Brooklyn tenants are trying to dismantle barriers around a seldom-used 1960s-era law that can prohibit landlords from collecting rent when they fail to fix dangerous building conditions for months on end. The campaign just had its first breakthrough.
While the total won’t be clear until remaining applications for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) are processed, a majority of the $391 in aid will likely go to the housing authority and other public housing tenants, with $35 million specifically earmarked for NYCHA. Still, thousands of New Yorkers living in public or subsidized housing did not apply for ERAP but continue to struggle with mounting debt.
“For decades, the government agencies that oversee and fund the supportive housing systems have disregarded the voices and needs of applicants and tenants, and instead prioritized the needs of providers, landlords, and developers.”
Seventeen previously rent-stabilized apartments in Cristina Ramirez’s Harlem building haven’t been registered with the state since 2018. Her legal team says her case is illustrative of the need for greater enforcement of New York’s rent laws.
“It’s a complicated question,” said Rosalind Black, citywide housing director at Legal Services NY, which aids tenants under the landmark city initiative to provide free representation to low-income New Yorkers facing eviction in housing court. Though the results have been overwhelmingly positive, the program has never been funded to cover every eligible tenant.
The process, called an administrative dismissal, is enshrined in state law. The Office of Court Administration wiped out a category of older eviction cases that property owners started before the end of 2020 seeking to recover unpaid rent, in which tenants never filed a response and the landlords took no further action.
A new data tool by the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University breaks down a trove of housing-related data for each of the state’s Senate and Assembly districts. It comes just over a week before the state budget deadline, in a year dominated by debates over how elected officials should address New York’s affordable housing shortage.
The Senate and Assembly on Tuesday released their annual budget resolutions, responding to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s $227 billion spending proposal unveiled last month. They rejected the bulk of Hochul’s strategy to increase housing production statewide, while entertaining eviction protections the governor has ducked.
The city’s landmark Right to Counsel law was the country’s first to guarantee legal representation in housing court to low-income tenants most at risk for eviction. But advocates and providers say it’s been undermined in recent months as the courts schedule eviction cases faster than there are available housing attorneys to take them. “When the law was first passed, it worked,” Ruth Riddick, a Flatbush tenant, testified Friday at a city hearing on the initiative.
“The city and state must stop relying on failed capitalist strategies when developing more housing, which is why I introduced a bill Thursday that would require the city to study the feasibility of creating a municipal social housing development agency.”
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