All about the right to counsel for evictions in NYC

UPDATE: Year 6 report demonstrates RTC’s strength

In its latest report covering FY23, the NYC Office of Civil Justice outlined that while eviction filings increased 83% from the prior year, and that “continued capacity concerns meant that providers frequently offered legal advice to tenants who were otherwise eligible for full representation”, they also found that “In those Housing Court eviction and NYCHA termination cases with reported resolutions in FY2023, 84% of households represented in court by lawyers were able to remain in their homes, preserving tenancies and promoting the preservation of affordable housing and neighborhood stability.”

UPDATE: Year 5 (FY22) report shows program’s continued impact

The Office of Civil Justice has released Universal Access to Legal Services: A Report on Year Five of Implementation in New York City, which looks at NYC’s eviction right to counsel program.  Key points from the report include:

• While evictions have not yet reached pre-pandemic levels, they rose by 20% from the prior year.
• Assistance was provided to 92,400 New Yorkers in approximately 41,800 households across New York City.  Tenants in rent-regulated housing comprised more than half of the clients.
• Although filings and calendars were not at pre–pandemic levels, UA citywide expansion, vestiges of COVID–19, and the ‘Great Resignation’, meant that, for the first time in the program’s history, providers did not always appear at housing court. Despite these challenges, more than 63% of tenants who appeared in Housing Court for eviction cases in the fourth quarter of FY2022 were represented by attorneys in court.” 
• “OCJ continued to work closely with the New York City Housing Court and the nonprofit legal providers who comprise OCJ’s Anti-Harassment and Tenant Protection (AHTP) program to ensure that tenants in emergency cases—illegal lockouts and HP actions for critical repairs —are afforded access to free legal services.”
• 78% of represented households in eviction proceedings, and 87% facing administrative termination of their tenancy by NYCHA, remained in their homes.
• Executions evicted by marshals have declined 41% since 2013 (the City began its investment in tenant representation in 2014).

UPDATE: NYC expands RTC to all seniors regardless of income

As a result of the passage of INT-673, all senior citizens in New York City are entitled to counsel when facing eviction, regardless of their income level.

Update: RTCNYC issues FAQ on tenants not getting attorneys

The Right to Counsel NYC Coalition has written a Frequently Asked Questions doc that explains the recent problem of courts proceeding with eviction cases even where tenants do not have a lawyer to which they are entitled.

Update: another study breaks down success of RTC program

A working paper authored by the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University and published in the National Bureau of Economic Research examined NYC’s eviction right to counsel from 2016-2019 and made the following key findings:

• “UA zip codes see fewer cases with a judgment due to a settlement, and fewer cases that are forfeited by a tenant failure to appear. The number of days between a case filing and a judgment is also longer.”

• “[R]epresentation has very large effects on the affected cases, reducing the probability of a possessory judgment by 38.5 percentage points, the log judgment amount by 2.226, and the probability of a warrant being issued by 38.1 percentage points.”

• “[R]epresentation reduces the probability that the judgment reflects a settlement (the most common basis for a judgment), which may reflect a diminution in self-represented tenants being strong-armed by landlords’ attorneys before appearing before a judge. Tenant representation also reduces the probability that a judgment is reached because the tenant ‘failed to answer’ the petition or ‘failed to appear’ in court.'”

• “[T]enant representation via the UA program reduced the probability of a possessory judgment by 62 percent, reduced the award amount by 85 percent, reduced the probability of a warrant being issued by 72 percent, and reduced the probability of a warrant being executed by 62 percent (though this last estimate is not statistically significant).”

• “[W]hile representation has an effect in both relatively poor and less poor places, the biggest impacts of UA representation are in the places with above-median poverty rates.”

Update: latest report shows continued success of RTC program

The latest report from the NYC Office of Civil Justice finds that 84% of represented tenants were able to remain in their homes.  It also reported that “100 percent of tenants with calendared eviction cases had access to legal services, and 71 percent of tenants who appeared in Housing Court had full representation by attorneys – nearly double the pre-pandemic rate of 38 percent, and an exponential increase over the 1 percent of tenants who had lawyers in 2013.” The program is funded through $166 million of NYC general revenue.  Check out the City’s press release.

Update: City expands right to counsel law

The New York City Council passed two bills expanding the right to counsel, one of which makes the right applicable to the entire City immediately (rather than being rolled out over a longer period) and the other requires the City to work with tenant organizing groups on an outreach campaign.

Update: documentary shows how the right to counsel was achieved

A new documentary, Our Rights! Our Power!  The Right To Counsel (RTC) Campaign To Fight Evictions in NYC, shows how tenant organizers in New York City built a powerful and winning campaign to make the City the first in the nation to provide a right to counsel for tenants.

Update: Latest annual report on right to counsel continues to show massive success

The Year Three report by the NYC Office of Civil Justice highlightx the significant impact of the city’s rollout of the right to counsel.  Notably, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and a partial moratorium on evictions in the City, the right to counsel model shifted to handle all lockouts, requests for emergency repairs, and pre-pandemic cases, and was able to represent all tenants without counsel.  The project also reached out to 14,000 households that had un-executed eviction warrants in 2020 in order to offer representation.

Some of the key points from the report:

• 38% of tenants are now represented in housing court (up from 32% last year), and 69% of NYCHA tenants were represented in administrative termination of tenancy proceedings.  There are 25 zip codes that have been reached so far as part of the phased-in rollout;
• Evictions by marshals declined another 15% since last year, and have declined 41% since 2013 when funding for tenant representation first began;
• 86% of represented tenants in housing courts were able to remain in their homes, and 98% of tenants represented in administrative termination of tenancy proceedings were allowed to remain.
• The City invested $117 million in FY20 and has $131 million allocated for FY21.

Update: Annual report on right to counsel shows huge drop in evictions, eviction filings

The latest report by the NYC Office of Civil Justice contains some dramatic findings on the impact of the city’s rollout of the right to counsel:

• Representation rose from 1% in 2013 to 38% in 2019 (the right is being rolled out over 5 years), which in 2019 included 32,000 households who were facing eviction in Housing Court or NYC Housing Authority administrative proceedings;
• Evictions have dropped 41% overall since 2013, including a 15% drop in 2019 alone;
• Eviction filings have dropped by 30% since 2013, including a 20% drop in 2019 alone.
• Default judgments have dropped 34% since 2013;
• Requests by tenants to bring their cases back to the Housing Court calendar on an emergency basis in order to dispute a judgment, request additional time, or raise legal issues previously not addressed have dropped by 38%, because tenant representation is ensuring these issues are addressed right at the start of the case;
• Overall, 84% of tenants who were represented by counsel remained in their homes.

Update: City Council holds hearing on expanding RTC law

On February 24, 2020, the NYC Council had a hearing on two bills to expand the right to counsel for tenants facing eviction: Intro 1529 would require the city to work with tenant organizers that could help to ensure the right is effectively implemented by making sure tenants know and understand their rights, while Intro 1104 would expand the income threshold for eligibility to 400% of the federal poverty level while also covering termination of housing subsidies.  Testimony at the hearing revealed that the default rate for evictions (i.e., the rate at which tenants fail to show up for housing court) has dropped by roughly 35% from 2016 to 2019.

The NCCRC submitted testimony in favor of the bills.  Media coverage of the hearing was provided by amny and Curbed New York.

Update: Report shows success of new RTC law

The Community Service Society of NY released a report about the impact of the existing RTC law in NYC (32% of the City now has RTC, and there’s been an overall 30% drop in the eviction rate) as well as where evictions are happening in the city as correlated by race and poverty.  The Real Deal has more on the report.  The report also links to the 2019 report by Community Action for Safe Apartments that found more than half of those in RTC zip codes didn’t know they had a right to counsel until they arrived in housing court, demonstrating the need for additional outreach.

Additionally, Next City covered how evictions are down in NYC thanks to the right to counsel law, while City Limits examined how NYC’s success has benefited and driven the right to counsel movement across the country.

Update: new rent regulations plus right to counsel cause 20% eviction decline

amny and the NY Daily News report on how the eviction rate in NYC is down nearly 20% in the six months since the state passed laws strengthening rent regulation, and advocates attribute the decline to a combination of those new laws plus the expanding right to counsel for tenants in the city.

Update: Report on 2 years of right to counsel shows dramatic success

NYC’s Office of Civil Justice has released their report analyzing the impact of the right to counsel in the first several years.  Overall, it finds that 84 percent of represented tenants are remaining in their homes, and the eviction rate has declined by over 30 percent since implementation began.  Moreover, eviction filings dropped 6 percent from 2018 to 2019 and have dropped 15 percent since the City started funding expanded representation in 2013.

Update: Advocates look to expand RTC law

Not content with achieving the first housing right to counsel in the county, NYC advocates have worked with Council member Mark Levine on introduction of RTC 2.0, which would expand eligibility for appointed counsel from 200% of the federal poverty level to 400% and would also include hearings at some non-housing court venues.  The New York Law Journal and AM New York have more.

Advocates have also introduced a bill that would provide funding for tenant organizing groups to better educate tenants on their rights under the new law.

Update: NYC court vacates tenant stipulation because tenant improperly denied counsel

In 2247 Webster Ave. HDFC v Galarce, 2019 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 29 (N.Y. Civ. Ct. 2019), a trial court found that a tenant was improperly deprived of her right to appointed counsel in an eviction due to a clerical error.  The court recounted the history of Intro 214 as well as its early success and some of the statistics about the effectiveness of attorneys, then vacated the stipulation the tenant had entered into because it said it could not find that representation would not have made a difference.  The court stated:

Indeed, to hold Respondent to this stipulation in the context of the Universal Access to Counsel law would take the case out of the due and ordinary course of today’s Housing Court where Respondent was entitled to litigate her case with the benefit of full representation by an attorney.

Vacatur of the stipulation supports the integrity and balance that the Office of Court Justice is charged by law with bringing to litigation in Housing Court. In her unrefuted affidavit, Respondent states that, after speaking with an attorney for the Petitioner, she was left with the impression that she “had to leave the apartment” and that she signed the agreement offered by the Petitioner’s attorney because she felt she “didn’t have a choice,” and might find herself in “more trouble” if she did not sign the stipulation. (Aff of Respondent at 8-9.) This is precisely the type of scenario described by Hon. Jean Schneider in her interview for the New York Law Journal article. As the 144 Woodruff Corp. v Lacrete court opined, “this court cannot permit itself the illusion, comforting though it might be but which our own Chief Administrators have rejected, that settlements in Housing Court are generally the result of arms length transactions between parties of equal bargaining power.”

Update: Studies and reports look at first year of implementation

A new policy brief by the Furman Center takes a look at how implementation of NYC’s eviction right to counsel is going, in order to provide useful information to other jurisdictions considering a similar right to counsel.  To do this evaluation, they say, “We visited Housing Court facilities across the city, watched how UAC is working, and observed how it is changing practices in those courts. We spoke with members of the judiciary, representatives from legal services providers participating in the UAC program, members of the landlords’ bar, tenant organizers, and other tenant advocates about the challenges and opportunities that implementing the program has posed. To better understand the challenges tenants face and their views about the need for counsel, we interviewed more than 100 tenants, most of whom appeared in Housing Court without counsel and did not live in the zip codes currently covered by the UAC program.”  City Limits has more on the release of the report.

Additionally, the Community Service Society of NY examined the first year data and found that evictions occurred five times less frequently in the zip codes implementing a right to counsel.  Crain’s New York Business and The Real Deal covered this analysis.

Councilmembers Levine and Gibson issued a memo to the Chief Judge urging the courts to address some of the implementation issues that have come up in the first year of the right to counsel.  The recommendations in the memo came from the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition.

Finally, NPR in both an audio segment and written piece, talked to tenants affected by the new right to counsel as well as the drop in eviction rates in zip codes that have the new right to counsel.

Update: NYC’s 1st year of right to counsel kept 84% of tenants in homes

The NYC Office of Civil Justice has released its 2018 report detailing the first full year of implementation of the right to counsel in eviction cases.  And it has some incredibly impressive numbers: