New York's Broken Housing Court Lets Tenant Stay For Years Without Paying Rent

By Christian Britschgi of Reason. Excerpt:

"In April 2020, Vanie Mangal's tenant, who lives on the bottom floor of the two-family home they share in Queens, stopped paying rent. Instead, she started harassing Mangal.

"This was the height of COVID. I had a lot of stress at work," says Mangal, an emergency room physician's assistant. "All of my patients were dying. I'd come home, and we share a hallway, and she would scream things to me in the hallway."

Other episodes of harassment followed. Mangal's tenant would play music at all hours. At one point, she exposed herself to Mangal. Her tenant claimed a COVID hardship to avoid eviction while also ordering new furniture and buying a new car.

In 2021, Mangal's nightmare situation was written up in The New York Times as an example of pandemic-era eviction restrictions' toll on small landlords.

Fast forward to today, those eviction restrictions are gone, but Mangal's nonpaying tenant is still there. Mangal is the one who moved out instead.

Helping to keep her tenant there is New York's overwhelmed housing court system, where it can take over a year to process a simple nonpayment case.

Under a new plan proposed by New York's landlords, and modeled off much-praised eviction diversion programs elsewhere in the country, more cases could potentially be shifted out of housing court. But groups that get taxpayer money to represent tenants in housing court are dead-set against the idea.

Housing Court Dysfunction

In 2019, New York landlords were filing around 14,000 residential eviction cases a month. Pandemic-era eviction restrictions dropped filings down to basically zero for a time.

In 2021, those suppressed cases started flooding back into an understaffed court system. In New York City specifically, landlords also say an expansion of the city's right-to-counsel program—which provides tenants facing eviction with free legal representation—has also slowed things down.

"You add all those [COVID-era cases] on top of a court system that is not fully staffed, and you have attorneys on the other side who are intentionally delaying [cases] as long as possible," says Jay Martin, executive director of Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP), a property owners trade association.

Right-to-counsel advocates say explicitly that their goal is "slowing down eviction cases."

Today, there are nearly 200,00 active eviction cases in state court, up from around 33,000 before the pandemic.

The result is people like Mangal have had to wait nearly four years to vindicate their property rights.

Even in cases where no one would be removed from the unit, the wheels of justice grind slowly. CHIP shared with Reason the case of one building owner whose tenant was killed by a bus, but retaking legal possession of the unit still took two years.

To cut down on the housing court backlog, CHIP has proposed creating a voluntary eviction diversion program. Tenants and landlords would meet with a financial planner before an eviction is filed. The planner could help tenants craft a payment plan and connect them with government assistance.

Tenant advocates praise Philadelphia's similar eviction diversion program. It requires landlords and tenants to undergo 30 days of either mediated discussions or direct negotiations before the landlord can file for eviction.

Local public radio station WHYY reported in August that some 5,000 people have used the mediation program, and 70 percent managed to reach an agreement that kept the case out of housing court.

Resolving landlord-tenant disputes before a landlord files for eviction can be a benefit to both parties, says Carl Gershenson, a director at Princeton University's Eviction Lab.

"The landlord has already paid filing fees. In a lot of cases, they've paid legal fees. A tenant has an eviction filing on their record, which is also not ideal when they go to look for rental housing in the future," Gershenson tells Reason.

Backlash

But legal aid groups in New York hate CHIP's idea. They say it will funnel renters into mediated discussions where they have fewer legal protections.

"Eviction cases are hardly ever only about money and a certified financial planner cannot safeguard tenants against bad acting landlords failing to hold up their end of the bargain," Ami Shah, deputy director of housing at Legal Services NYC, told The Real Deal in a statement.

(In 2022, 80 percent of residential eviction cases were for nonpayment of rent, according to the state court system's eviction dashboard.)

Instead, legal aid groups have asked for more funding for housing court lawyers. New York City's right-to-counsel program got a $20 million bump this fiscal year, on top of the $186 million they were already receiving.

Martin attributes this opposition to cynical motives: Any alternative to housing court would lower the demand for these groups' services. Legal aid attorneys would also have less ability to use a prolonged housing court process as leverage for landlords dropping eviction cases.

(Legal Services NYC did not respond to Reason's request for comment.)

A mediation program would do little to help Mangal, who says she tried to work things out with her tenant outside of court already. A smoother-moving court system would allow her to vindicate her property rights a little faster.

CHIP says they hope to introduce statewide legislation creating a New York eviction diversion program in the new year."