Earlier this year, Princeton University’s Eviction Lab came out with a harrowing statistic: Austin’s eviction filings are the highest number they’ve been since 2020. During the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, Austin applied an eviction moratorium, but they returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2022 when the ban was lifted and have since continued climbing.
On Tuesday, local tenant organizing group BASTA (Building and Strengthening Tenant Action), a project of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, presented its findings to the City Council Housing and Planning Committee, explaining what Council can do to curb this worrying trend.
“I’m not excited about the numbers,” said BASTA’s Shoshana Krieger, “but I think there’s a lot of opportunities for us to be making inroads on this issue.”
BASTA’s report for Travis County as a whole, which was published in March, shows that same bleak trend that began in 2022 continuing into 2024 and the first part of 2025. BASTA compiled its data on eviction filings from the county courts, though Krieger noted that it doesn’t reflect the fact that the “majority of tenants move out before there actually is a filing.”
“My team has been out door-knocking at night at properties where we have tenants associations, and they’ve seen tenants frantically packing boxes, saying that the manager threatened to call ICE if they didn’t move out the next day,” she continued. “All of those stories are captured in the numbers that I’m about to talk about.”
In 2024, there were 13,210 eviction filings in Travis County, the highest ever. And, in just the first three months of this year, there had already been 10,545 filings, compared to 9,305 during that time span last year, meaning the county is on track to surpass last year’s numbers.
BASTA also found that the typical duration of a case – the time between a filing and being evicted – is a mere 20 days.
“This is very contrary to the narrative which the Apartment Association put forth at the legislature this past session,” Krieger said. “We actually see in Travis County that 99 percent of cases were disposed of within 60 days. This also points to the fact that if we are serious about intervening with evictions, we have to do so before a filing, because as soon as we’re at a filing, everything goes super quick.”
With the recent passage of Senate Bill 38 during the regular legislative session, things are “just going to get quicker,” said Krieger. The bill, which the Texas Apartment Association named as a squatter bill, “had nothing to do with squatters, but everything to do with making an already easy process easier for landlords to evict tenants,” said Krieger. “It’s going to tighten timelines, change the way in which tenants can receive service and also change the appeals process.”
Evictions are also shifting farther and farther out of Travis County, said Krieger, “Traditionally, Eastern Crescent is where there’s more concentration of evictions. That tracks with national research, which finds a stronger correlation between communities of color and evictions than poverty and evictions.”
This change could be related to lower-income residents being pushed out of Austin proper by the prohibitive rents and cost of living, but, Krieger noted, it “could be that there are a few high evictor properties in those areas, and there are fewer renters overall.”
Much of evictions are controlled at the state level. For example, there are limits on the city changing how much notice is given. In 2022, Council passed a local right-to-cure ordinance, which gave tenants 7 days to repay rent. “When we crunched the data, it actually seemed like that did have an effect on eviction filings in the city compared to eviction filings outside of the full purpose jurisdiction,” said Krieger, “but it was only in place for, I want to say, around nine months before the state came in and preempted it. So we no longer have the ability to do that.”
But there are still things the city can address. Krieger pointed to tax exempt private partnerships like the Strategic Housing Finance Corporation, which give their tax exemption in exchange for the production of affordable housing, and have a higher eviction filing rate than the citywide average.
“This is an area where there’s opportunity, right? Like, if we are giving public benefit, then we can also implement things like eviction prevention plans at these properties,” she said.
Some public housing with government subsidies are subject to special protections – Austin’s rental housing development assistance program has additional eviction protections, like requiring landlords to meet with tenants, giving additional time and providing a “right to cure.” The problem lies in enforcement.
“It does not appear that many properties are actually giving out the addendum with the protections or following it, and there hasn’t historically been enforcement. So that that is definitely an area which could result in fewer evictions if those policies were followed,” she said. For example, BASTA has been organizing since 2016 at the Arbors at Creekside on Clayton Lane, a city-owned affordable housing complex with tax credits. Krieger said the group has seen that they are not giving out lease addendums detailing the city protections.
Often, evictions are concentrated within a particular apartment complex, carried out by a particular property manager. BASTA has shown that the top evicting properties file at least one eviction for every five households.
“That means if you live there, you have about a 1-in-5 chance that you will receive an eviction that year,” Krieger said. “Some properties use the filings as a collection method, so they will then dismiss it if the tenant repays rent, pays an eviction fee penalty, pays for costs, other things like that – which makes the tenant more housing insecure.”
Even when tenants try to repay late rent, these high-evictor landlords sometimes don’t accept it. One tenant BASTA spoke to at the Arbors “had been hustling to make ends meet for some time,” Krieger said. “He got about $400 behind on rent at some point, and he had been chipping away every month by just paying a little bit more. But then Arbors changed its policies and stopped accepting partial payments. This resulted in a snowball effect, because when you’re barely able to make ends meet and you’re struggling, it makes sense that you may dip into that extra money your landlord hasn’t taken. So he ended up with a notice to vacate.”
Council Member Paige Ellis noted that she and her husband experienced the same thing at their apartment complex where they used to split the rent: “As the apartment got bought and sold a couple of times, the policy changed and we weren’t notified until it was time to make the payment. And all of a sudden, you know, you’ve got families that are dealing with moving money around or, saying ‘hey, if I had known this two or three weeks ago, it would have helped.'”
The city can’t pass an ordinance that would require landlords to accept partial payment, Krieger said, but it could pass a policy saying, “OK, if you accept city rental assistance that means you agree to have policies related to x, y and z at your property. So thinking creatively about how to leverage some of the investments y’all are already making in this space.”
Krieger also urged the city to improve regulations on eviction communications, which can often come through email, which is easily missed, or do not consider tenants who don’t speak English. One tenant in his 60s at the Arbors learned that his roommate stopped paying his half of the rent and didn’t tell him. “The roommate threw out the couple of notices they received – they were in English, both of them speak Spanish – and an eviction was filed,” Krieger explained. “Once the primary tenant found out about it, he was able to hustle and talk to family and friends who were able to come up with that rent amount. But now he has an eviction filing on his record, and there was no reason to get there. They could have picked up the phone. This is an eviction which maybe could have been averted.”
Krieger told the Planning Committee that it’s most important to intervene before an eviction gets formally filed, by providing prevention plans at properties which facilitate conversations with tenants and landlords to resolve issues and work on payment plans. Focusing more on enforcing the protections that do exist is also important, as landlords aren’t always following them. Lastly, she urged the city to reconsider how it calculates eligibility for affordable housing.
“This is a huge challenge – the Area Median Income has increased about 77 percent in the last 10 years. But then, when we look at the cost of living increases for folks on fixed incomes, that has only increased by 37 percent,” she said. “So as long as we’re tying affordability to AMI, we’re going to be just exacerbating a problem and no amount of emergency rental assistance is going to fix an ongoing gap.”
Aside from what the city can do, BASTA provides resources to tenants, including an early notification system with email and texts to tenants facing eviction, call clinics to call tenants with resources, and a community resources guide. They also provide legal assistance through Texas RioGrande Legal Aid and volunteer legal services. The city and county provide rental assistance, and even though there could be funding cuts to federal section eight vouchers, they “provide, as opposed to emergency rental assistance, more long-term stability,” said Krieger.
Beyond the financial aspect, Krieger urged Council members to consider the humanity of people in this destabilizing situation. At the same Arbors property, “a couple in their 80s were evicted. They hadn’t received the notices. The constable came to remove their items, and put all their belongings out in the parking lot.” When they tried to recover some of their things, including mail, “the manager chased them off the property. There may be times when we can’t prevent the eviction, but how are we both treating people with dignity in this really horrific moment? And how are we also creating a social safety net where there are people who can help this couple who are in their 80s – who have lived their lives in Austin, who are elders – not be sleeping in their car right now?”