an upward trend since. Ashley Flores, senior director at Child Poverty Action Lab, has been watching it in real time. “Once the federal eviction moratorium was lifted in August of 2021, we really saw eviction filings rise pretty steadily and more steeply than we had before,” Flores said. “August 2022 was actually, for Dallas County, a record-breaking month. There were 4,355 evictions filed in August for Dallas County, and that’s the highest one- month total we’ve got in our data set going back to January 2017.” September and October saw fewer eviction filings, and it’s hard to say exactly why. One factor that could have contributed to fewer evictions in October is that justice of the peace courts, which handle eviction cases, were closed for the last four days of the month. It’s even harder to say what comes next. Mike Brooks >> p4 President and CEO of Family Gateway Ellen Magnis helps families process eviction.