Residents with low income living within the 20 zip codes of the city who face eviction, you can seek the free assistance of lawyers. This is possible thanks to the law in 2017, known as «the right to representation by counsel». But, despite the fact that the city helps people seeking to retain housing in new York city every year are evicted thousands of people.
In 2018 was recorded 18007 of evictions, compared with 21074 in 2017, but the new convenient tool presented Right To Counsel Coalition and JustFix.nyc, demonstrates that you need to do a lot of work. To draw public attention to the programme for the protection of residents, human rights organizations released a map of evictions (within the zip codes where renters represent hired by the city lawyers), and a list of landlords who evicted the largest number of tenants.
Human rights organizations stressed that «tenants should know their rights.» «In addition, because the eviction is a frightening and traumatic process, many tenants prefer to move instead of fight. Homeowners use this, but we must not let them to do so.»
The interactive map shows 5 of the borough, where tenants are fighting against evictions, as well as homeowners who served on these tenants to court. Although the program operates not so long ago, the first results show its effectiveness.
In 2018 in the range of 20 zip codes where a right to representation by counsel, was recorded 3622 eviction. It’s on 477 cases less compared to the previous year – 4099 case. But, interestingly, the number of evictions have also decreased slightly in areas where it is not valid right to representation by counsel — 18819 in 2017 to 18008 in 2018. The decrease in the number of evictions also due to the fact that tenants are taking more aggressive steps to fight back homeowners, including collective refusal to pay rent, lawsuits and even hunger strikes.
Basically evictions happen when tenants are late with rent, but the circumstances that led to the delay in payment, may be different. Homeowners sometimes deliberately carried out repairs, which gives them the opportunity to increase the amount of the payment for the apartment. Many tenants with low income can’t afford to pay for a lawyer and could not stand up to lawyers in housing court. The city decided to change the situation and adopted a law on the right to representation by an attorney. Now about 324 thousand tenants who live within 20 zip codes of the city, where a high level of evictions have access to the help of lawyers hired by the city. New York continues to gradually expand the program to include new areas. It is expected that the program will be fully operational by the end of 2022.
