As in Brooklyn, tenants are being evicted for non-payment

If a person cannot pay rent in Brooklyn, then in order to be evicted, he will have to defend a long line in court, waiting for his case to be considered.

Фото: Depositphotos

They take numbers and wait patiently until the clerk calls them to report the date of the upcoming trial, writes The New York Times.

In the same building, a young man enters information about eviction cases into a database for tenant verification services, which offers “black lists” of apartment renters - the names of people who were participants in the eviction process; after getting on this list, it will be very difficult for them to rent an apartment . Even if they win their cases in housing court, their name will still remain on this list.

The New York housing crisis does not begin in the housing court, but ends there. This is the busiest court in the city.

In every area of ​​New York there is a housing court, in Brooklyn it is special. This is not a court building, but a converted commercial space in which there is not enough space for all the processes that take place there.

Proper confidentiality is not ensured there, judges and participants in the cases they are considering go in the same elevators and may encounter in the corridors.

At the same time, due to high load, the system is slow. It takes an average of three to six months to evict someone, while in some other states it may take several days. Such delays cause discontent of landlords.

At the same time, tenants often suffer. Despite the fact that there are organizations supporting them in the city, many tenants do not have attorneys during the proceedings, which makes the housing court the most one-sided court in the American system.

The Housing Court in New York was created in 1973, and its main purpose was to monitor the maintenance of proper condition of apartments. Today, the bulk of his work is evictions, with only a few cases dealing with home repairs and conditions.

In 2017, approximately 69 000 applications were filed with the housing court in Brooklyn. Only about 6% of them were complaints of tenants to homeowners due to insufficient heating, broken appliances or parasites. Virtually all other claims were a request for eviction of tenants for non-payment.

At the same time, another form of eviction is becoming increasingly popular in New York, when tenants are evicted not for non-payment, but for minor violations - such cases in Brooklyn accounted for about 17% of the total. At the same time, homeowners often fabricate charges in order to vacate the apartment and have the right to raise the rent for the next tenants.

For example, one tenant was asked to evict because he kept an unauthorized washing machine in the apartment; another because his child threw rice out of the window.

The car evicting residents through the court is constantly gaining momentum. Recently, the rate of evictions has slowed, as the cost of legal services for tenants at the expense of charitable organizations has increased, but still remain very high. In 2017, the city had 21 074 eviction cases.

Of these, 5 are in Brooklyn. In other words, every day on average 984 families lost their homes.

The unwritten record of such proceedings is that tenants wait at the courthouse, often for several hours, until homeowners attorneys call their names and ask them to step back to talk.

Discussions take place in the corridors, and others in the building can hear them, since there is simply no other place for that. In this noisy corridor, where there is often no place even to sit down, it is very difficult to concentrate. Therefore, it is rather difficult to negotiate, and transactions are often reached in a hurry.

These transactions are executed on a sheet of paper, which is then simply submitted for approval by the judge, the meeting itself does not take place.

The tenants are basically ready to sign even dubious deals, because they are scared, they are ashamed, they need to take the children out of school or they simply cannot miss another working day. Some of them even think that they are having a conversation with an impartial representative of the court, who recommends this transaction to them, although in reality this is the lawyer of the landlord.

Judges have to deal with 40-60 cases per day. There were cases when a judge reviewed 92 cases in a day.

The courthouse also has an office of the Office of Human Resources Management, a city social services agency, which helps with emergency one-time payments to pay off tenants in need of eviction.

Under the administration of Mayor Bill de Blazio, this program received significantly more money. In Brooklyn, in 2017, 62,6 million was paid on it compared to 35,2 million three years earlier, individual payments averaged 3800 dollars.

During the decision-making process, social security officers must find out what caused the overdue debt. This is usually a loss of income, family emergencies, the death of a relative, etc.

Among all offices of this agency throughout the country, the level of approval for applications for emergency payment due to eviction is 67%. But in Brooklyn, it is close to 99%.

Technically, one-time payments are loans. But older New Yorkers and people with disabilities shouldn't have to pay them back. The rest must repay some portion of this loan, depending on their income level and several other factors, but these payments are spread out over years. According to the social services agency, about 80% of recipients are in arrears on these loans.

According to the rules, a person cannot get more than one such loan per year, but in fact, in New York, some get two or even three such loans in a year.

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