By Leah Waters
COVID-era renter protections helped Dallas County residents keep their homes and care for their families during the pandemic, a study says.
But now that most of those protections have expired, more people are falling behind on rent and credit card payments, putting them at greater risk for eviction.
Researchers found that Dallas County ZIP codes with a higher share of residents of color were especially hit hard compared with other neighborhoods in the metro area. Without protections in place to shield them, renters are more likely to be forced out of their homes.
Xiaohan Zhang, a senior economist in the communications and outreach department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, helped author the report.
“We work with a lot of local organizations, local government, nonprofit organizations to understand the impact of monetary policy on low- and moderate-income communities and also how to achieve full employment in low- and moderate-income communities,” Zhang said. “Eviction, despite sounding not about employment, is actually highly connected to the economic well-being of those communities.”
The researchers examined eviction filings and credit card delinquency rates in Dallas County, comparing data from December 2019 to February 2020 to data from June through August 2021.
After looking at county-level eviction and loan-level credit card data, the findings showed a dual benefit to residents’ broader financial well-being, by keeping them housed and allowing them to pay credit cards, with housing stress being only one part.
All of the communities of color in Dallas County experienced a significant drop in both eviction and credit card nonpayment rates while protections were in place, based on loan-level data from the Equifax/FRB New York Consumer Credit Panel produced by the credit reporting firm and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The implications of this research could be significant to policymakers and communities, said Mark Melton of the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center, a nonprofit founded in 2020 to support low-income renters with legal aid.
“There’s a lot of life-altering things that happen that could have been stopped with relatively small interventions,” Melton said. “And these small interventions help to stabilize people, most of whom recover into a state of independence.”
When communities lack tools to intervene in their communities with autonomy, they often must depend on other interventions that are much more expensive and intrusive, Melton said.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he said.
Communities of color
The study defined a community of color as an area of a ZIP code where the top one-third of residents are people of color.
Higher rates of eviction, unemployment and homelessness have historically been linked to communities of color, Zhang said. Even when setting aside economic factors, communities of color still have a higher likelihood of facing eviction.
Seven of the 22 Dallas County ZIP codes without a high share of residents of color experienced large declines in credit card delinquencies when evictions fell significantly, the study found.
Credit card delinquency rates in Los Angeles County remained relatively unchanged. The area is another major metro with a large share of residents of color, where a local eviction moratorium continued past the federal cut-off, researchers found.
“Applying the findings of Dallas County more broadly to other metros in the United States, we find evidence of benefits that could arise should more attention be focused on ensuring housing stability for vulnerable households,” the researchers wrote.
Local eviction filings reached a five-year high last fall just as federal rent relief funds tied to COVID dried up. Since August’s high of 4,355 eviction filings, Dallas County landlords have filed on average 3,420 evictions per month, according to data from the Dallas-based nonprofit Child Poverty Action Lab, which receives new eviction filing data daily but updates the North Texas Eviction Project with the new data weekly.
Dallas County evictions increased from a low of 46 in April 2020 to a high of 4,106 in March 2022, following the expiration of the Texas moratorium, according to the report.
The number of delinquent Dallas County credit card holders increased from a low of 99,920 in May 2021 to 123,720 in June 2022, the report shows.
In the past two years, Dallas County has experienced a sharp decline in housing affordability, especially for low-income renters.
Dallas-Fort Worth ranks 20th among 100 U.S. cities where affordability is shrinking at the fastest rate, according to the National Equity Atlas, a report card on racial and economic equity compiled by PolicyLink and the University of Southern California.
PolicyLink is a national research and action institute that focuses on policies affecting low-income communities and communities of color.
Nitzan Tzur-Ilan, a research economist, and Emily Perlmeter, senior advisor in the community development department, also helped author the report.
The study also found that renter protections correlated with an increase in spending on food and reduced anxiety over food security.
That aligns with previous research that found interventions like renter protections allow lower-income households to redirect their scarce resources to more urgent needs, like food and health, especially among Black and African American households.
