Demand for protesting property values goes up as families fight to stay in their homes
Story by Sujata Dand and Jeffrey Ruiz
When Karina Portillo walked into the Wesley Rankin Community Center in West Dallas for help protesting her property taxes, she didn’t know what to expect.
Her grandmother heard about the event at Casa Feliz, a program at Wesley-Rankin for senior citizens. She asked Portillo to attend because they could use some help reducing their property taxes.
Portillo’s grandfather, Juan Portillo, bought the home on Gallagher Street in 2017 with help from Builders of Hope. In the last five years, the property value has more than doubled.

“It’s not a lot. But a couple of hundred dollars for them is a lot,” Portillo says. Her grandmother doesn’t work and her grandfather is retired. “I went for them.”
Property tax consultant Toby Toler met with Portillo and more than 20 other Dallas County residents at Wesley-Rankin that day.
“Ninety-five percent of the people in Highland Park protest their taxes,” Toler says. He’s been in the business of protesting taxes for clients for more than 40 years. Since 2018, he’s been helping residents in South Dallas and West Dallas for free. “Here, 95% don’t protest their taxes.”
Toler worked with 36 people at Wesley Rankin over two days, walking them through the protest process on Dallas Central Appraisal District’s (DCAD) website.
DCAD is the agency charged with appraising each parcel of land in Dallas County “accurately, fairly and equitably.” Each year, the agency assigns a property value, and Dallas Independent School District, the City of Dallas, Dallas County, Dallas College and Parkland Hospital each collect a percentage of that value from residents to fund their budgets.
“The system is basically upside down because to protest, you have to go in and prove them wrong instead of going in and talking to them and making them prove to you that they’re wrong,” he says.
Portillo says Toler wasn’t able to do much for her grandparents. They had already file