Housing and Homelessness
Housing Events in NYC This Week: Rally for Right to Counsel
Jeanmarie Evelly |
City Limits rounds up the latest housing and land use-related events, public hearings and affordable housing lotteries that are ending soon.
City Limits rounds up the latest housing and land use-related events, public hearings and affordable housing lotteries that are ending soon.
City Limits rounds up the latest housing and land use-related events, public hearings and upcoming affordable housing lotteries that are ending soon.
“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 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 governor’s proposed budget did not include funding for the state-run Homeowner Protection Program, or HOPP, a network of legal service providers and counselors aimed at preventing foreclosures. Program supporters say the omission ‘makes no sense’ as New York grapples with a housing crisis, which Hochul’s administration has centered as a policy focus this year.
The city’s trailblazing program guaranteeing legal representation to the city’s poorest tenants facing eviction has been falling short since the state eviction moratorium was lifted last year; many still face housing court alone. State officials told City Limits the program has declined more than 10,000 cases since March 2022.
City Limits rounds up the latest housing and land use-related events, public hearings and upcoming affordable housing lotteries that are ending soon.
City Limits rounds up the latest housing and land use-related events, public hearings and upcoming affordable housing lotteries that are ending soon.