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The Lawyer Who Landlords Don’t Want to See in Court

Attorney Mark Melton started helping people on Facebook during the pandemic.

Before he knew it, he’d assembled the country’s only group of lawyers focused full time on stopping illegal evictions—and saving taxpayers millions.

Mark Melton stands in the eye of a storm, a waiting area outside the 1-1 Justice of the Peace Court, in the South Dallas Government Center, an uninspiring building off Interstate 20.

Two other lawyers whip around the room, clutching clipboards and trying to reach about two dozen tenants in the next 20 or so minutes before court is called into session.

Two legal assistants sit at a card table, hurrying through paperwork with clients.

Melton, a partner at Holland & Knight who specializes in tax law, has the height and build of an edge rusher, one who prefers Maker’s Mark to protein shakes, with a charcoal beard and a fleeing hairline.

Today, he’s wearing a tailored navy blue suit with a baby blue tie, a lighter blue dress shirt, and black Oxfords.

If the outfit doesn’t make it clear enough, Melton, 46, is perched near a sign that reads, in English and Spanish, “FREE ATTORNEY FOR TENANTS.”

Sixty-one cases are on this Friday’s eviction docket.

Years of data show that without an attorney arguing their case, nearly all of them will lose their apartments in a matter of minutes.

The attorneys are here to stop that, if they can.

“This is a well-oiled machine now,” Melton says, still avoiding the fray. “I think I’ll fuck it up if I jump in.”

The machine is the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center, a team of 10 lawyers and seven support staffers.

Housing experts have not been able to find another operation like it in the entire country.

Legal Aid works in the same space but is federally funded and far more limited in terms of whom it can serve.

Melton started this work with his wife, Lauren, in the first week of the pandemic.

It began as a Facebook post to explain how business owners could navigate lockdown.

Then it morphed into tenant advocacy and took over their lives.

Four years later, and three years after incorporating the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center, Melton spends his time fundraising, educating justices of the peace about housing law, advocating to elected officials, and recruiting more attorneys, doing the work that makes the machine more efficient.

Today that means convincing at least one client that she needs help.

About half of today’s defendants will not show up at all, which is typical.

Maybe they couldn’t find transportation.

Maybe they felt the decision had already been made.

In his 1-1 Court, Justice of the Peace Thomas Jones will issue immediate eviction judgments on every contested case where the tenant is absent.

With minutes to go, attorney Nichole Harden is trying to get a woman wearing pajama pants and Crocs to sign her retainer for the day, which will allow her to represent the woman pro bono.

NICHOLE ALEXANDRA HARDEN Eligible to Practice in Texas

Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center

Bar Card Number: 24122110

“I don’t know what’s going to happen if you go up there by yourself,” Harden says. “But I will represent you, and I believe I can get it dismissed.”

The landlord filed the eviction under the woman’s middle and last names, which violates state property code.

She eventually signs, and Harden wins a dismissal an hour later.

Melton realized early in the pandemic that, without legal representation, tenants who face eviction were essentially being asked to argue in a language foreign to them.

Their reflex too often is to narrate intimate tragedies rather than point out that their landlord didn’t give them enough notice or didn’t deliver the notice in a legal fashion or didn’t file notice with the court using a business name as it is registered with the Secretary of State.

Judges need a legal argument, not an emotional one.

When he began, Melton suspected landlords weren’t following the law and that nobody was in court to check them.

The first year proved him right.

With three attorneys, they litigated 853 cases and won 96 percent of them, which saved taxpayers millions of dollars in support services that would otherwise have gone to evictees.

“It’s easy to win when you’re right,” Melton says. “And landlords just don’t do it right. Ninety-six percent of the time.”

Mark Melton was once evicted himself.

In 1999, he was 21, a newly married father of a 3-year-old and a 3-month-old.

He was living with his then wife, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he grew up, one of nearly 4,000 people employed by Commercial Financial Services, the nation’s largest debt collector at the time.

Melton says he “separated people from their money.”

But CFS filed for bankruptcy, and its CEO, Bill Bartmann, faced 58 federal counts related to defrauding investors.

Though he was found not guilty, the company shuttered.

Melton, through no fault of his own, lost his income, then his rental home.

Desperate, he moved his family to Dallas in search of work.

He went to downtown office buildings, punching random floors in elevators, popping out to ask receptionists for job applications.

This was how Melton came to understand the vicissitudes of life.

He’d grown up in a household with a father who had interesting notions about his relationship with the federal government.

He was about 5 years old when he saw a story on the local news about his dad’s TV and VCR repair store being seized by the IRS for nonpayment of taxes.

“He thought that the constitutional amendment that allowed for income tax was bullshit, and he shouldn’t have to pay taxes,” Melton says.

Rush Limbaugh’s voice echoed through his childhood home.

His dad listened to Jerry Falwell sermons.

Before his eviction, Melton says, he was a “Trump Republican before it was cool.”

Lazy people relied on the safety net.

But now here he was, after the collapse of CFS, waiting in line at a county clinic to get free vaccinations for his kids.

“I’m everything that I never thought I would be,” he says. “Like, God, where are my bootstraps?”

He was humbled.

And radicalized.

He’d done everything he’d been told would secure him stability, and he was still struggling.

The only reason he found an apartment, he says, is that a landlord near Five Points—a crime hotspot near Park Lane, east of Central—told him they “needed more White people in this neighborhood.”

He could skip the $495 rent until he found a job.

His infant slept in a fold-out baby bed in a closet.

His daughter slept in the living room.

But they had a roof.

He enrolled in junior college in Tarrant County and paid the bills with cold-calling sales jobs and a night gig bouncing at a country bar.

Afterward, he earned a master’s in taxation at UT Arlington and began working at an accounting firm in Fort Worth after graduating.

The high school moot court champion liked arguing, so he decided to pursue law school, eventually taking night classes at SMU.

He graduated in 2008, less than a decade after he was nearly penniless in Five Points.

Then came a tax law job at Hunton Andrews Kurth and, in 2018, partnership at Holland & Knight.

It wasn’t lost on him that he wouldn’t have gotten there without catching some breaks.

And so, two decades later, when he took to Facebook to explain how business owners could operate on the right side of the law during a pandemic, he was struck by the comments to his posts.

Many people—regular folks—were running out of money to buy food and pay their rent.

Melton started translating the Texas property code for people who were about to lose their homes.

To help in the near term, the Meltons sent money over Zelle and Venmo to commenters who said they couldn’t pay their bills.

They helped people move in the middle of the night, becoming masked regulars at a hotel near their home, just east of Ferguson Road.

Melton joined eviction proceedings on Zoom, representing clients he’d never met.

He used Facebook to recruit hundreds of attorneys to help for free.

He organized furniture drives and GoFundMe accounts.

He advised the city on drafting an eviction moratorium.

Lauren started studying eviction laws.

The vaccines came and businesses reopened—but the eviction filings kept growing.

So the Meltons kept at it.

They became minor media darlings, sharing their story with the AP and CBS Evening News.

In 2021, with a $50,000 grant from the Meadows Foundation, Melton filed paperwork to start the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center as a nonprofit.

He and Lauren work for free.

Until recently, evictions in Dallas were something of a mystery.

Justice of the Peace courts, of which Dallas County has 10, are not courts of record, meaning there are no stenographers.

The elected judges hear small claims, with lawyers rarely present, so there’s little oversight.

The judges even control how they record outcomes.

The county provides them with software to track their cases, but the judges don’t have to use it.

Before the pandemic, no one really knew how many evictions were being filed in Dallas County.

This mystery attracted the attention of the Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL), a local nonprofit that studies housing insecurity in North Texas.

Before the pandemic, CPAL partnered with Dallas County to track evictions for the first time by collecting each day’s docket.

In 2019, there were 43,306 evictions filed across the county’s 10 JP courts. The

CDC issued an eviction moratorium six months into the pandemic, cutting the figure in half, but by 2022 the number returned to its previous level, and this year it is on track to top 40,000 again.

Dallas has the fifth-highest filing rate per capita among large American cities, according to data collected by the Eviction Lab.

The median amount the tenant owed has tripled over this period, according to CPAL, from $950 in 2019 to $2,530 today.

If you find it hard to muster sympathy for someone who doesn’t pay his rent, consider the cost of an eviction to taxpayers.

When people lose their homes, they soak up social services.

A study by the Waco-based Perryman Group found annual savings of $40 million for the city and county when free legal services are provided to just 5,000 tenants facing eviction.

“The cost burden is largely assumed by departments within the city and county budgets due to uncompensated healthcare, criminal justice and shelter costs, along with downstream tax benefits,” the report found.

As CPAL and Melton’s Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center gathered data on the JP courts, it appeared that landlords have been forum-shopping, filing evictions in a court where they expect the scales of justice to tilt their way.

Judge Jones’ 1-1 Court in southern Dallas is by far the busiest of Dallas County’s 10 JP courts.

Last year, landlords filed 9,924 evictions in his court.

The next-highest-volume court is 5-1, which includes Northwest Dallas and Cockrell Hill, where landlords filed 5,007 evictions last year.

Right next door to Judge Jones’ 1-1, Judge Valencia Nash oversees 1-2.

Only 2,333 evictions were filed there.

This part of town is dense with apartments and includes some of the poorest ZIP codes in the county, but the different caseloads between the two next-door courts show that something else is in play.

Harden, the attorney, says that Judge Nash studies cases before they come to her, looking for errors that might lead to a dismissal.

Judge Jones considers only what is presented to him in court.

That was the next matter CPAL studied, not just how many evictions were filed but how those cases resolved.

The organization parked SMU law students in five JP courts from November 2022 through April 2023.

They found that judges sided with landlords in just 7 percent of cases when tenants had legal representation.

Those without an attorney lost nearly 70 percent of the time.

Melton sees this as evidence that landlords aren’t following the law.

When cases get dismissed because of an error, tenants get more time to settle their debt.

Melton worked with the United Way to secure rent relief, and his team works with tenants to find other ways to reduce their debt.

“I’m still not necessarily opposed to the idea of eviction,” Melton says. “I understand that there needs to be positive and negative incentives to do the right things, however you define that. But whatever those processes are, they should be fair and equitable.”

The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center wasn’t the first to provide free representation to eviction clients.

That work has long been the realm of Legal Aid, which, like Melton’s team, sets up a table and tries to find tenants who need representation.

But Legal Aid is funded by the Legal Services Corporation, a congressionally created nonprofit that sends money to attorneys all over the country to represent low-income Americans on matters as varied as divorce to wills and estates.

Because the money is federal, it often limits whom its attorneys can serve.

Three of Melton’s attorneys once worked for Legal Aid, which they speak highly of, but they all wanted to do more.

“Whenever Mark snatched me up, one of the key things I told him in building this, I said no government funds,” says Stuart Campbell, the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center’s managing attorney. “No funds that give us red tape.”

STUART P. CAMPBELL Eligible to Practice in Texas

Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center

Bar Card Number: 24096777

Melton’s goal is what he calls “saturation theory.”

Put attorneys in every JP court and scale the effort.

That rush to register clients in the 1-1 Court doesn’t happen if intake involves checking income or immigration status.

He sees it as a waste of time that could be spent getting tenants on retainer.

The philanthropy class is responding to the model.

The center’s revenue grew from $300,000 in 2021 to $1.6 million in 2023, according to its tax documents.

In addition to the Meadows Foundation and the United Way, the center secured gifts from Margot Perot, the Dallas Foundation, the Williams Family Foundation, and the Carl B. and Florence E. King Foundation.

In March, Melton actually turned down $240,000 from the city’s leftover federal COVID-19 relief dollars.

Accepting the money would have required them to represent tenants only in districts 7 and 14, which includes Pleasant Grove and much of downtown and East Dallas.

As Melton told the team his decision over a Zoom call, Campbell shook his head knowingly.

“It would change our intake process in a way that I’m not willing to change it,” he said.

He’s hopeful the city will spend the federal dollars on something else, which would then free up an equivalent amount from the general fund, cutting the red tape.

A little after 1 pm on that Friday in March, Harden and her colleagues exit the 1-1 courtroom.

She represented 20 people, all of whom got to stay in their homes.

A day earlier, she’d gone 16-0.

The staff takes a group photo to mark their achievement, as they do every day in every court.

But for all this effort, Melton’s team is representing only about 13 percent of tenants who face eviction.

For years, this resource wasn’t available to the county’s most vulnerable residents.

Reality always sets in after court: Melton says he needs to hire another 10 attorneys.

The Eviction Cure

Here was Mark Melton, one of Dallas’s most decorated lawyers, stepping out of his milky white Cadillac Escalade as two dozen code-compliance officers swarmed one of the most crime-plagued spots in the city. Melton, who’s in his mid-forties, didn’t look the part of someone who steers billions of dollars’ worth of private equity deals each year. A sweat-stained purple Patagonia cap shaded his scruffy salt-and-pepper beard; an untucked T-shirt dangled loosely over his jeans. Melton has the throaty rasp of a chain smoker, and as he surveyed the spectacle, he deadpanned, “This is pretty normal.”

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The Rosemont at Meadow Lane apartments, just a few miles southeast of downtown, could easily pass for typical middle-class dwellings. Many of the roughly two hundred units are two-story townhomes, their facades accented with tasteful if weathered desert-hued stone. As the promotional materials would have it, the place exemplifies “luxury affordable living.”

In reality, city officials have identified the complex as an epicenter of violence, one of five spots where they’ve focused extra resources to disrupt deeply embedded criminal networks. Commotion, in other words, was nothing new. But on this searing afternoon last August, the offenses being documented by the officers laying siege to the complex weren’t carried out by residents or visitors. They were perpetrated by the apartments’ owners.

For weeks, as triple-digit temperatures transformed the city’s concrete expanses into a sprawling skillet, tenants had been pleading with management to repair or replace faulty air conditioners. According to several residents, these requests had been largely ignored. This was not only cruel and unlawful—a city ordinance requires that rental properties be outfitted to keep temperatures at a maximum of 85 degrees—it was also potentially deadly. At least 64 residents of Dallas County and neighboring Tarrant County died of heat-related causes in 2023, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. Statewide, more than 330 were killed by the blistering heat, a record toll in a year marked by record-shattering temperatures.

At the Rosemont, many of the residents were young families. They’d made pallets and slept together in their downstairs living areas to avoid the dangerously sweltering upstairs bedrooms. One single mother with five kids said she’d been without AC for two months. “They didn’t give me a unit, didn’t give me nothing. They just treated me like I was an animal,” she fumed. At one point she was hospitalized, comatose from diabetic complications, and even still, “They didn’t do nothing for me,” she said.

Such stories no longer surprise Melton. In addition to his lucrative corporate work, he’s the founder and head of the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center (DEAC), a nonprofit that has attracted national attention since its inception in 2020. In short order he’s become the go-to figure when tenants across the city are facing crises and have nowhere else to turn. In Dallas, as in other parts of the state, such crises are never-ending. “This is not a Dallas problem,” said Eric Kwartler, the Houston-based managing attorney of the eviction unit at Lone Star Legal Aid, the country’s third-largest pro bono firm. “This is a Texas problem. This is an everywhere problem, but especially in Texas because of our lack of protections.”

More than 37,000 evictions were filed in Dallas County in 2023, disrupting roughly 8 percent of renter households. That tally doesn’t include untold numbers of unofficial evictions, in which landlords oust renters from their homes without going through the courts. Melton has seen cases in which property owners have smashed a tenant’s electrical box with a sledgehammer, removed a home’s front door with a circular saw, and placed a two-by-four full of nails across a renter’s driveway to pop the tires of the family car. He’s taken a middle-of-the-night call from a twenty-year-old single mother whose landlord had employed gang members to pound on her doors and windows, trying to intimidate her into moving out.

A few years ago, he got word that a complex in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Cedar Crest was trying to evict more than seventy residents. When he showed up at the Volara apartments, multiple residents told him about long-running problems with their gas—they were unable to use their stoves or take hot showers. Melton stormed into the management office and threatened litigation. Days later, he got a call from a whistleblower, a former manager at Volara who made a startling claim about what was allegedly going on: a new owner had ordered employees to do anything necessary to rid the complex of Black residents and replace them with “better tenants.” Melton recorded the call, and he said he later played it in a courtroom, successfully abating the rash of evictions that had been filed. (The city attorney’s office subsequently investigated Volara, which has made significant improvements.)

Melton is quick to note that plenty of landlords in Dallas scrupulously maintain their properties and are patient with tenants who are struggling financially. And certainly some tenants unfairly try to game the system. But, Melton says, “there are a lot of slumlords, and the only message that they are able to understand is a smack in a courtroom.” That single mother suffering without AC at the Rosemont, Melton said, “is a perfect example of the average tenant we deal with, just getting f—ed three ways from Sunday, and with no recourse. Nothing she can do about it. She’s almost breaking down in tears just recounting it.”

When the Rosemont residents’ requests for working AC went unheeded, they appealed to the city.

Kevin Oden, the head of Dallas’s Office of Integrated Public Safety Solutions, a crime-prevention unit that operates independently of the police department, deployed a team to investigate. (The complex has “needed good, solid ownership for thirty years,” he said.) That’s when a scrum of code officers descended on the property, a clipboard-carrying battalion in khakis and navy polos. They split up and went door to door, discovering that roughly forty units didn’t have functioning ACs, many more than had been reported. (Tenants are often reluctant to report issues because they fear retaliation from their landlord.) The code officers ticketed the complex for every unit without cool air, and they planned to return in three days to see if the problem had been resolved. “I can’t compel them to do anything today,” a city official lamented.

The official told Melton that he’d called someone from Devco Residential Group, the out-of-state company that owns the apartment complex, and asked him to immediately install window units. The guy promised only to look into it. “If that’s his mindset,” the official said to Melton, “please do what you need to do to become his best friend.”

Melton smirked and said, “I will.” Presently he noticed the arrival of a news van from the local NBC affiliate, KXAS. “You want to do a TV interview?” Melton asked the official, who demurred. “I’ll do it,” Melton said. “I know how to apply pressure to these assholes.”

“And that’s why I appreciate you coming out,” the official said.

Melton strolled over and introduced himself to the KXAS reporter, who quickly mic’d him up. Melton then launched in as the camera rolled. “So far, the landlord has not committed to fixing all of this immediately,” he explained. “Unfortunately, this isn’t that rare of an instance. We see apartment complexes across the city, especially in poorer parts of town, that regularly don’t have AC.”

“And the landlords don’t care?” the reporter asked.

“It’s easy not to care when you’re not the person sitting in ninety-five-degree heat,” Melton shot back.

With that, he headed into the leasing office to confront the property manager. After swinging open the creaky, wood-paneled doors, he was met by the manager’s assistant, who said the manager couldn’t talk because she was in a meeting. (Management at the Rosemont did not agree to Texas Monthly’s interview requests, instead providing contact information for a public relations firm, which did not respond.) Melton handed the guy his card and suggested that the manager give him a call. “I’m an attorney,” he said. “I know the city has limited options, but we have a few more.” He went on to explain that it would be much cheaper—not to mention less painful—for the owner to address the problem now. “Otherwise, they’re going to have to do all that stuff anyway and then have to pay a bunch of lawyers and statutory civil fines.”

Then he was back outside. “That conversation is usually fairly effective in short order,” he said.

Air conditioners began arriving within days. The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center team at the Oak Cliff Government Center on May 24, 2024. The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center team at the Oak Cliff Government Center on May 24, 2024.Photograph by Trevor Paulhus

When Melton launched DEAC, in 2020, he figured it would be a temporary pandemic project. Instead, it became a second full-time job, albeit one he performs for free. He routinely puts in hundred-hour weeks, and up to 40 percent of that time is devoted to DEAC. He now has a paid staff of fifteen, and his wife, Lauren, serves as a director. (Neither of them takes a salary.)

Melton is an unassuming spitfire, simultaneously brash and understated, with a wry sense of humor and a habit of gnawing on his right index knuckle when mulling a complex problem, as if literally chewing it over.

The list of folks he has riled is long and distinguished: the Dallas mayor, powerful lobbyists, state legislators, countless landlords, local judges, and at least one member of the Texas Supreme Court.

“The bottom line is he’ll fight anybody if he thinks they’re wrong,” said Dallas County commissioner Andy Sommerman.

“This is just a massive industry, and he has set it on its ear by fighting on behalf of people who didn’t have a voice before.”

Sommerman, a personal injury trial lawyer, was an early mentor: he coached Melton to a national championship in moot court competitions when Melton was an undergrad at the University of Texas at Arlington, and then again when Melton won nationals in mock trial contests as a law student at Southern Methodist University.

“He has a calm temperament. You cannot rattle him. I don’t care what you come at him with,” Sommerman said. “And he also has an excellent mind for the law.”

Last summer a tenant represented by Melton’s group lost her eviction hearing, and the judge gave her a week to move out or appeal.

When she got home, she discovered that the landlord had already stopped by—smashing the front door in, bashing the air conditioner, and cutting some electrical wiring. Melton went on TikTok, where he has more than 13,000 followers, to vent.

“Why do people have to be assholes?” he began.

“Instead of just following the rules and being a decent human being, he decided to go in there and mess up the apartment, so she didn’t have a safe or secure place to stay for the following few days while she figures out what she’s going to do next.”

He concluded with a not-so-veiled threat: “I don’t think he’s going to like what happens next.”

The next afternoon, at a run-down county courthouse in Mesquite, just east of Dallas, Melton wore a crisply pressed navy suit accessorized with silver bulldog cuff links.

He secured a private appointment with justice of the peace KaTina Whitfield to brief her on the situation and then waited in a dingy, fluorescent-lit hallway for a public hearing with the client, an auburn-haired woman named Nicole Hernandez.

At one point he asked Hernandez what would’ve happened had his group not intervened.

“Oh, gosh, I would’ve been screwed,” she said. “I don’t even know, honestly. I slept in my car the first night.”

Hernandez had lost her job at a home health-care agency and was training to become a dog groomer at PetSmart, but in the interim she had fallen behind on rent. She’d tried to google what her rights were but quickly gave up. “Texas laws are just so confusing.”

One of Melton’s colleagues, an irreverent former criminal defense attorney named Jena Davidson, had initially represented Hernandez in eviction court and then brought her a portable AC when she learned what had transpired.

Davidson started doing eviction cases pro bono for Melton’s group early last year.

“She kicked so much ass,” said Melton, that he recruited her to join full-time.

Like Melton, she takes joy from the occasional confrontation. (Her Facebook page, labeled “That Attorney Jena,” features zany photos of her celebrating legal victories and sticking her tongue out.)

“If you keep it fun and entertaining, people will tune in,” she explained with an impish grin. On the rear window of her gray Dodge pickup, using hot pink and blue window chalk, she had scrawled “Big DEAC Energy.”

Melton had already arranged a bed at a Dallas shelter for Hernandez should she need it, but he reassured her that she would get some recompense for her troubles.

“There’s nothing I love more than finding a landlord that’s a bully, because they think they can get away with it, and then just f—ing them up,” he said.

Once inside the courtroom, as he recounted the saga to Judge Whitfield, he struck a far more analytical tone.

“That is just unbelievable,” the judge responded. She drafted a writ demanding that the landlord, who wasn’t present for the hearing, immediately repair the damage. She would dispatch a constable to deliver the orders, and Whitfield explained that if the owner didn’t soon comply, she’d have him handcuffed and hauled in.

Afterward, Melton lingered briefly in the parking lot. He wasn’t in a celebratory mood.

“This happens every day,” he said of the mistreatment of tenants. “But nobody knows.”

He was bent on changing that.

Conventional wisdom holds that evictions are a consequence of poverty, an idea so glaringly self-evident it hardly seems worth noting.

Yet it’s an incomplete narrative because the converse is also true: evictions often create poverty.

Losing your home tends to set off a disastrous domino effect. Tenants sometimes lose everything: their belongings may get piled up outside while they’re at work, and by the time they arrive to collect the pieces of their lives, scavengers have picked through them.

Driver’s licenses and Social Security cards go missing. Most homeless shelters require identification, but applying for a new license can take weeks, which means that for a while, you may not have the option of bunking in a shelter.

Folks who were already living paycheck to paycheck are plunged into desperation.

Those fortunate enough to secure a new place typically relocate to substandard housing, which can lead to job loss (transportation can be tricky) and children having to change schools midsemester.

The Child Poverty Action Lab, a Dallas-based nonprofit research group, found that in Dallas, evictions cause roughly 60 percent of student mobility, which stunts academic performance.

“If a student moves at least once in the middle of the year between kindergarten and third grade, when they get to their third-grade standardized-reading assessment, they perform significantly worse than other students,” said Ashley Flores, CPAL’s senior director. The downstream effects of eviction are lasting, even generational.

Displacement is also an expensive proposition for taxpayers. The Perryman Group, an economic consulting firm that was commissioned by CPAL to study the issue, found that in 2023, Melton’s group saved the city and county roughly $40 million in health-care, criminal justice, and shelter costs, among other economic impacts that would have resulted from evictions it had forestalled.

DEAC’s budget was $1.3 million, which means it delivered a roughly thirty-to-one return on investment.

Governments don’t track data on evictions, so CPAL collaborated with Dallas County to fill that gap.

The research outfit has since published several striking reports. It found that from 2017 to 2022, fully 77 percent of defendants in eviction cases had no other eviction filings. In other words, most evictees weren’t chronically delinquent.

“What that tells me is that, most likely, there was some financial shock,” Flores said. Missing the rent stemmed from a single calamity or multiple, simultaneous setbacks—temporary job loss, an unexpected hospital bill, a broken-down vehicle—that briefly caused them to come up short. “For many people, it’s the one time they fall behind, something happens, and they find their footing again.”

One factor compounding this dilemma: rising housing costs. When Flores crunched the numbers, she discovered that Dallas rents have shot up by one third since January 2020.

Today families at or below the area’s median income spend at least half their paychecks on housing, which frequently means they can’t meet daily needs without government assistance and often have to choose between buying groceries or paying rent.

The paucity of inexpensive housing is an acute crisis across the state—Texas has one of the biggest shortages of affordable rental units in the country.

And mounting rents aren’t squeezing only the poor.

Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies recently found that Texas is one of twelve states in which more than half of renters are “cost burdened,” meaning they spend at least 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities.

According to CPAL, the median income of a Dallas resident with a bachelor’s degree isn’t enough to afford the median rent in the city.

“I think that’s been particularly shocking for folks,” Flores said.

To allow renters to recover from the acute disruptions that can snowball into financial precarity, most states have enshrined “right to cure” laws, guaranteeing tenants a grace period during which they can pay their rent, plus any late fees.

“Texas is one of seven states in the country, by my count, that doesn’t have that,” said Ben Martin, the research director at Texas Housers, an Austin-based nonprofit.

“Texas is among the least renter-friendly states in the entire country. We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

Melton sees the human cost of these policies every day.

During last year’s legislative session, he partnered with state senator Nathan Johnson, a Democrat from Dallas, to try to get traction on a right to cure bill.

Melton knew the prospects were remote at best, but he was playing a long game. In Austin, he took meetings wherever he could get them.

That included a private confab with Brandon Creighton, a Republican senator based in the Woodlands, north of Houston. Sitting in a conference room adjacent to Creighton’s office, Melton pitched him on the idea.

Creighton seemed to sympathize with the import of such a bill, Melton said.

Later, though, Creighton told him the idea was dead on arrival.

“The Apartment Association doesn’t want us to do it, so we’re not going to,” Melton said Creighton told him.

(Creighton didn’t respond to an interview request.)

According to Martin, “The Texas Apartment Association is incredibly powerful at the state legislative level.”

Last year, the association’s political action committee doled out $162,000, including $7,500 to Creighton; Governor Greg Abbott was the only elected official who received more.

Creighton is also the owner of Creighton Realty Partners, a residential and commercial real estate firm that does business with influential landlords in Montgomery County, where he’s based.

For these reasons, Melton wasn’t all that surprised when Creighton worked to further erode tenant rights.

He authored a bill that would have banned local governments from adopting any measure that “prohibits, restricts, or delays” the delivery of a notice to vacate, the first step in the eviction process.

It prevailed in the Senate but stalled in the House.

Creighton then spearheaded the Senate campaign to pass the so-called Death Star law, which, once signed by Abbott, barred cities and counties from passing ordinances that go beyond what’s broadly allowed under state law, even in areas such as agriculture and labor, long considered the province of local government.

“Cities in Texas were starting to make moves to adopt some of these national best practices around right to cure,” Martin said. “And then the state took a step backwards and preempted that.”

Meanwhile, a slew of other state laws that leave tenants vulnerable remain on the books. Melton, though, discovered through his work in Dallas that the problems run far deeper: the few protections tenants are afforded in Texas are routinely ignored.

“Most people jump to the conclusion that if you got evicted, it’s because you did something wrong,” he said.

“You didn’t pay your rent and therefore you deserved it. And that’s the beginning and the end of the analysis. But it’s not accurate in any way, shape, or form.”

The majority of evictions are unlawful, he found.

Eviction courts are the domain of county-level elected judges who aren’t required to hold even the most basic credentials.

Some are blatantly biased in favor of landlords.

Others are openly vindictive toward tenants.

Melton regarded the entire system as profoundly flawed, and he began devising a remedy.

It all started, strangely enough, when a Facebook post in early 2020 went old-school viral.

At the time, Melton had already cemented his reputation as a tax attorney, a partner at the international firm Holland & Knight.

He was then in his early forties, with a gently receding hairline, and his salt-and-pepper beard was much lighter on the salt.

Though he’s never run for public office, Melton is deeply immersed in local politics.

City council candidates seek his endorsement. County commissioners ring him for advice.

Mayor Eric Johnson takes his calls.

(At least, he used to. When Johnson switched parties from Democrat to Republican last year, Melton dressed him down on social media, calling him a charlatan.)

In Dallas, Melton tends to know what’s going on long before the news appears in the papers.

Social media is Melton’s bully pulpit, with his eight-thousand-plus Facebook followers tuning in for unfiltered takes on political goings-on.

So that’s where he turned in the spring of 2020, as the first wave of pandemic restrictions and disruptions arrived.

Melton had gotten a look at the county’s shelter-in-place orders and knew the panic they would incite, especially among those certain to lose their paychecks as businesses shuttered.

On March 22 he sat down at his desk in his home office, a cigarette smoldering in the amber ashtray beside his keyboard.

Melton lives in a modest tan brick house in a working-class neighborhood in far East Dallas, worlds away from the aristocratic enclaves where many of his peers reside.

(“I refuse to live in the Park Cities,” he said. “Ever. Period. It’s like this little bubble that’s not real, and I just don’t have any desire to be a part of that.”)

His house is perpetually under construction, in a series of renovation projects that have taken years because he does the work himself, in the little spare time he has.

That included building and installing floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in his office, lined with presidential autobiographies (George W. Bush, Clinton, Obama), several volumes on the American Revolution, a collection of Dallas histories, and—his most treasured possession—a signed copy of Mother Teresa’s The Joy in Loving.

That spring evening, he opened Facebook and started typing.

“In light of the number of jobs lost this past week, I’ve had several questions regarding evictions,” he wrote.

He explained that county courts had suspended eviction hearings for sixty days, so tenants were provided some emergency protections.

But he also noted that it wasn’t yet clear what would happen when the moratorium expired.

Melton then tapped out the seemingly innocuous sentence that would upend his life: “Feel free to reach out to me if you receive an eviction notice and you have questions.”

Over the next week, he hardly slept because of all the panicked calls he fielded.

The Facebook post was shared and reshared, but many also got wind of his offer through word of mouth.

Melton didn’t know the first thing about eviction law, so he learned on the fly.

“People were scared. People just lost their jobs. You still have to pay your rent, and landlords are already calling,” he said.

He became a one-man legal aid operation.

By week’s end he’d lost track of how many families he’d helped to navigate the grim prospect of losing their home in those terrifying and uncertain early days of the pandemic.

And though he was physically and emotionally depleted, he couldn’t bear to turn anyone away.

He knew precisely what they were going through.

Melton grew up in Tulsa in the eighties, one of six kids in a devout, blue-collar family that lionized Ronald Reagan and tuned in daily to the Rush Limbaugh Show.

They were long-standing members of Victory Christian Church, which held Sunday services inside the nearly 9,000-seat basketball arena at Oral Roberts University.

Melton attended the church’s small private school; his graduating class numbered around fifty students.

His parents divorced shortly after he was born, and his stepfather, Gaylon McDonald, was an avid outdoorsman who cultivated in Melton a hardscrabble independence.

McDonald, who ran an electronics repair shop, was “like a f—ing NASA engineer with no degree,” Melton said. McDonald taught him how to construct a rudimentary shelter from mud and sticks, craft basic tools from wood and stone, and start a fire without a match.

Once, when Melton wasn’t much older than thirteen, McDonald dropped him off on the side of a forest-lined highway and equipped him with a compass, a map, a knife, some fishing line, and three matches.

He told him to hike into the woods and meet him at a designated spot on the map two days hence.

Melton made it.

McDonald found other creative ways to test him.

He once took Melton out to the garage and told him to replace the water pump on the family’s car.

Melton wasn’t strong enough to loosen the pump’s bolts.

It took him the better part of a day, but he found a way.

“Whatever the project was, I always figured it out,” he said. “And I eventually learned after a few years of these projects to not get frustrated, to just keep going, because there’s going to be a breakthrough point.”

From a young age, Melton also nursed an entrepreneurial streak.

At twelve, he noticed the budding pyrotechnic fantasies common to his fellow preteens, so he began buying matches in bulk and unloading them at five times the cost to other kids at school.

At fifteen he got a job selling pagers and cellphones at a mall kiosk.

He was paid on commission but quickly grasped that the real money was being made by those farther up the chain.

One day he dressed up in his Sunday best and persuaded his mom to drive him to the local corporate offices of American Paging.

There, he talked his way into a reseller contract.

Every day after school, he’d sit with the phone book splayed in front of him and make cold calls. He charged $10 a month per line, an $8 profit. By the time he finished high school, in 1995, he was making around $2,000 a month.

Melton’s mom told him that college was for rich kids, and anyway, he didn’t need a degree; no one else in his family had one. He graduated from high school a semester early and applied for a job at Commercial Financial Services, which occupied 51 floors of the glass-walled CityPlex Towers, on the southern edge of Tulsa. The CEO, a flamboyant entrepreneur named Bill Bartmann, told Melton he’d never hired anyone without a bachelor’s degree, but he agreed to give Melton a shot. His starting salary was around $20,000.

The company’s business model was simple: it bought overdue credit card loans from big banks for nickels on the dollar, then collected those unpaid debts from consumers and kept the profits. CFS became one of the fastest-growing businesses in America, and Bartmann, a pale-skinned caricature with hair so white that he resembled a Q-tip, landed on the Forbes list of the richest Americans.

Melton thrived. A hard worker unfazed by rejection, he spent his days cold-calling debtors and persuading them to pay their bills. In 1997, a year after Melton was hired, Bartmann paraded him onstage during a company retreat in Las Vegas, praising his performance and challenging others to keep pace with the teenage up-and-comer.

That same year, Melton met his first wife, Candiance, at a party thrown by his roommate. They married a month later. She already had a two-year-old daughter, and they were soon expecting a son. Melton felt he was settling into a version of the American dream. His salary had doubled, he’d purchased a house, and he was managing a team of twenty.

Then it all imploded. Accusations of accounting fraud brought ruin to CFS, not to mention jail time for Bartmann’s partner. (Bartmann was acquitted of all charges and later refashioned himself as a motivational speaker.) Over a few months beginning in January 1999, all four thousand of the company’s employees were let go, in a collapse so large it was later compared to Enron. With so many scrambling to find decent work in a midsize city, Tulsa’s job market was long on applicants and short on openings.

Without a college degree, Melton turned up nothing but dead ends.

Six months passed, and an eviction notice from the bank arrived in the mail.

Desperate for cash, he put up for sale nearly everything the family owned.

For the next few days, he watched in despair as strangers rambled through his home, picking through items he was once able to provide for his family—living room furniture, his toddler’s three-wheeler.

He and Candiance then crammed their few remaining possessions into their Honda Civic, buckled the two kids into the back seat, and headed to Dallas.

Melton had visited the city only once before, and he didn’t have a job or so much as a plan.

“I thought with all these big buildings and highways, surely there’s more opportunity there than there is in Tulsa,” he said.

His wife’s mother lived in Euless, just west of Dallas, and they briefly crashed at her apartment.

“I was raised to be self-sufficient, a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps kind of environment,” he said. “So the thought of having to live on my mother-in-law’s couch ate at me.”

He spent his days hitting every office building he could find, asking for work.

He stumbled into a few low-paying jobs and simultaneously searched for an apartment.

One afternoon he walked into a complex north of downtown and told the manager of his plight: he was looking for a small place while figuring out how to pay the bills.

The manager took a set of keys out of a drawer and slid them across the desk.

“Here’s the keys to a unit,” he said. “It’s kind of small. You can have it for $450 a month. We need more white people in this neighborhood. You can move in today. Let me know when you find work, and we’ll figure out the terms.”

Melton took him up on the deal, relieved to be catching a break, though the exchange stuck with him: “When people tell me white privilege doesn’t exist, I’m like, this was just the other day, man.”

His three-month-old son slept in the coat closet.

They carved out a spot for their daughter in the living room.

He and Candiance took the only bedroom.

They didn’t go out to eat.

They didn’t have cable TV.

“We didn’t do s—. I went to work and came home, and that was it.”

A few months passed, and he and Candiance and the kids returned to Oklahoma to get free medical care for his infant son at a Native American clinic.

On the way home, the boy started crying, hungry.

They were still two hours from Dallas, and they didn’t have any baby formula, so he pulled over at a small-town grocery store.

When he went to check out, his debit card was declined—his account was empty.

His son wailed for the rest of the drive.

“And that broke me in some way,” he said. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Why is this happening? I’ve never been lazy. I work every day of my life as hard as anybody has ever worked. So how did I end up broke? I can’t even feed my kids or take them to a doctor.’ ”

Those painful memories often flood back when he meets with a client today.

“In the back of my mind I’m always thinking, it’s not always their fault,” he says. “It doesn’t mean they’re lazy or stupid. I tend to have compassion based on my own experience, because maybe they’re going through something similar, where they were pretty smart, and they were hard workers, and life just beat the s— out of them. Maybe they just need a helping hand.”

Realizing he needed a degree to have a shot at a stable career, Melton enrolled in Tarrant County Junior College and then transferred to UT-Arlington, working two jobs all the while.

As an accounting major, he landed a paid internship at a CPA’s office in the mornings.

He packed his coursework into the afternoons, and from there drove straight to a gig as a bouncer at Cowboys Dancehall.

He would stay and clean up after it closed, often working until 4 a.m., and scramble home to sleep for a few hours.

Then he’d wake up and start over.

Despite his chaotic schedule, Melton completed a bachelor’s and a master’s within three and a half years.

He applied to thirteen law schools but was accepted only into SMU’s evening program, which allowed him to work at a tax firm during the day.

After class each night, he’d cart his books to a local bar, settle into the same corner booth night after night, and study until closing time.

Following graduation, in 2008, he landed a job at the Dallas office of the international firm Hunton & Williams and started making his way up the ladder.

A decade passed, and Holland & Knight called, offering to make him a partner.

Today most of his clients are private equity funds.

The typical deal he works on ranges from $50 million to $150 million.

The largest he’s ever been involved in, the buyout of a Korean bank, was for more than $7 billion.

He’d always felt a compulsion to give back, which was only heightened as he achieved further material comforts.

“If hard work was really the be-all and end-all, then rice farmers in Southeast Asia would be the richest motherf—ers on the planet,” he said. “And the reason they’re not is because they’re not working within a system that allows them to convert that energy into upward mobility. So it’s important that we create that system. And I started thinking, What’s my role in creating the system? How do we make the system better and more inclusive?”

Melton at the Oak Cliff Government Center on May 24, 2024.

Inside an ornately appointed ballroom at the Dallas Arts District Mansion, a late-nineteenth-century neoclassical manor that’s now home to the Dallas Bar Association, Melton stood behind a lectern wearing a royal blue tie with his navy

suit. A group of two dozen looked on, seated around a handful of white-cloth-covered tables, dining on a buffet lunch.

Forks clinked against salad plates.

Ice jangled in glasses of sweet tea.

To Melton’s left, the title slide of his presentation was projected on a large screen. It read, in bold, blocky letters: “Injustice of the Peace.”

Melton has given this lecture in venues across the state and country, including to the American Bar Association and the justices of the Texas Supreme Court, but his efforts are still unknown to many in Dallas.

He was here to evangelize.

And he began with a disclaimer:

“There’s a whole lot of feelings out there about evictions on all sides of the political spectrum,” he said. “So I want to make clear that the problem we’re trying to solve at the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center is not to stop all evictions; it’s to stop unlawful evictions.”

This is about the rule of law, he went on, and protecting constitutional rights such as due process.

He proceeded to recount the origins of DEAC, as a screenshot of his March 2020 Facebook post flashed onto the screen.

Within a week of that post going up, he said, the around-the-clock pace of the work was bordering on unsustainable.

That’s when his wife, Lauren—who was a manager at Chili’s when they met at a karaoke night around 2014, after his first marriage fell apart—looked at him and said, “You know, it’s okay to ask for help.”

Melton put out a call on social media, and about forty local attorneys responded.

Lauren handled logistics, creating a website and a Google voice line.

(“I would spend ten to twelve hours a day talking to people on the phone, through text messages, through emails,” she later said.)

The calls accelerated as word of the group spread, and by the end of that year, roughly 250 lawyers had donated their time, assisting some 6,500 families.

Going into 2021, DEAC was still purely volunteer run.

“But there’s this thing that happens when you spend all day, every day dealing with people having the worst day of their life,” Melton told the crowd. “Vicarious trauma.”

Burnout became a mounting problem.

Also, courts began to reopen after pandemic restrictions loosened, and it was untenable for attorneys with full-time jobs to litigate cases in person on short notice.

So Melton started raising money.

He solicited individual donations but also turned to philanthropic enterprises—his first big check, for $50,000, came from the city’s long-standing Meadows Foundation.

By July he’d brought on two lawyers full-time, including Stuart Campbell, a boyish 32-year-old who is now the group’s managing attorney.

The bulk of the organization’s work was still focused on counseling those who phoned in.

But they also litigated 853 eviction cases in court that year.

“We won 95.9 percent of those cases,” Melton told the crowd, eliciting gasps throughout the room.

“Jesus,” someone murmured.

Far from declaring victory, Melton saw the win rate as symptomatic of a much larger problem.

“It occurred to us—how the hell does that happen? I’m not Jack McCoy,” he said, referring to the formidable fictional prosecutor played by Sam Waterston on Law & Order, “though I like to pretend sometimes.”

Melton and his team realized that landlords, in most of these cases, simply weren’t following the rules.

“This wasn’t magic. This wasn’t courtroom theatrics. It was literally standing up there and saying, ‘Hey, the law requires you to give this notice in this way. Did you do that?’ And almost one hundred percent of the time, the answer is no.”

Looking to prove his point, he turned to the Dallas research outfit CPAL, which recruited SMU law students to sit in on eviction hearings across the county during the summer of 2022.

The data they recorded was stunning.

Melton clicked through a series of slides with an array of charts and graphs.

But the upshot was uncomplicated: when tenants didn’t have legal representation, he told the crowd, landlords won 79 percent of the time.

When tenants did have a lawyer, landlords won only 10 percent of the time. “That’s a very big delta,” Melton pointed out.

Eviction cases bear little resemblance to the kinds of trials the public is accustomed to seeing in movies and on TV.

For one, defendants aren’t guaranteed a lawyer.

Nationally only 4 percent of renters in eviction court have legal counsel, compared with 83 percent of landlords, according to the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel.

What’s more, in Texas, eviction courts are overseen by justices of the peace, county-level elected positions with four-year terms that, in Dallas County, pay $151,252 annually.

To qualify for the post, you must have been a state resident for twelve months and a district resident for six months, and be at least eighteen years old.

You are not required to have a high school diploma, much less a law degree, though many do.

Most of the JPs win office in elections that voters barely pay attention to.

The rationale for such low standards goes like this: the cases heard by justices of the peace are elementary enough that common sense and some simple training should suffice.

“Texas wanted to have a forum where people could go and litigate matters without having to suffer the expense of having to hire a lawyer,” Melton explained.

“The rules of civil procedure are greatly reduced. It’s intended for a layperson to be able to show up and get justice. But if people are getting justice by winning ninety percent of the time with a lawyer and only twenty percent of the time without, then the whole premise is fundamentally broken.”

Because of the way the JP system was designed, there was until recently no data available to assess how it was working—no minutes kept, no tracking of case outcomes—or whether it was working at all.

In Dallas County, CPAL found, the average length of an eviction trial is three minutes and 59 seconds.

“We spend fewer than four minutes to develop the facts to decide whether we should kick a person and their kids—usually, more than sixty percent of the time, a single mother of color and her kids—out into the street,” Melton said. “Anybody want to make an argument that that’s constitutionally sufficient due process?”

To bolster CPAL’s court observation data, Melton enlisted volunteers to probe evictions that were appealed by tenants—cases in which the landlord won initially and the tenant contested the JP’s decision.

In appeals court, the rules of evidence apply, the judge holds a law degree, and records are kept.

In these courts, landlords lost 80 percent of the time.

If the tenant had a lawyer, landlords lost 89 percent of the time.

Accounting for both scenarios, Melton calculated that the JPs who initially ruled on these cases had gotten it wrong roughly 85 percent of the time.

He grew more animated as he spelled out these findings.

In eviction cases, “It turns out the rule of law is a myth. Is the Constitution also a myth? It applies to you if you can afford a lawyer or you get lucky enough to have one volunteer to represent you. But if you don’t have one of those two things, you might as well tear it up and use it for kindling at your next campfire, because no one is enforcing it.”

He then told a story: a few months earlier, a landlord was upset with him after losing an eviction case.

“Are you telling me that I’ve got to bring evidence to every single one of these things?” she screamed at the judge.

“This is a trial to decide whether we’re going to kick a person out of their home and into the street. Historically, no one has taken the time to ask, ‘Are you entitled to kick that person out?’ ” Melton said.

He didn’t blame landlords for not following the rules.

What incentive did they have if no one was enforcing them?

The only plausible way to create accountability, he decided, was to make sure someone was there to defend every case.

Melton coined a name for this strategy.

He called it saturation theory.

They were lined up some thirty deep, drawn by the promise offered on a glossy white poster propped on a three-legged easel: “FREE ATTORNEY FOR TENANTS.”

It was an unseasonably warm Friday morning in early February.

A steady stream of renters had filed down the hallway toward the justice of the peace court on the second floor of the newly built South Dallas Government Center, a modern, glass-walled structure on the southwest edge of the county.

Julio Acosta, a DEAC legal assistant with a background in community organizing, was making announcements in Spanish and English, shepherding new arrivals toward a pair of tables beside the poster.

A crew from DEAC was stationed there, including Stuart Campbell, the managing attorney.

Wearing a cobalt-blue suit, he was flipping through the day’s docket, researching the companies that own the apartment complexes that had filed for evictions, looking into possible defenses before he had even met the clients.

He could determine, for example, whether a company’s tax status was active with the secretary of state.

It often is not, in which case the corporation doesn’t have standing to file any sort of lawsuit in Texas, including for an eviction, so those cases should be automatically dismissed.

Sitting nearby was Marisela Gonzales, an eager 28-year-old fresh out of Texas A&M University’s law school, along with Bill Holston, a cheery Patch Adams type with a walrus mustache and tangerine bow tie, a “Housing Is a Human Right” button pinned to his corduroy jacket.

Holston signed on as DEAC’s chief operating officer last July after an eleven-year stint as executive director of the Human Rights Initiative of North Texas.

“I’ve been doing legal aid for thirty years,” he said. “And I’ve never seen anything like this.”

This was saturation theory at work: Melton’s attempt to represent every resident in the county facing eviction.

Rather than waiting for tenants to call DEAC, he was trying to build a staff large enough to defend every tenant who showed up in any of the county’s ten JP courts on any given day.

DEAC lawyers set up outside the courts to intercept tenants as they arrived, signed them up using a brisk intake process, and then went to work inside the court, arguing as many cases as possible, sometimes forty or fifty in a single court each day.

Campbell once got 55 eviction cases dismissed in one session.

Afterward, his clients gave him a standing ovation, an emotional experience he described as “surreal.”

Scant preparation is required for most cases.

Melton rarely attends JP courts himself now that he’s built a staff for that purpose, but during his early forays he persuaded a few judges to allow an experiment:

he posted up in front of the bar, and as the clerk called the next case on the docket, Melton would ask the tenant if they needed a free lawyer.

If they agreed, Melton would turn around and argue their case.

He had just learned their name.

Often that was enough.

He only had to compel the landlord to follow basic procedures.

“‘You’re required to give a notice to vacate. Did you give it? Show it to me. Who delivered it? Is that person here? Can you prove, like, the two or three things that you have to do to get an eviction under Texas law? This is a court. Show me some evidence.’ They almost never can.”

Representing tenants in eviction court isn’t a novel idea, of course.

Plenty of legal aid nonprofits have done the same.

Melton is frequently asked why he doesn’t work under the legal aid umbrella.

“The answer is—well, the real answer is I didn’t want to have to abide by anyone else’s rules,” he says. “I’m not a fan of bureaucracy or people telling me I can’t do something.”

DEAC accepts only private money, whereas legal aid groups are funded primarily by state and federal grants, which come with reams of red tape:

You can only help people who fall below certain income limits. You can’t help undocumented immigrants.

There are stacks of paperwork to sift through for every client, a fifteen-to-thirty-minute intake process.

But when tenants are standing in an eviction docket, Melton said, “You don’t have thirty seconds. It’s right now. It’s go or no go.”

Before signing on with DEAC, Campbell spent three years as a housing attorney with Legal Aid of Northwest Texas after graduating from law school at Texas A&M, and he admires many who work for the organization.

He and Melton have heard their frustrations.

Many of them wish they weren’t so constrained by bureaucracy.

At the South Dallas JP court one recent day, Campbell said, Legal Aid had two staffers working the same hallway.

“And they only picked up one client.”

Around 10 a.m. on this morning, 42 tenants settled into the ten wooden pews inside the courtroom.

Justice of the peace Thomas G. Jones presided, his spectacles perched near the tip of his nose as he peered out at the gallery.

Jones, a Democrat who was first elected in 1990 and is the longest-tenured JP in the county, opened with a joke:

“We have made it our mission and duty to alert the young men in the courtroom that the fourteenth of February is coming. Hopefully that means something to you. We’re giving you a hint, men.”

Then he started calling names on the docket.

Soon DEAC attorney Chris Dart was on his feet, explaining to Jones why his first client of the day should have her eviction tossed out.

“Castle Crown properties, [which owns] Waverly Apartments, is still forfeited on the secretary of state’s website.

They’ve been forfeited since December,” he said. “They do not have the right to sue in the state of Texas.”

Jones, though, declined to issue a judgment. “If you want to, we can reschedule this so you can check with the main office,” he said to the attorney representing the complex.

He abated the case for two weeks, giving the apartment owners more time.

Then, with the company’s lawyer still standing before him, Jones promptly issued three eviction judgments in favor of that same complex because the tenants had failed to show up for their hearing—even though he had just learned that the company didn’t have legal standing to file the evictions in the first place.

It happened quickly, in a matter of seconds, with few registering what was happening.

That morning, none of the more than twenty tenants represented by DEAC lost their cases, while Jones, who didn’t respond to an interview request, ruled against all of the dozen-plus who defended themselves.

As JPs go, Jones isn’t an outlier.

“The bias is just unbelievable,” Melton said. “Everyone wants to enforce the laws that benefit the landlord. But when it comes to enforcing the few laws that benefit tenants, everyone wants to forget those exist.”

Once, in another JP court, Melton remembered, he got a case dismissed.

As the next tenant approached the bar, Melton offered to represent him for free.

“No, I’ve got this,” the man said.

“I live in the same apartment complex as the tenant that was just up here,” he told the judge. “My facts are exactly the same. The landlord didn’t follow those same rules in my case.”

“You don’t even know what those rules are,” the judge responded, and then he quickly ruled in the landlord’s favor without asking the landlord a single question.

The tenant was left shaking his head, and Melton was helpless to intervene.

He could only watch, enraged.

“A lot of these justices of the peace are huge contributors to generational poverty,” he said. “Sometimes it is with incompetence, and sometimes it is intentional and with malice.”

Melton says he witnessed what he considered to be one memorable example of malice in the courtroom of Al Cercone, a since-retired Republican who was first elected as a JP in 1992.

A young woman facing eviction told Cercone she hadn’t received the proper notice in the mail.

“I don’t think you have any idea what the correct notices even are,” Cercone responded.

The woman became flustered, and Cercone quickly ruled in favor of the landlord.

Then, as she shuffled out of the room, Melton claimed, Cercone called after her, “Next time, don’t be so stupid in my courtroom.”

The woman, her back to Cercone, mumbled, “You’re stupid.”

“Did you just call me stupid?” Cercone asked.

He then held her in contempt and instructed the bailiff to arrest her.

As she was taken away, Melton trailed closely behind and approached the woman, whose face was tear drenched.

She was terrified about what would happen to her kids if she was detained and unable to pick them up from school, not to mention concerns about where they would all sleep after being ousted from their home in a few days.

Melton returned to the courtroom and approached the bench to ask Cercone whether he would consider letting her go.

“She’s already having a pretty bad day,” Melton told him.

Cercone agreed—but only if she returned and apologized to him in front of the room.

“I wanted to drag him right off of that bench,” Melton later reflected.

Instead, to ensure the woman got home to her kids that day, he arranged for the apology.

When reached by phone, Cercone, who doesn’t have a law degree, said he didn’t recall this specific incident.

He denied using the word “stupid”—“I wouldn’t have said that”—but the flavor of the anecdote rang true to him.

“It doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know what I said. I don’t know what she said. But if she apologized for it and I let her go, that’s a good ending.”

(For the tenant, the good ending came later, when Melton appealed Cercone’s ruling and the landlord dropped the eviction.)

Cercone shared another story to demonstrate his philosophy on maintaining order in his court:

He once heard a civil case—it was unrelated to housing—involving a litigant who was “an attractive young female in a business suit. She was very sweet. Of course, I don’t let that influence my decision, but I can’t help but notice.”

After Cercone announced his decision, she screamed that she’d only lost because she was a woman, a premise he claimed was absurd.

“I’m a true Italian,” Cercone explained. “So if I have a slant, I’m sorry, it’s going to be toward females.”

The woman slammed the door to the gallery on her way out, and, Cercone recalled, he had her jailed.

(Later, Cercone said he’d misremembered this anecdote. He didn’t actually jail her, but now believes he should have.)

Cercone isn’t the only JP with whom Melton has developed a combative relationship.

In some cases, he said, he has presented statutes and Supreme Court opinions spelling out what judges are supposed to do in various scenarios.

“And they literally will say, ‘I don’t care what that says. I’m the judge here. It’s not a court of record. I’ll do what I want.’ ”

According to Melton, even more flagrant violations of tenants’ rights have occurred.

In the summer of 2022, while he was in Chicago to receive the American Bar Association’s Pro Bono Publico Award, the organization’s highest honor for volunteer legal services, he got a call from a tenant who’d lost her case in the court of Margaret O’Brien, even though the woman had insisted that she’d never received a notice to vacate.

Melton flew home early to investigate and shortly thereafter got a call from a whistleblower claiming that O’Brien’s chief clerk, Lutishia Williams, had forged a notice to vacate after Melton had started asking questions.

Melton successfully appealed the woman’s eviction, and he asked the district attorney to investigate the forgery allegation.

In December, Williams was indicted by a grand jury on charges of falsifying official documents.

(Williams has denied any wrongdoing, and O’Brien wouldn’t comment on the case, which is still pending. In an email she wrote that her support for Williams is “unwavering” and that defendants always get due process in her court.)

These examples notwithstanding, Melton believes the majority of justices, including Judge Jones, operate in good faith.

“The problem is not that they’re actively being assholes. It’s just like in any other part of life: there are implicit biases. And I think even judges need to be reminded that they have them too.”

He and Campbell are trying to recruit a fresh slate of JP candidates for future elections.

“These judges impact more people every day than the police do, more than any other local official,” Campbell said. “Maybe the only other public employee that does is a teacher.”

DEAC now has a daily presence in the county’s two busiest JP courts, but the group is still playing Whac-A-Mole in the other eight.

Melton needs more attorneys to achieve true saturation.

Still, his efforts have impressed some notable figures. “Mark is doing heroic work,” said Deborah Hankinson, a former Republican justice on the Texas Supreme Court who now chairs the nonprofit Texas Access to Justice Foundation.

Melton’s model is easily the most promising she’s seen for providing legal services to the poor. “He’s got a long ways to go in order to have that one hundred percent saturation that he wants,” Hankinson said. But she believes he’ll get there.

For Melton, the obsessive pursuit of that goal has come at a considerable cost. The aftermath of the Meyers Street fire.Courtesy of Mark Melton

There was a fire tonight. And it burned something into my soul.”

It was July 19, 2022, and Melton was awoken at 1:01 a.m. by a text message from a former client who lived in a tumbledown apartment near Fair Park, in South Dallas.

Four of the complex’s sixteen units were aflame. Another building had lost power.

Residents didn’t know what to do. Melton and Lauren hopped in their Escalade and headed that way.

When they arrived, multiple fire engines were still on the scene. Melton found the department’s captain and asked if displaced residents would receive any assistance.

The captain said they’d called Red Cross, but it wasn’t clear if or when help would arrive.

As Melton and Lauren wandered the property, a small crowd congregated.

A pregnant woman mentioned she was hungry, so Lauren pulled up Uber Eats on her phone and ordered forty cheeseburgers and bottles of water from a McDonald’s down the road.

By the time the food arrived, the fire trucks had dispersed.

Around 2:30, Melton answered a call from an unknown number—the Red Cross, it turned out, phoning about the fire.

The woman on the other end told him he’d been listed by residents as an emergency contact.

She could help arrange for hotel rooms for those who were displaced, but she needed proof of residency.

Many of the victims had lost their IDs in the flames, Melton explained, and no one who lived there had an actual lease.

Contracts were informal—they’d always just paid rent using a money order at the beginning of each month.

In that case, the woman told him, there was nothing she could do.

Melton hung up and dialed all of his city contacts, none of whom picked up.

He was livid.

Finally, he gathered the residents together and apologized for not being able to do more, but he promised that he and Lauren would return.

It was shortly before 4 a.m. when they reluctantly drove home.

“It was so hard,” Lauren said. “You’re leaving these people who—you could just see the desperation in their eyes.”

When they arrived back at their house, Melton wrote an email to city officials, which he also posted on Facebook, excoriating them for not putting better emergency systems in place for poor residents.

Lauren put in a bulk order at Sam’s Club, and they returned to the apartment around noon with fifty sack lunches.

Residents were still sitting outside in the courtyard.

Lauren handed out food and took down contact information.

“These are people nobody listens to. Nobody gives them the time of day,” she said. “We talked about what their next steps were going to be.”

She spent much of the next three weeks returning to the site, maxing out multiple credit cards to help rehouse every displaced resident.

Melton and Lauren routinely take on projects that fall outside the scope of evictions, often at personal expense.

That twenty-year-old single mother whose landlord hired thugs to harass her family?

Melton drove down and pulled her and her kids out of the apartment in the middle of the night.

Lauren helped find another apartment for her, and they covered her rent for a year to help her get back on her feet. “They’ve just got big hearts,” said Ashley Brundage, a vice president at United Way of Metropolitan Dallas, who during the pandemic often partnered with DEAC. “

They can’t just do the one thing they set out to do and then be done with it. That just wouldn’t sit right with their conscience.”

This commitment, though, has required an almost monastic devotion to the cause, forcing Melton to renounce many of the comforts he might otherwise be enjoying.

He regularly gets by on just three or four hours of sleep.

“He’s got a lot of horsepower,” said his friend and fellow attorney Ross Williams.

But still, there were times after Melton launched DEAC when he felt depleted.

“He was trying to build this airplane in midair, and he worked himself past the breaking point multiple times. He had two back surgeries during the pandemic because he would just sit there and work and not stop until he passed out.”

Even steeper was the emotional toll.

Almost daily, Melton would retreat to a dark room in his house to sit by himself and cry.

Few realized the effect the work was having on him.

Early in the pandemic, Williams recalled, a mutual friend died unexpectedly, and a group gathered at Melton’s house to grieve.

While they were all outside, it began raining.

Melton quietly walked over to the shallow, partially filled inflatable pool in his backyard.

Still wearing blue jeans, he laid down inside it, rested his head on the slightly deflated lip, and stared up at the sky, letting the drops pelt his face while he sobbed.

Melton said he never felt overwhelmed, exactly.

“I don’t think I’ve ever found myself in a situation where I’m frozen. It’s always, all right, this sucks and I hate it, but even if I’m emotionally messy, I’m still in the back of my mind saying, ‘What’s the next step?’ ”

He realized he needed help and began seeing a therapist, which gave him some relief.

At the end of last year, over the holidays, he took time off—five days without phone calls and emails, a luxury he hadn’t allowed himself in years.

He visited his parents.

He sat down to dinner with Lauren every night.

“I even got a dog, which is something I swore I would never do,” he said.

Now he looks forward to waking up in the morning and going on walks.

“It occurred to me that I was coming out of this deep, dark, emotional hole that I really didn’t even know I was in.”

There are still times, though, when he hears from folks going through eviction, then hangs up the phone and breaks down.

“I’m not one hundred percent sure what the specific triggers are. Almost every time I talk to a dad, you know, and whether it’s a single dad or a dad with a wife and kids, and I have this grown-ass man on the other end of the line crying because they don’t know what to do, and they feel like complete failures, and they can’t take care of their families. That one gets me every time.”

At this point, DEAC is representing more than four hundred tenants every month in court, roughly a quarter of those who show up.

And Melton is working with economists at the University of Notre Dame to devise and test various methods to get more people to attend their hearings, a perennial problem. If DEAC were to function at full capacity—i.e., representing everyone in the county facing eviction—Melton estimates the group’s annual budget would need to double to roughly $3 million.

He’s hoping to inspire others in cities across the country to mimic his saturation approach.

Kwartler, the legal aid attorney in Houston, is already trying to implement Melton’s model.

“There’s a path here to actually having the systemic change that we’re trying to create,” Melton says. “If you simplify it enough, it’s a workable plan.”

When he encounters resistance, he often recalls those boyhood moments in his garage, agonizing over the mechanical tasks assigned by his stepfather.

“At some point I’m going to get that bolt to come loose,” he said. “I just got to keep trying, and hopefully I don’t strip it before I do.”

MR. MARK AARON 'MARK' MELTON Eligible to Practice in Texas Holland & Knight LLP Bar Card Number: 24065734

MS. DENA DENOOYER STROH Bar Card Number: 24012522

MR. JOHN ERIC CEDILLO Bar Card Number: 00796330

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