A bedrock of CASA’s work has been fighting to transform the Housing Court. In the 1970s, Housing Courts in New York City were established for tenants to sue their landlords. Now they are eviction mills, and Bronx tenants suffer the highest rate of eviction cases and evictions in the city. According to city data, in just a three month span, 16,660 tenants faced eviction in Housing Court with just a 31% rate of representation by attorneys – both the highest amount of cases and the lowest rate of representation in the city.
Justice in Housing Court campaign (2012-2019)
In January 2012, CASA members voted to start a campaign to reform the Bronx Housing Court. In partnership with the Urban Justice Center, we spent a year researching and documenting tenants’ experiences. We released our report, entitled, Tipping the Scales: A Report of Tenant Experiences in the Bronx Housing Court, in March of 2013.
The campaign had two main focuses:
- To change the policies and procedures within the court itself, such as improving the process for tenants to file complaints, having tenants’ rights signs and bulletins, etc. (see the report for the full list of recommendations). We won agreements from the Office of Court Administration for court staff to wear identification cards, bi-lingual informational presentations in courtrooms, and more!
- To ensure that tenants had lawyers in Housing Court! We made history when Right to Counsel was signed into law in August 2017, making NYC the first city in the country to pass a law making it a right for tenants to have an attorney in housing court to defend themselves. We have continued to work and fight with the city-wide coalition of tenant groups, legal services providers, academics and advocates we formed in 2014 to oversee this implementation process as it is rolled out. Learn more about the Right to Counsel Coalition here!
COVID Organizing, Cancel Rent, and the Eviction Free Bronx campaign (2020-present)
During COVID, in the periods where there has not been an eviction moratorium, landlords have taken advantage and moved to evict tenants in a never-before-seen crisis. At the same time, legal services organizations have not been able to keep up with the thousands of eviction cases filed against tenants, and the judges appointed by Governor Hochul have been unwilling to slow down the court system.
CASA responded to this crisis by coordinating rent strikes across the Bronx, winning billions of dollars in rental assistance for tenants in the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (a concession for CASA’s demand that then-Governor Cuomo cancel rent debts for all New York tenants) and fighting for a strong eviction moratorium that lasted from the beginning of COVID until January 2022.
After New York State’s eviction moratorium expired in January 2022, CASA launched the Eviction Free Bronx campaign to end evictions in the Bronx! We are fighting to pass Statewide Right to Counsel (all tenants in New York State would have the right to an attorney in Housing Court), the Winter Eviction Moratorium and Clean Hands Act
We also organize tenant associations in buildings with lots of eviction cases filed, hold monthly campaign meetings and legal clinics, conduct outreach to hundreds of tenants weekly in Housing Court, watch the practices of judges in court, and show up and disrupt Housing Court and the eviction mill as usual to keep people in their homes! Join Us!
For more information, please contact Juan Giraldo at (585) 895 – 7153.