Page 25 - Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice

families go straight into the shelter system and that eviction prevention decreases homelessness, the Mayor identified neighborhoods where the highest number of people enter the shelter system directly from evictions, and allocated an additional $12 million to provide legal services to prevent evictions in those neighborhoods .7
As more lawyers are hired to represent tenants, we are in the middle of an incredible moment in our city’s history . New York City’s Mayor has explicitly acknowledged that preventing tenant displacement through legal counsel is central to our expansion and growth as a city . For many years, advocates and tenants throughout New York City have been advocating for New York to establish a Right to Counsel—a right for New Yorkers facing the loss of their home to have an attorney to defend them even if they are too poor to pay for counsel . From a funding perspective, we are closer to a Right to Counsel than we’ve ever been . But a right is so much more than just funding .
The high stakes of housing Court
To illustrate how a right is different than greater access to resources, allow me to use a recent experience that my husband Jon and I had with another one of the city’s courts––Traffic Court . As part of the preparation for a three-week vacation, we parked our car in a part of the city that has no alternate side parking restrictions (yes, they do exist!) . When we came back to get the car, it wasn’t where we had parked it and it was nowhere to be found . We went online and found that we had racked up close to $1,000 in parking tickets and that the car had been towed . Jon took time off work to investigate, went back to the neighborhood where we had parked the car and went door to door and business to business to find out what may have happened . He slowly pieced it together—the street had been repaved, and the city had moved our car to an avenue and parked it there . Obviously we weren’t paying the meters we didn’t know about and the car racked up tickets and eventually was towed . To get the car out of the lot where it had been towed, we had to pay the fines and fees . The women at the impound lot were very nice to Jon and encouraged him to fight the case and go to Traffic Court . They explained to him what he needed to bring to court and what and how he should argue . With their encouragement, he decided to go . The next day, armed with information he had gathered himself, he argued his case before a judge . The judge agreed and within a few weeks, we were fully reimbursed . It was a bizarre experience and cost us money, time and effort, but at the end of the day, we got justice in the court .
But we didn’t get justice just because we were right . We got justice in part because of how privilege and power play out . We had the resources to pay the fines up front . Jon’s boss was understanding and allowed him to take two days off work, with pay . He was able to walk through a neighborhood, investigate and be well received . He was received as a victim of a city’s bureaucracy and not as a lazy person who wasn’t following the rules or worse, as a criminal . He got the same treatment in the impound lot with the women who explained his rights and encouraged him . And he got the same treatment from the judge, whose language he spoke both in terms of English and class, and whose respect he instantly had . Jon is an exceedingly nice guy, but he is also white and middle class . And in this case, both his class and his whiteness gave him an advantage to argue his case and to navigate the court . And he learned that he can fight and win, which reinforces his place in society—as a white citizen with rights who gets a fair shot . He learned that the city’s systems of justice work, at least for him .
7 See Press Release, supra note 6; Erin Durkin, De Blasio Launches $12.3M Plan to Help Tenants Fighting Off Evictions Get Legal Aide, N.Y. daily news, Sept. 28, 2015, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/de-blasio- launches-12m-plan-tenants-avoid-eviction-article-1.2377842.
Specific Areas for Reform: Housing
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