An increasing share of tenants facing eviction are doing so without housing attorneys, according to a new report from New York City Comptroller Brad Lander highlighting an issue tenant advocates have been ringing alarm bells about for years as evictions continued to surge post-pandemic.
Lander’s report released Friday draws heavily from an analysis from the NYC Office of Civil Justice that found only 42% of tenants facing eviction had lawyers in housing court last fiscal year — down from 71% in Fiscal year 2021.
The report covers a post-pandemic period when the eviction moratorium ended and eviction filings rocketed up from 42,109 in 2021 to 119,834 in 2024, still slightly lower than pre-pandemic levels.
This past March saw the highest number of evictions since before the pandemic with 1,560 evictions, according to the NYC Eviction Crisis Monitor which scrapes publicly available data from state court records.
Rates of legal representation were lowest in the Bronx, which also has the highest eviction rate. Just 31% of tenants there facing eviction went to court with a lawyer, the comptroller’s report found.
THE CITY reported in 2022 that the share of tenants facing eviction in housing court who had attorneys plummeted after a pandemic-freeze on evictions was lifted, dropping to as low as 6% in a given week.
In a press conference Friday releasing the report, Lander, who is running for the Democratic primary nomination for mayor, took aim at incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who a day earlier unveiled what he referred to as the “best budget ever.”
“Somehow yesterday the mayor called it the ‘best budget ever’ but what we have is the worst housing crisis ever: evictions rising, representation falling, rents going up, more families being evicted, more families are going to end up homeless,” Lander said. “This is a crisis and we need to focus on fixing it.”
He pointed to funding for legal services for tenants which is projected to remain flat at $156 million despite the surging demand. Adams’s office didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
The city’s right to counsel law passed in 2017 is supposed to guarantee a housing attorney for low-income tenants facing eviction. An estimated 82 percent of tenants facing eviction are thought to qualify for lawyers based on the income threshold.
Tenants are vastly more likely to be able to stay in their homes when they have lawyers representing them in court. Of 41,161 households facing eviction who had lawyers between 2018 and 2023, 81 percent remained in their homes, according to the comptroller’s report.
“Without an attorney the odds of a tenant prevailing in housing court are very, very slim. There’s a reason for that. Housing law is complicated. Most tenants do not know the defenses to which they are entitled,” said Legal Aid Society Attorney Pavita Krishnaswamy, who spoke alongside Lander Friday morning. “When they raise those defenses, they are very likely to prevail, to buy themselves time, to stay in their house, to pay off debts that they may owe, and remain in the community.”
All told, about 60% of the 82,881 households who faced eviction between 2022 and January of this year did so without lawyers, according to the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition.
Last week Lander joined other candidates in the Democratic mayoral primary in backing a rent freeze next year for over a million rent-stabilized as the Rent Guidelines Board, appointed by Mayor Eric Adams mulls increases of as much as 4.47%.
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