Page 31 - Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice

New York City .14 Many of us have been working on issues of affordable housing, tenant power and housing court reform for decades .
As a Coalition, our main goal is to make sure that people stay in their homes and communities with dignity and respect and for housing court to be a place where justice is applied equitably . We believe that a Right to Counsel for tenants is a key piece in making that goal a reality .
For over a year and a half, the Coalition has been working to educate tenants, advocates and allies about the issue . In December of 2014, we put together a day-long conference that drew over 450 people and featured prominent speakers such as then Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, New York City Human Resources Administration Commissioner Steven Banks and many more . We subsequently released a report citing the findings of this conference .15 We put together a compelling video citing the statistics that support a Right to Counsel .16 We’ve held four town halls in four different boroughs, which educated and engaged over 500 tenants and dozens of elected officials . We’ve developed a 3-year phase-in plan for Right to Counsel, taking into consideration the time it will take to develop the infrastructure to support such a critical change in how housing court works . We’ve developed a logistical plan, thinking through how Right to Counsel would be implemented at every step in the process . There has been a great amount of press that connects Right to Counsel to the crisis of homelessness in our city and how cost effective it is .17
In just a year and a half, we’ve made incredible progress . While money was initially a significant concern, those concerns have lessened as funding has increased and the gap from what we currently fund to what we’d need to fund to have a full right, continues to close . In regards to funding, no one will be thinking about the cost of Right to Counsel in 10 years, it will just be the way we operate, just the cost of providing justice and due process for close to half a million people every year .
Conclusion
A detriment of having increased funding levels is that it presents a danger that we will stop there . Not only does dependence on funding make us vulnerable to the funding priorities of a future administration, but increased funding alone does not address the fundamental question of how we value the lives of the people who not only go to housing court, but who see housing court as a very real threat to their ability to stay in their homes .
People are afraid of their landlords precisely because their home is such a valuable, intimate cornerstone of their lives that they must protect and also because they know that landlords have more power in the court system than they do . With almost all of the cases in court initiated by landlords and with most of the landlords represented by counsel while most of the tenants are not, how could anyone draw any other conclusion?
14 See Home, righT To counsel nyc coaliTion, http://www.righttocounselnyc.org/ (last visited Apr. 7, 2016).
15 See righT To counsel nyc coaliTion, housing JusTice: whaT The exPerTs are saying on new yorkers’ righT To counsel in eVicTion Proceedings (2015), available at https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/righttocounselnyc/pages/23/ attachments/original/1433269447/FINAL_expert_report.pdf?1433269447.
16 See Right to Counsel-The Facts! New Settlement Apartments Community Action for Safe Apartments (Dec. 6, 2014), available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrlsSrRCuyg.
17 See, e.g., Mark D. Levine & Mary Brosnahan, How to Fight Homelessness, n.y. Times, Oct. 19, 2015, http://www. nytimes.com/2015/10/19/opinion/how-to-fight-homelessness.html?_r=1.
Specific Areas for Reform: Housing
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