NYTimes: How to Fight Homelessness
OCT. 19, 2015
Community Board 3 Land Use, Zoning, Public & Private Housing Committee
Wednesday, November 18 at 6:30pm — Project Renewal, Kenton Hall – 333 Bowery (btwn E 2nd & 3rd Sts) will weigh in tonight.
Parks are increasingly the ‘home’ of last resort to the homeless. How do we tackle this honestly and effectively and humanely? Here’s some thinking from City Council Chair and Coalition for the Homeless:
“WITH over 58,000 people in our shelter system every night, and thousands more sleeping on the streets, concern about homelessness in New York City has reached a fever pitch. We must attack this challenge on every front: through construction of more housing with on-site services, expanded federal support for homeless families and improvements in city-run shelters.
But the best solution to homelessness is preventing it before it even occurs…
More than two-thirds of the people in our shelters are families with vulnerable children, and the most common cause of their homelessness isn’t drug dependency or mental illness. It’s eviction….
Evictions have reached epidemic proportions in New York City. The number of families forced from their homes by court order has been rising steadily for the last 10 years, and is now close to 29,000 per year. Countless thousands more are leaving under duress midway through eviction proceedings. Many end up with nowhere to go and are forced to turn to homeless shelters.
The sky-high pace of evictions is exacerbated by our profoundly unequal judicial system. Unlike those in criminal cases, New Yorkers in housing court have no right to counsel. The result: Only 10 percent of New York City tenants who appear in court have attorneys to help protect their rights. In stark contrast, close to 100 percent of landlords do. It’s hard to overstate just how badly this skews the results of eviction proceedings in favor of owners.
Housing law in New York is byzantine and challenging even for lawyers to navigate. For low-income tenants representing themselves, winning a case against a landlord’s attorney is a steep uphill climb. Unscrupulous landlords are fully aware of this dynamic and attempt to capitalize on it by routinely hauling tenants into housing court on weak grounds — knowing full well that the deck is stacked in their favor. Randomized studies have shown that those few tenants who do have attorneys are 80 percent less likely to be evicted as those representing themselves. Landlords know this, too — and will sometimes simply drop their case as soon as they realize a tenant is represented….
….The status quo is untenable, and even judges are increasingly speaking out. New York State’s chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, has called eloquently and powerfully for the establishment of a right to counsel in housing court….”