Harris County put about $100,000 each into two eviction diversion courts. There were more than 75,000 eviction filings in 2025.

ABC13 profiled three Harris County justice of the peace courts on Monday that help tenants find rental assistance before an eviction hearing. The story never says what the program costs. The county decided that eleven days earlier.

Why it matters

Eviction diversion is one of the few county programs where the cost per case is knowable and the caseload is enormous. Harris County saw more than 75,000 eviction filings in 2025. What the county spends against that number is the difference between a program and a pilot, and it is a line in a budget that was adopted on September 17.

By the numbers

More than 75,000 eviction filings in Harris County in 2025, from a Rice University Kinder Institute report cited by ABC13. Some neighborhoods ran at up to three times the county average.
Roughly $100,000 each for eviction diversion work in two justice of the peace courts, out of the $15.1 million Harris County had left to allocate in early September.
$2.7 million for eviction defense and rental assistance through Harris County Housing and Community Development.
$1.5 million to the Houston Eviction Advocacy Center and $500,000 to Lone Star Legal Aid.
$15.1 million was available on September 8. The budget was adopted September 17 with about $400,000 left unallocated.
Prior county spending on eviction legal aid: $1 million in 2021, $4 million in March 2023 covering eight courts, and $4 million approved unanimously on December 20, 2023 to reach all 16 justice of the peace courts, all from federal pandemic relief money.

What the coverage buried

Cost. ABC13 built the story around eviction diversion coordinators, quoted three court staff by name and title, and printed no dollar figure at all. Harris County had funded that work nine days before the story ran, and the number was already public in Click2Houston’s September 18 account of the budget.

The piece also does not say where the money comes from now. The earlier rounds were federal pandemic relief. This one is county money in a year the county raised its tax rate. That is a fact a reader is entitled to have in a story about the program’s expansion.

The other side

The fair objection is that roughly $100,000 a court is not the program and judging it that way understates the effort by an order of magnitude. The actual rental assistance runs through Housing and Community Development at $2.7 million, with another $2 million going to legal aid organizations. That is the real number, and it is not small.

Conceded. The narrower point survives: the story was about the coordinators, and the story did not say what the coordinators cost.

One caution this desk will not paper over. ABC13 names Precinct 7 Place 1, Precinct 2 Place 1 and Precinct 2 Place 2. Click2Houston names eviction diversion funding for Precincts 2-2 and 7-2. Those labels do not line up, and this piece does not claim the funded courts and the profiled courts are the same courts.

What to watch

Whether the adopted FY27 Harris County budget shows a court-by-court breakdown for justice of the peace eviction diversion.
Whether the third court ABC13 profiled appears in any funding item, or is running the program without a line.
The Kinder Institute’s next eviction filing count for Harris County.
Whether the $2.7 million rental assistance contract is renewed when the current agreements lapse.

Bottom line

A county that files 75,000 evictions a year and spends about $100,000 a court to head some of them off is either running a very efficient program or a very small one. Nobody has published the number of hearings diverted, so nobody can say which. That number, not the interviews, is the story.

Sources

Editorial