56-year-old Rocio Quero Yescas is walking with a cane, and she fears she will trip and fall because the floor tiles in her apartment keep peeling.
Kenya Whitt, a former psychiatric nurse, has been unable to pay rent since she was attacked by a patient and suffered a traumatic brain injury.
Julio Rodriguez and his 81-year-old mother have struggled for months with noisy neighbors, and want to force the landlord to take action.
Each of them gathered at housing court in the Bronx in early June, seeking answers in a maze of paperwork, negotiations, and byzantine hearings.
More than 171,500 deportation petitions was filed with New York’s housing court in 2019, a year before the pandemic closed the courts. Now, the courts are starting to work again, removing pandemic restrictions and resuming in-person appearances. The corridors are starting to fill up with tenants, landlords and their attorneys again. More than a third of all new evictions are in the Bronx.
The resumption of evictions comes at a time when New Yorkers are being squeezed by Inflation soars and record high rent. On Tuesday, a management board approved a 3.25 percent increase on one-year leases for stable rentala move that would affect about two million city residents.
Every morning, at the gates of the Bronx Building, a long line of people line up as tenants anxiously wait under scaffolding that now partially covers the front of the building while repairs to a leaky roof are done. being made. Most mornings, the line stretches down to the sidewalk, where a food cart sells egg sandwiches and hot coffee to early breakfast skippers.
Inside the court, it is not the same as before, observers said. Before the pandemic, the corridors and courtrooms were packed with lawyers and tenants. On a recent day, an eerie quiet concealed a simmering tension beneath the proceedings. Financial assistance for renters is dwindling due to Pandemic relief program runs out of money. And since the state’s eviction moratorium ended in January, records in housing courts in New York climbed higher.
The number of evictions is still far below pre-pandemic levels, and court officials say they are trying to keep the load from becoming overwhelming by eliminating backlogs. .
“It’s significantly lower than it was in pre-pandemic times,” said Jean T. Schneider, overseeing judge for the New York City Housing Court. “Not just a record explosion.”
But for tenants facing the risk of being evicted, the first trip to court can be daunting. Some tenants are directed upstairs to appear in court, while others are taken to the information desk on the first floor, where they can get paperwork, file complaints and even make payments. debts.
On a recent Monday, Michelle Patterson-Gay waited to file a complaint against her landlord, who was trying to evict her. She lives in the Soundview neighborhood with her 17-year-old daughter, Essence, who has a learning disability, and says she has an agreement to move out in March 2020, but her landlord repeatedly pays cash in her rent check, causing the deal to be cancelled.
Now, Ms. Gay said, the landlord has harassed her and blocked access to her apartment, for which she pays about $1,200 a month. Until she found a lawyer, she was prepared to fight alone. “I have a child with special needs, and I can’t live like that,” she said.
Raven S. Dorantes, managing attorney for the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project, said the dam would break. It’s only a matter of time.
“You will see more people at their breaking point,” she said.
Upstairs at the Bronx Building, a large courtroom on the second floor has been converted into a reception room where tenants can request legal representation, look up cases and file paperwork themselves. . The two stations are set up for tenants who can only appear virtual, but have no computers or Wi-Fi access and therefore must appear in person.
Miriam Maldonado, who was looking to fix up her apartment, sat in front of the big screen for 20 minutes, hoping to connect with a lawyer, but was told she wasn’t there on the right day. Another tenant, Nector Caro, appeared in a virtual meeting with a representative for Mobilization for Justice, a legal services provider in the Bronx, who said the agency was unable to take on any cases. but will contact him by phone and provide free legal advice. .
Down the hallway, a long table serves as a makeshift help desk, with a desktop computer at one end and a bilingual court clerk at the other.
Julio Rodriguez was waiting there with his mother, Ligia. After years of substance abuse, mental health problems, homelessness and bad credit, Mr. Rodriguez found a landlord willing to give him a chance at an apartment in Morris Park for the price. $1,950 a month. However, shortly after moving in, the neighbors upstairs started making “unreasonable noises”, he said.
“We don’t really want to start complaining about anything because we’re just lucky to be there,” Mr. Rodriguez said. However, he added, “my quality of life is declining at a rapid rate.”
Since he had been evicted from his home before, he said he was reluctant to move. So he went to housing court to force his landlord to act. “He was just waiting for me to lose my appetite and move out,” he said, “and I was not qualified to do that because I had to go through a headache to get to this place.”
A help desk is also available for the host. Marco Villegas, who owns nine buildings in the Bronx, mostly in the Morrisania neighborhood, sits on a bench with his daughter, hoping to resolve issues with tenants about not paying rent.
“This is my first time back on the court post-Covid,” he said. “I don’t know how if the calm reflects real life or just a change in the way the process is done.”
Mr. Villegas said he considers tenants his biggest asset; without them, he couldn’t pay his bills. He prefers a community-based approach where landlords build relationships with their tenants. For him, filing for deportation is a last resort.
And a legal battle can be expensive. He said the upfront fee was $2,500 to file the paperwork and get two court hearings. To move an apartment, including repairs and finding a new tenant, can cost up to $30,000, he said.
Mr. Villegas, who rents out 30 units in total, is frustrated because he feels the housing court is targeting larger landlords who have money and connections. “My approach to resources is different,” he says.
Even homeowners with more units find relocation a hassle. Lisa Gomez, chief executive officer of L&M Development Partners, which manages about 20,000 affordable homes in New York, said. “There’s nothing difficult about going to court,” she said.
Some of New York’s biggest low-cost landlords say they’d rather avoid a court battle altogether. Adam Weinstein, chief executive officer of Phipps Houses, said the pandemic has given them time to rethink their relationship with tenants.
To help ease the looming log-in in the courts, Phipps withdrew half of the pending cases. “It’s not just a responsibility, it’s a homeowner’s benefit,” he said. “The eviction is just a vacancy, and a vacancy is a loss.”
Lisa Bova-Hiatt, general counsel at NYCHA, said the New York City Housing Authority, whose homeowners make up 11% of the city’s population, is also rethinking its approach, said Lisa Bova-Hiatt, general counsel at NYCHA. management, work with tenants before the problem becomes a crisis.
“We decided there had to be a better way to do this,” she said. “We have to do better to keep people around.”
Housing advocates accept this approach. “Preferably yes, we will all work together before anyone gets caught in the legal system,” said Runa Rajagopal, executive director of civil action at Bronx Defenders, a publicity defender, said.
Despite efforts to prevent massive eviction filings, tens of thousands of New Yorkers are facing deportation: 121,473 new cases have been filed in New York’s housing courts since Jan. March 15, 2020, by Princeton’s Expulsion Laboratory. More than a third of those records – 41,988 – are in the Bronx alone.
Often, an eviction fight occurs because of issues beyond a tenant’s control, such as a simple mistake in paperwork or loss of a job.
On the fifth floor of the Bronx Housing Court, Ms. Dorantes of the Urban Justice Center represents Kenya Whitt, a tenant who has not worked since she was taken by a patient at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center. , where she knocked the nurse unconscious.
Without a job, Ms. Whitt, 46, cannot pay the rent of her apartment in University Heights. However, her landlord claims that she is receiving income and is in recourse.
“This is my first time in court, and I don’t know how things are going,” she said, glaring at Mrs. Dorantes, who was entering the courtroom to appear before the judge.
Miss Dorantes reappeared a few minutes later; The case has been adjourned until July 20.
“We can’t help people fast enough,” she said. “The tenants fell through the cracks.”
That day, drilling in the roof above Judge Diane E. Lutwak’s courtroom pushed everyone out into the hallway, where they lingered and waited for instructions.
Among them was Rocio Quero Yescas, who sat with her 26-year-old daughter, Stephane Martinez-Quero, while their attorney met with Judge Lutwak. They are trying to settle a dispute with a landlord about the floor of their apartment in Jerome Park, for which they pay $1,173 a month.
Ms. Martinez-Quero said the girl’s mother noticed the first smell. “She thought it was mold, but it was rotting wood.” A leaky radiator damaged the wooden floor, and now the tiles on it have peeled off.
But several attempts by the homeowner to fix the problem were unsuccessful, so Quero Yescas filed a complaint with the city. In response, her daughter said, the landlord was trying to evict them.
A social worker at Part of the Solution, a Bronx emergency services provider, introduced them to Elizabeth Maris, a supervisory attorney at the agency.
“Homeowners often try to fix things on the cheap,” says Maris. Through an interpreter, she explained to Quero Yescas and her daughter how the meeting with the judge went. “We have requested a postponement to give the owner time to repair. Hopefully, they will withdraw their case.”
Tomorrow will bring a new wave of tenants looking for help, and advocates say they’ll do whatever they can, despite the increased load.
“The right to advice is a great thing the city decided to do; It can be a great model for others across the country,” said Donna Dougherty, senior director of legal services for elder justice at JASA, a New York-based elder service. , said. “If we fail because of the pandemic, it will be a tragedy.”
Kirsten Noyes contribution research.
