Testimony: Expand Right to Counsel to Moderate-Income New Yorkers
Oksana Mironova
Joint NYC Council Meeting of the Committees on the Justice System & Housing and Buildings
Intro 1104 and 1529
Thank you for this opportunity to comment on the implementation and expansion of Right to Counsel (RTC). My name is Oksana Mironova and I am a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society (CSS), a nonprofit organization that addresses some of the most urgent problems facing low-income New Yorkers and their communities, including the effects of the city’s housing crisis.
New York City has always been known as a chronically tight, high-cost rental market. In recent decades, truly affordable housing has become more elusive and housing insecurity has become the norm for the vast majority of low-income New Yorkers. Since the beginning of its implementation, the right to counsel law has proven to be an effective strategy for reducing the number of evictions.
Over the past three years, CSS has used eviction data to evaluate RTC’s rollout and implementation. Key points from this year’s report (which you can find in our written testimony) are:
- Since 2017, evictions in RTC zip codes declined by 29 percent, compared to a 16 percent decline in zip codes with similar eviction, poverty, and rental rates that do not yet have RTC.
- Longer term trends point to the positive influence of tenant organizing, legal assistance, and tenant protection laws on eviction rates. There is a steady climb in evictions from 2010 to 2013, followed by a sharp reduction in 2015, likely due to the start of the RTC organizing campaign and the first infusion of government assistance for legal services in housing court. A secondary reduction in 2019 is likely a result of the continuing RTC’s rollout and the passage of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA).
- RTC and HSTPA are complementary. RTC is a powerful tool for upholding and interpreting the new rent laws, especially when they are contested in the courts.
- Still, vulnerabilities remain. In 2019, CSS’s Unheard Third survey showed that 30 percent of moderate-income New Yorkers have experienced one or more housing hardship, indicating that doubling RTC’s qualification threshold to 400% FPL can have a real impact.
- In 2019, a survey of Bronx tenants in RTC eligible zip codes by CASA-New Settlement and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition found that about half of respondents did not know about RTC until they first arrived in court, pointing to a knowledge gap requiring action.
We urge to pass Intro 1529 and Intro 1104 to both expand the right to counsel in housing court to a wider pool of tenants and to ensure that tenants know about this powerful right before they get to court.
Thank you again for the opportunity to offer our recommendations. For more information or if you have any questions, please contact Oksana Mironova, CSS Housing Policy Analyst at 212-614-5412 or omironova@cssny.org.