Despite the splashy headlines and a self-serving narrative being pushed by professional tenant activists, there is no looming eviction crisis in New York. Rather — and this is where the interests of tenants and property owners (the latter of which I represent) are aligned — there is an administrative crisis.
Criminal Court House building in Queens.
With billions of federal dollars designated specifically for rental aid now flooding the Empire State, months upon months of back rent is finally being paid. The shortcomings of New York’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) have been extensively chronicled: We were the last state in the country to launch a rent aid program, and the process in distributing the funds was so slow that the U.S. Treasury Department had to allow exceptions in order to protect our funds from being clawed back and reallocated to more efficient states. But that’s old news.
What’s not old news is the ongoing closure of Housing Court, and the impact that denying access to the courts is having on property owners — and tenants, too. Let’s be clear: Housing Court is also where evictions are prevented. Housing Court is where tenants and landlords meet to resolve issues with the help of government agencies and programs that are physically present in the courthouse in order to effectuate positive outcomes. Housing Court is where parties meet to solve problems.
When New York closed its Housing Courts, it effectively shut down all recourse for property owners to question the truthfulness of a tenant’s COVID rent-hardship declaration — which is why the Supreme Court of the United States ruled this flawed process unconstitutional. Albany’s dodgy tinkering to provide a weak pseudo-challenge to tenant information in the newly-minted eviction moratorium extension failed to address the court’s concerns. That issue is again being litigated in federal court.
Only a small percentage of Housing Court cases result in eviction — typically less than 9%, far less in more recent years — and only after extensive due process, and not always because of non-payment.
New York City has a robust “right to counsel” law that provides tenants with legal representation, and there already are substantial protections in place to keep families in their homes including the Tenant Safe Harbor Act and, with New York awash in federal rent relief dollars, the ERAP.
Therefore, we are forced to draw a very disturbing conclusion to this prolonged closure of Housing Courts — especially when considering that Albany ended the state’s COVID-19 state of emergency last June for restaurants, offices, sports arenas and other courts. Even Broadway and the education system have fully opened. Our conclusion? This can really only be punitive to property owners — some sort of revenge being meted out by a one-party government driven by radical activists, who get their way by threatening legislative primaries, and by the political triangulations made by candidates (and likely candidates) for governor.
Housing policy, which now includes wrongly keeping Housing Courts closed, should be more honestly named “housing politics.”
While disappointing, this isn’t a surprise. Rent regulations in New York are inherently inequitable, failing to meet the needs of those the system is meant to help because it also subsidizes a luxury lifestyle for others. Rent regulations in New York are not means-tested, creating and perpetuating a public benefit being paid for by private actors in a system that increasingly encroaches on property rights. ERAP’s failures, and Housing Courts still being closed, are an outgrowth and reflective of this larger broken system.
At its base, legislating is problem-solving — a process dependent on honest presentation of facts. What New York is facing is not an eviction crisis, but rather a crisis of administrative failures that continue to prevent equitable access to the courts alongside inefficient delivery of rent assistance.
Those impacted by COVID should have help paying rent — a proper function of government no different than addressing food insecurity or unemployment. But we must be honest about calling out campaign politicking, especially when politics takes priority over sound policy and drives decisions that trample on basic fairness. Benefit programs without accountability or safeguards are experiments bound for disaster.
Access to Housing Courts, access to procedural and substantive justice for the private providers of a public benefit, is absolutely necessary. With Housing Courts closed, tenants are, in effect, adjudicating their own cases — and that’s bad for affordable housing, owners, and tenants in real need of government assistance.
Strasburg is president of the Rent Stabilization Association, New York’s largest organization of landlords.