Rocio Quero Yescas is 56 years old and walks with a cane. He is worried that he may trip over and fall as the floor tiles in his apartment continue to peel off.
Former psychiatric nurse Kenya Witt was unable to pay the rent because she was attacked by a patient and suffered a traumatic brain injury.
Julio Rodriguez and his 81-year-old mother have been struggling with their noisy neighbors for months and want to get the landlord to take action.
Each of them went to the Bronx Housing Court in early June to look for answers in the Byzantine Maze of paperwork, negotiations, and hearings.
is more than 171,500 eviction petitions A proceeding was filed in the New York Housing Court in 2019, a year before the pandemic closed the court. Now the courts are starting to wake up again, removing pandemic restrictions and resuming face-to-face appearances. The corridors are once again beginning to fill with tenants, landlords, and their lawyers. More than one-third of all new peasant evictions are in Bronx.
The resumption of evictions occurs when New Yorkers are squeezed by rising inflation and record rents. On Tuesday, the Regulatory Commission approved a 3.25% increase in annual rent for homes with stable rents. This is a move that affects approximately 2 million urban dwellers.
Every morning, there is a line in front of the Bronx Housing Court, where anxious tenants are waiting under scaffolding covering part of the front of the building while repairing a leaked roof. Most mornings, the procession stretches down the sidewalk, and food trucks sell egg sandwiches and hot coffee to those who arrive early after breakfast.
The interior of the courthouse isn’t as it used to be, observers say. Before the pandemic, corridors and courts were full of lawyers and residents. Recently, an eerie tranquility has hidden the simmering tension under the minutes. As the pandemic bailout program runs out of funding, financial assistance to tenants is declining. And since the moratorium for eviction of the state’s peasants ended in January, Submission to New York Housing Court Creeping higher.
The number of evictions is still well below pre-pandemic levels, and court officials say they are trying to prevent the load of the cases from being overwhelmed by clearing the backlog.
Jean T. Schneider, New York City Housing Court Judge, said: “There is no filing explosion.”
However, for tenants facing the threat of eviction, the first trip to court can be daunting. Some residents will appear upstairs, while others will be sent to the information desk on the first floor to receive documents, file complaints, and pay late payments.
Last Monday, Michelle Patterson Gay was waiting to file a complaint against the landlord trying to get her out. She lives in the neighborhood of Sound View with her 17-year-old daughter Essence, who has a learning disability, and she says she agreed to move in March 2020, but the landlord checks her rent. Her contract was revoked as she continued to cash.
Currently, Mr. Gay said the landlord was harassing her and blocking access to the apartment. She pays about $ 1,200 a month. She is ready to fight herself until she finds her lawyer. “I have a special needs child, and I can’t live that way,” she said.
Raven S. Drantes, lawyer managing the safety net project at the Urban Justice Center, said the dam would explode. It’s only a matter of time.
“You will meet more people at their limits,” she said.
The large second-floor courthouse on the second floor of the Bronx Housing Court is a water intake where residents can request legal representatives, investigate proceedings, and file documents. Two stations are set up for tenants who need to appear directly because they only get a virtual look but no computer or Wi-Fi access.
Miriam Maldonad, who was trying to repair in the apartment, wanted to contact a lawyer and sat in front of a big monitor for 20 minutes, but she was told she was there on the wrong day. Another tenant, Nector Caro, attended a virtual meeting with a representative of Mobilization for Justice, a legal service provider in The Bronx. He said the agency could not file any further proceedings, but would contact him by phone and provide free legal advice. ..
In the hallway, a long table acted as a makeshift help desk, with a desktop computer on one end and a bilingual court clerk on the other.
Julio Rodriguez was waiting there with his mother, Lysia. After years of substance abuse, mental health problems, homelessness, and bad credit, Rodriguez realized that his landlord was willing to give Morris Park an apartment a chance for $ 1,950 per month. But shortly after moving in, he said, the neighbors upstairs began to make “a ridiculous amount of noise.”
“We were lucky to be there, so we really didn’t want to start complaining about something,” Rodriguez said. But he added, “My quality of life was rapidly deteriorating.”
He said he was reluctant to move because of his previous eviction. So he came to the housing court to force the landlord to act. “He’s just waiting for me to move tiredly, and I’m not in a position to do it because of the headaches I’ve experienced to get to this place,” he said.
The landlord also has access to the help desk. The Bronx, Marco Birgas, who owns nine buildings, primarily in the Morrisania district, sat on a bench with his daughter, hoping to solve the tenant’s problem with his rent delinquency. ..
“This is the first time I’ve returned to court after Covid,” he said. “I don’t know if calmness reflects real life or just a change in the way processes are executed.”
Mr. Birgas said he considers his tenant to be his greatest asset. Without them, he couldn’t pay his bill. He prefers a community-based approach where landlords build relationships with tenants. For him, applying for eviction of a peasant farmer is a last resort.
And court battles can be costly. He submitted the paperwork and stated that the prepaid fee for two court hearings was $ 2,500. He said it could cost as much as $ 30,000 to hand over an apartment, including repairs and finding a new renter.
Mr. Billgas, who rents out a total of 30 homes, is dissatisfied because he feels that the housing court is targeting landlords who have a connection to money. “Access to my resources varies greatly,” he said.
Even landlords with more units find eviction a hassle. Lisa Gomez, CEO of L & M Development Partners, which manages about 20,000 affordable homes in New York, said the court battle would be time consuming and costly for them too. “There is no advantage to going to court,” she said.
Some of New York’s largest affordable homeowners want to avoid court battles altogether. The pandemic gave them time to rethink their relationship with their tenants, said Adam Waynestein, CEO of Phipps House.
To alleviate the looming log jam in court, Phipps withdrew half of the pending proceedings. “It’s not just a responsibility, it’s in the landlord’s interest,” he said. “Peasants are just vacancies, vacancies are losses.”
The New York City Housing Authority is the landlord of 11% of the city’s population and is rethinking its approach, NYCHA legal adviser Lisa Bova-Hiatt said city officials stopped 90% of the expulsion. , Said to focus on the case instead. Work with your tenants to manage problems before they fall into crisis.
“I decided we needed a better way to do this,” she said. “We have to do better to keep people in containment.”
Home advocates take this approach. “Ideally, yes, we all work together before everyone gets involved in the legal system,” said Luna Rajagopal, managing director of civil litigation practice at Public Defenders Bronx Defenders. Said.
Tens of thousands of New Yorkers are facing evictions, despite efforts to prevent a flood of eviction applications. Since March 15, 2020, 121,473 new proceedings have been filed in the New York Housing Court. Princeton Shrimp Lab.. More than one-third (41,988) of those filings are in Bronx alone.
Evacuation battles often occur due to problems beyond the control of the tenant, such as simple paperwork mistakes and unemployment.
On the fifth floor of the Bronx Housing Court, Drantes of the Urban Justice Center represented Kenya Witt, a tenant who hasn’t worked since being unknowingly knocked by a patient at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center where she was a nurse. ..
Due to lack of work, 46-year-old Witt was unable to pay the rent for her apartment in University Heights. However, her landlord claims she is earning her income and seeking her delinquency.
“This is the first time I’ve been in court and I don’t know how things work,” she said, staring at Drantes, who went to court to appear in front of the judge. I did.
Drantes reappeared a few minutes later. The case was postponed to July 20th.
“We can’t help people fast enough,” she said. “The tenant goes through the crack.”
That day, when excavating the roof above Judge Diane E. Lutwak’s courtroom, people were driven into a corridor, where they stayed longer and waited for guidance.
Among them was Rossio Kero Jeskas, who was sitting with his 26-year-old daughter Stephen Martines Kero, and the lawyer met with Judge Lutwak. They were trying to resolve a dispute with the landlord over the floor of an apartment in Jerome Park, which pays $ 1,173 a month.
Her mother first noticed the scent, Martinez Kero said. “She thought it was mold, but it was the wood that was rotting.” A leaking radiator scratched the wooden floor, and the tiles that now cover it were peeling off.
However, the landlord’s attempts to solve the problem failed several times, and Quero Yescas filed a complaint with the city. In response, her daughter said the landlord was trying to get rid of them.
Social workers at The Bronx emergency services provider, Part of the Solution, introduced them to the agency’s oversight lawyer, Elizabeth Maris.
“Landlords often try to fix things cheaply,” Maris said. Through her interpreter, she explained to Kero Yeskas and his daughter how the meeting with the judge went on. She “sought a postponement to give the landlord time to repair. Hopefully they will withdraw their proceedings.”
Tomorrow will bring a new wave of tenants seeking help, and supporters say they will do whatever they can despite the increased load.
“The lawyer’s rights were this great thing the city decided to do. It could be a great model for everyone else in the country,” he said. “If you fail because of a pandemic, it’s tragic.”
Kirsten Noyes Contributed to the research.
