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“When New Yorkers need essential legal services—whether to defend their home, their family, or their freedom—they often rely on nonprofits funded by the city to deliver them. But for years, those same providers have been asked to do more with less.”
Mayor Mamdani’s proposed budget gets one important thing right: increasing funding for Right to Counsel, which helps ensure low-income tenants can fight eviction with legal representation.
That investment matters. Housing stability is essential to affordability, safety, and dignity.
But without substantial increases in funding elsewhere for indigent legal services, it points to a troubling gap in how legal need is understood. Because for low-income New Yorkers, legal crises rarely stay in one courtroom.
An arrest can lead to eviction. A family court case can destabilize housing and income. An immigration case can trigger detention, family separation, and economic collapse. What begins in one legal system often spirals into another. If the city strengthens one part of the legal safety net without matching it for others, it risks leaving families exposed precisely when they need coordinated support most.
When New Yorkers need essential legal services—whether to defend their home, their family, or their freedom—they often rely on nonprofits funded by the city to deliver them. But for years, those same providers have been asked to do more with less: underfunded, stretched thin, and forced to absorb the cost of government delays.
When public defense and legal services are underfunded, the cost is paid first by the people who can least afford it. People spend more time in jail pretrial. Parents face life-altering family court decisions without consistent support. Tenants lose precious time while their housing hangs in the balance. Immigrant New Yorkers face detention, deportation, and family separation while trying to navigate systems built to move faster than fairness.
The stakes are even higher now. The federal government is escalating enforcement against immigrant New Yorkers and signaling a broader crackdown on constitutionally protected speech and protest. In that environment, the right to counsel is not an abstraction. It is what makes real New York’s promise that everyone—regardless of income or where they were born—can defend their rights and freedom.
That requires investing in a robust legal safety net.
It requires funding that retains experienced advocates, supports full teams, and meaningfully reduces caseloads, so representation can be effective across criminal, civil, family, housing, and immigration matters—not just one part of the system.
But funding alone won’t solve what city leaders have acknowledged for years: the city’s contracting system is failing.
Nonprofit providers deliver essential services yet are often forced to wait months—sometimes years—to be paid. The result is predictable: organizations take on debt to make payroll, delay hiring, and cut services. That is not efficiency. It is a transfer of risk from government onto nonprofits, their workers, and the communities they serve.
Past mayors and City Councils have recognized the problem, held hearings, issued reports, and proposed reforms. Yet providers are still forced into the same survival posture, year after year.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani—who has consistently recognized the value of legal workers’ labor—has an opportunity to show that affordability and labor justice require a more holistic understanding of public obligation.
Because affordability is more than rent and groceries. It is whether families can remain housed after an arrest. Whether an immigrant parent can avoid detention long enough to keep their children stable. Whether a housing crisis becomes a family crisis—or whether a legal safety net is strong enough to interrupt that spiral.
And because the city is the funder—not a bystander—it has the responsibility to get this right.
Before the budget is finalized, Mayor Mamdani should strengthen the full legal safety net by:
- ensuring robust funding for indigent legal services in line with what providers need to retain staff and deliver high-quality representation to all New Yorkers; and
- committing to a real overhaul of the contracting and payment system, developed in close partnership with the nonprofit sector, with enforceable timelines and accountability.
We are ready to work with this administration. We are also ready to hold it accountable.
Because the people we represent cannot afford a partial legal safety net that works in only some of the places where their lives can unravel.
Juval O. Scott is the executive director of The Bronx Defenders. Samantha Espada is the president of The Bronx Defenders Chapter of UAW-ALAA Local 2325.