Written by Taylor Laredo and Sidney Beaty
Today, Texas Housers released its annual Harris County Eviction Mapping Tool and Harris County and City of Houston Eviction Snapshots. The tool shows that evictions in Harris County remain high. Some of the highest evicting properties are part of low-income housing programs. Many other high evicting properties are owned by non-Texas companies. Evictions are a key barrier to housing stability for low-income households in Harris County. Non-Texas companies are driving much of this harm. And in a few cases, low-income housing programs are directly contributing harm.
The Harris County Eviction Mapping Tool is an interactive mapping tool that tracks evictions at the census tract level, overlays demographic data, and identifies the Top 30 evicting properties in Harris County in 2024. The Mapping Tool page also features a report that provides a review of the research on evictions, the context of evictions in Harris County, the findings from our analysis, and a detailed review of high-evicting properties.
The updated Eviction Snapshots of Houston City Council Districts and Harris County Commissioners Court Precincts combine data from the Harris County Justice of the Peace Courts and the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to illustrate trends among evictions (case outcomes, defendant representation) and housing characteristics (cost burden, household income, median rent) at the Council District and Precinct levels.
By compiling data on both the cost of renting and geography of evictions, Texas Housers intends to paint a broader picture that illustrates how housing affordability interacts with evictions in a given area. These tools also aim to make evictions in Harris County more visible and continue critical conversations around the need for additional eviction diversion initiatives inside and outside of the Justice Court System for families facing eviction.
Key Takeaways
Here are the key takeaways from our analysis of 2024 Harris County eviction filing data:
- 76,321 eviction cases were filed against Harris County residents in 2024, which equates to about 1 in 10 Harris County renter households.
- This is about a 5% decrease in filings compared to the 80,110 filings in 2023, yet overall eviction filings still remain above pre-pandemic levels.
- Back-to-back disasters in 2024, the May Derecho and Hurricane Beryl in July, coincided with drops in eviction filings.
- Eviction filings were concentrated in Southwest Harris County north of the Westpark Tollway, South Central Harris County, and Northwest Harris County along FM 1960.
- Areas with high concentrations of eviction filings had more renters of color.
- The top 30 evicting properties accounted for nearly 1 in every 13 evictions filed.
- One in three of these top-evicting properties is owned by a non-Texan company.
- Two of these top-evicting properties receive state or federal affordable housing funds: one Low-Income Housing Tax-Credit (LIHTC) property and one with a 100% tax exemption due to being owned by the Pecos County Housing Finance Corporation, the latter purchased in February 2025.
- The majority of cases resulted in a dismissal and the majority of those were because the plaintiff did not appear for the court hearing. This does not mean that the tenant was necessarily able to stay at the property, and may instead indicate that the tenant left prior to the trial.
- The median eviction case length was 24 days from filing date to judgment, demonstrating that the current eviction timeline does not unreasonably burden landlords from reclaiming possession of their units.
We would like to thank University of Houston CHIP Intern Cody Szell for his significant contributions to this project and former Texas Housers staff member Taylor Laredo for all his work in launching and maintaining this project. We would also like to thank Moksha Data Studio for continuous support on data collection, cleaning, and analysis.
For more information on our findings, see the full report on our Harris County Eviction Mapping Tool page.
More information on the methodology used to compile and analyze eviction data can be found here.
