Back in January, Nicole Hernandez was renting a room in Garland, Texas, when her relationship with her landlord went south. She said the landlord wanted her to leave. Hernandez told her she’d go when a court ordered her to leave and stopped paying rent.

Instead of filing an eviction case, Hernandez said the landlord and her family subjected her to months of what she calls harassment and abuse.

Among her allegations: “They’ve cut the valves in my tires, kicked in a deadbolt lock on my door and stole my fan out of my room,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez said she has called the police at least a couple of times but she can’t definitively prove who was behind the incidents. Her landlord did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

This summer, the landlord finally took Hernandez to court for nonpayment of rent. Hernandez lost, and was given about a week to move out or appeal. 

But when she returned home later that day, she said she found her window air conditioner smashed. It was over 100 degrees that week, making her second-floor bedroom sweltering.

“The heat was making me very sick and I felt like it was hard to breathe just to walk from my bed into the bathroom,” Hernandez said.

When renters are evicted, they often end up in worse housing or even homeless. Their health problems commonly compound, they may lose work, and their kids frequently do worse in school. 

Pre-pandemic, landlords typically filed 3.6 million eviction cases each year nationwide, according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. And since then, case filings have skyrocketed in some cities.

But those numbers don’t count all the renters forced out without being formally evicted, sometimes by intimidation or through other, illegal tactics, according to Mark Melton from the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center.

Melton’s heard about landlords allegedly pulling breakers on air conditioners, illegally towing cars, banging on tenants’ windows in the middle of the night. While he can’t be certain it’s the landlord in every case, Melton said they have a motive.

“They want to make it as miserable as possible for that tenant to stay so that they’ll leave voluntarily so that they don’t have to go through the trouble of filing an eviction,” Melton said.

Tenants’ rights advocates say it’s even more common for landlords to use tactics that are likely illegal but hard to prove are retaliatory. For example, a landlord might refuse to renew a lease after a tenant demands repairs. Or they might file an eviction case with no grounds to evict in order to punish a tenant.

Jason Simon from the Apartment Association of Greater Dallas said most landlords work hard to provide a safe and habitable apartment, and make sure to follow the law. But he hears about bad actors sometimes.

“I would condemn anyone for putting someone’s life at risk over an air conditioner, or retaliating or destroying someone’s home,” Simon said.

Melton said he doesn’t see this kind of landlord behavior in most of his cases, but he sees it a lot.

“I’m not trying to say that these things are happening … in every apartment complex in Dallas, because they’re not,” he said. “But there is a significant portion — primarily around people that are poor — where (tenants) are just being abused day in and day out.”

While renters facing these situations often have the option to pursue legal recourse, Melton said they may not know how to get justice, and the process is time-consuming and complicated. So a lot of people just end up moving out.