These Cities Are About to Make It Harder for Landlords to Evict People
“I was numb,” he says of the moment he discovered the notice from his landlord. “I was frightened. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.”
A single parent of five and a bricklayer by trade, Dillard, 62, got the eviction letter not long after he returned home from a months-long stay in the hospital, where he was receiving treatment for emphysema. He was losing his Bronx apartment, he learned, because the Section 8 housing program that subsidized his rent had stopped making payments to his landlord because of the property’s dilapidated condition. Despite the fact that the apartment’s pest infestation and its leaky plumbing were a result of the owner’s own negligence, Dillard says his landlord used the subsidy cutoff as an excuse to try to toss his family into the street.
“No one should have to look in their daughter’s eyes while she’s crying and saying she doesn’t want to go to a shelter, and you have to hold back your own tears and tell her that everything is going to be all right even though you don’t know if it will be all right,” he says. “No one should have to do that.”
For most tenants, this would have been the beginning of an unmitigated nightmare. They could have ended up in a shelter. They could have lost their jobs. Their kids might have had to move to a new school. They might have suffered a heath crisis, or something worse.
Dillard, though, was lucky. A neighbor told him about a local organization that offered free legal counsel to beleaguered tenants, a rare service in a city where only a tiny percentage of renters have customarily had access to housing attorneys. Dillard got a lawyer and a legal battle ensued, one which saw him return time and again to housing court. Finally, after three years of motions and proceedings and paperwork, his landlord sensed defeat and dropped the frivolous case.
The court fight enabled Dillard to stay in his apartment as long as he pleased. It also activated him.
“If I hadn’t had an attorney, I would have been evicted,” he says. “Without legal knowledge, there is no way I would have been able” to fight in court, he added.
After his eviction scare, Dillard wanted other tenants to benefit from the same sort of legal support he’d received, so he became an organizer with a Bronx-based housing-rights organization called Community Action for Safe Apartments, or CASA. He also took on a leadership role with the Right to Counsel NYCCoalition, the motivating force behind a visionary movement to guarantee all low-income tenants in New York City a right to legal counsel.
The coalition, which brings together legal-aid attorneys, tenant-rights groups, unions, faith organizations, and more, formed in 2014 and quickly started recruiting supporters for its cause. Dillard and members held town-hall meetings and panel discussions, threw block parties, and published reports. They took local officials on tours of housing court and pushed their message in TV and print media. They won the support of dozens of community boards, all five borough presidents and a wide range of prominent officials, including Jonathan Lippman, the former chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals. This summer, they finally prevailed.
On August 11, Mayor Bill de Blasio signed legislation that, when fully implemented, will dedicate $155 million a year to ensure that all low-income tenants in New York City have access to legal representation in housing court. The right-to-counsel legislation is the first of its kind in the country, but it won’t be the last. From Philadelphia and Baltimore to San Francisco and Washington, DC, a diffuse but savvy movement is taking shape to ensure that tenants get the legal assistance they need when landlords try to kick them to the curb. In doing so, it aims to decrease evictions, slow gentrification, and mitigate the devastating social effects of home dispossession. It hopes to help solve the housing crisis that is roiling cities across America.
Source: thenation.com
Accessibility