Page 26 - Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice

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But he also got justice because Traffic Court is relatively easy to navigate . It sees a relatively small number of cases . The laws that govern traffic violations are relatively simple and straightforward and the stakes are low . Even with all of Jon’s advantages, the complicated nature of housing laws in New York City, and the nature of the court itself with its high volume of cases and heavy traffic in the hallways, would have made it impossible for him to do in Housing Court what he did in Traffic Court . He can’t investigate his own case, because he doesn’t have access to the landlord’s files and he certainly can’t walk in to see a judge . Not to mention that he went into Traffic Court confident partly because losing would not have had a huge impact on our lives . Contrast this with the weight of losing your home, of making your children homeless, of needing to pack and store all of your belongings in a matter of days, rearrange your mail and your bills and find a new place to live . Even with all of his advantages, Jon would never just walk into Housing Court like he walked into Traffic Court . He would get an attorney .
The more than 200,000 New Yorkers who go through our city’s Housing Courts every year8 learn quite a different lesson about justice, their rights and roles than Jon did in Traffic Court . Right to Counsel isn’t just about evictions, displacement and affordable housing—though it is about all of those things . It is about how we treat our mostly Black, Brown, poor and female members of this city as they face the loss of one of their most important necessities—their home .
CAsA’s housing Court reform Campaign
In New York City, over 200,000 families are sued in Housing Court every year by their landlords . In the Bronx alone, 2,000 people are in the Bronx Housing Court every day .9 Twenty to thirty thousand families lose their homes every year in New York City through a formal eviction process, with about a third of evictions occurring in the Bronx .10 Almost all of them are Black or Brown, many of them are women and almost all of them make less than $48,000 a year for a family of four (200 percent of the poverty line and below) . And for almost everyone, housing court is a humiliating, degrading and horrific experience . Thousands more never brave the housing court but lose their homes through an informal eviction process, moving out when an eviction is looming or threatened, when papers are served, when basic services like heat and hot water are denied .
For those who make it to court, here is what a typical day looks like:11
8:30 a .m .: Two tenants arrive at Bronx Housing Court . Tenant #1 has been to Housing Court before . Tenant #2 is at Housing Court for the first time . They both wait in the security line in the rain to get into the Housing Court building .
8 See housing Court Answers, Inc., Eviction Trends (1998-2015), http://cwtfhc.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/ EvictionTrends1998to20151.pdf.
9 new seTTlemenT aParTmenTs’ communiTy acTion for safe aParTmenTs (casa) & communiTy deVeloPmenT ProJecT (cdP) aT The urban JusTice cenTer, TiPPing The scales: a rePorT of TenanT exPeriences in bronx housing courT 1 (2013), available at http://cdp.urbanjustice.org/sites/default/files/CDP.WEB.doc_Report_CASA-TippingScales-full_201303.pdf.
10 See housing Court Answers, Inc., Eviction Trends (1998-2015), http://cwtfhc.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/ EvictionTrends1998to20151.pdf. For annual eviction data for the Bronx and other counties in New York City, see Marshals Evictions, housing courT answers, http://cwtfhc.org/evictions-marshals-documents/.
11 This segment about a “typical day” is excerpted from new seTTlemenT aParTmenTs’ communiTy acTion for safe aParTmenTs (casa) & communiTy deVeloPmenT ProJecT (cdP) aT The urban JusTice cenTer, TiPPing The scales: a rePorT of TenanT exPeriences in bronx housing courT (2013), available at http://cdp.urbanjustice.org/sites/default/files/CDP. WEB.doc_Report_CASA-TippingScales-full_201303.pdf. A survey and the methodology used to obtain the data reported here are described infra and in the report, and the survey appears as an appendix to the report.
Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice