Bronx
Courts Need to Adapt to New Rights for Tenants: Report
Jarrett Murphy |
Many tenants facing eviction in housing court are unaware of their right to a publicly funded lawyer, Bronx advocacy organizations contend.
Many tenants facing eviction in housing court are unaware of their right to a publicly funded lawyer, Bronx advocacy organizations contend.
‘It’s time we recognize that the interests at stake for parents under ACS investigation are just as compelling, with consequences that can be just as grave, as in a criminal case.’
When facing the possible loss of their children, New York state parents have the right to a lawyer only when a case moves to court. Even then some counties fail to provide them. And many key decisions are made before a case ever gets to a judge.
San Francisco voters approved a similar program, Los Angeles lawmakers tasked that city’s housing department with developing one, and places like Philly, Newark and the nation’s capital are headed down the same road. But there are lessons to be learned from the Big Apple.
‘Without organizing, RTC will be just a legal services program; it’s really only a right that people know and claim when organized tenants have ownership over it.’
The Right to Counsel program is being phased in over five years by zip code and is currently available to 15 zip codes, three in each borough.
Legal service providers say the phase-in of the city’s unprecedented right to counsel program is going well but comes with challenges.
In the three days before the final State of the City address before he faces re-election, Mayor de Blasio unveiled two major shifts to address critics of his housing policies. On Friday, he revealed a major shift toward lower-income families in the allocation of units to be created under his housing plan. And on Sunday he and Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito announced they had agree to create a universal right to legal services for tenants facing eviction. The starkly unequal playing field in housing court, where most landlords have lawyers and most tenants do not, has long infuriated advocates and was a focus of City Limits’ 2015 series on that court. The de Blasio administration has for years offered some funding for housing-court legal services but had resisted creating a universal right.