Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center

The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center’s mission is to promote housing justice and stability by ensuring the protection of tenant’s rights through the provision of passionate and committed lawyers at no cost to the tenant. 

The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center (DEAC) has changed drastically since its grassroots inception in March 2020. Historically, in the United States, tenants who attend their eviction hearings without an attorney have a 3% chance of winning their case, regardless of the information they present. By providing pro bono legal defense for tenants facing eviction, we have been able to assist our local neighbors in remaining housed, with a success rate of 58%. 

This success means our most vulnerable neighbors in our local community are allowed to remain in their homes, tax our local infrastructure and financial systems less, and get back on their feet faster in order to continue to maintain self-sufficiency on their own and for generations to come. 

The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center (DEAC) is here to disrupt the system, not triage it. We feel that there is a spectrum of housing insecurity, ranging from those individuals and families facing an immediate, oftentimes short-term threat of housing insecurity or instability, to those individuals and families experiencing long-term homelessness. 

The many nonprofits focus on those experiencing long-term homelessness because they are the ones with the most critical, immediate needs.  With a myriad of organizations to assist those facing long-term homelessness, we focus on those persons facing immediate threats of housing insecurity and instability. By focusing on situations of immediate, short-term insecurity or instability where people are struggling to make ends meet circumstantially we can help prevent persons from progressing further towards a lifetime of homelessness. Nonprofits do a good job typically of triaging the situations they encounter, but their efforts are diluted by the sheer scale of the problem. 

Additionally, a primary driver of homelessness is evictions. Traditional legal aid services have too much red tape to effectively address the issue en masse. However, our unique approach to reducing homelessness by reducing unlawful evictions consistently results in thousands of competently represented tenants annually minimizing unlawful evictions across entire communities. Protecting tenant rights ultimately falls into three categories. Our process works by combining these elements: 

- Saturation Theory – providing at least one eviction defense DEAC attorney in every eviction court every day, actively advising, representing and educating clients both inside and outside of the courtrooms; 

- Advocacy – developing a legislative agenda at all levels of government, as well as community outreach and education (in both English and Spanish); and

- Impact Litigation – attacking unconstitutional laws and unlawful eviction suits, repair and remedying cases to address inhabitable conditions resulting from a landlord’s refusal to make repairs, unlawful lockets, and utility termination, and Fair Housing litigation. 

Additionally, our clients typically have social service needs far beyond housing security. They need food, transportation to be able to work, daycare for their kids, medical care, and many other basic needs that so many take for granted. In response to those acute needs we see firsthand, we have built relationships with community partners so that we can refer our clients to other providers to holistically address their needs in hopes of restabilizing their lives, and to not duplicate services.  We have been instrumental in organizing collaborative groups to address issues at scale, while it is technically outside our three main scopes of service. 

The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center believes that the pandemic coupled with an affordable housing crisis created a critical eviction issue and housing displacements of mass proportions, which can be assisted with pro bono legal defense.