Brigid Bergin: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin filling in for Brian Lehrer today. On this show, there have been plenty of conversations about the city's housing crisis. The dearth of affordable housing combined with rising costs can be keeping a roof over your head a persistent challenge in the City. Those conditions were all exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in January of 2022, when a moratorium on evictions expired, things got even worse.

There are lots of different reasons someone might be evicted. Sure, there's backed rent, there are also landlords, big and small, who make other plans for their properties. Maybe they want to sell the building, or maybe they just want a tenant willing to pay more money. The average Manhattan rent is now $5,500 a month. Excuse me while I choke on my own words here.

To help you understand where evictions are happening the most and why, my colleagues in the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom launched an eviction tracker. The team built a tool using publicly available data of where people are being evicted from, and they made a map with some really interesting hotspots.

Our housing reporter David Brand worked on the tracker with another teammate who is headed back to school this fall. Shout-out to Neil Mehta. David joins me now to talk about the ongoing eviction tracker project. David, welcome back to The Brian Lehrer Show.

David Brand: Thanks for having me.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, the phones are open. Let's offer each other some support on this really challenging subject. We're talking about evictions in the city. Are you currently facing an eviction proceeding? What's the reason for it? How are you getting through it? Are you getting the support you need? Call me at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Were you evicted in the past? Do you have any hard earned wisdom you want to share with some other listeners facing a similar situation?

Landlords, we want to hear from you too. What are the issues you're facing that might be prompting you to evict a tenant? When you look at this tracker, and again, check it out at gothamist.com, I also tweeted it before the show, what jumps out at you? Help us report this story. Give us a call at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You can also text us at that number or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Okay. David, let's talk about the data that's underlying the eviction tracker. Where is it from and how'd you get it?

David Brand: Our project differs from a lot of the reporting on evictions, which relies on eviction filings. Those are court cases that are started to remove people from apartments or mostly to prompt them to pay their back rent. Housing Court is a blunt instrument to do that. There's been about 200,000 eviction filings in the past year and a half.

We drill down into how many actually executed evictions there have been. It's a little more than 10,000, which shows most filings don't actually end in eviction, but 10,000 is still a lot, especially coming out of the pandemic with the number of evictions rising pretty much every single month over the past year and a half. We drill down on that and then on specific locations. We are able to do that using data that city marshals report to Department of Investigations after they've actually executed an eviction.

Brigid Bergin: Oh, wow. You mentioned the number. It's in the headline of that story that you co-wrote. For people who might be looking for the story on our website, it's New York City's eviction hotspots: Tracking the 10K removals since moratorium ended. As you said, 10,000 does sound like a lot, but let's put that number in context. How does that compare to recent years and other eviction rates in those previous years?

David Brand: We have to go back a few years here prior to the COVID pandemic. The last full year before that was 2019. There were 17,000 evictions, so marshals removing people from their homes 17,000 times in 2019. Year before that, 2018, it was 20,000. 2017, it was around the same, about 21,000. Then pandemic hit. The state court system first, followed by Governor Cuomo through an executive order, and then the state legislature instituted a series of eviction moratoria, or freezes on evictions.

That really halted most evictions. It's pretty incredible, actually. There was just few dozen for about two and a half years. Right before the pandemic, there was more than 3,000 just in January, February, and half of March. That eviction machine was rolling and is revving up again.

Brigid Bergin: Wow. Listeners, the phones are open. We want to hear from you about this subject of housing in the city, and particularly evictions in this city. If you know someone who's gone through it, if you yourself have experienced it, or if you are coming on the other side of it, maybe you've got some support, and you have some suggestions for resources that are available to help your friends, your neighbors, call us. The number is 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

David, as you said before and your reporting makes clear, the vast majority of people who are facing eviction do not actually get thrown out of their homes thanks to support from housing attorneys, other city and state resources. We're going to talk about what to do if you're facing eviction a little bit later in this segment. For those people who are removed from their homes, can you talk about what actually happens? What is that experience like?

David Brand: Well, a lot of people give in before the marshals arrive. Maybe the marshals are going to complete a warrant from a judge to remove people and change the locks. They show up, there's an empty place there. People say, "I don't want to go through the trauma of that."

A lot of people stay. A lot of people have their things removed from their apartment or walk out of the apartment. The marshals change the locks. Now it's like, if you hadn't prepared for that, and preparing for that is, I guess, finding another place to live, ideally, another apartment, that's really hard right now in New York City, so it could be doubling up with friends, or family, or someone, or could be entering a New York City homeless shelter.

It's a traumatic experience. It's a really difficult experience for individuals and also for a city when we think about a city with record number of homeless families and individuals. Right now this shelter system, it will be stretched to the brink.

It's what we were trying to look at with this whole project, of every eviction is a unique circumstance. Some people owe a lot of back rent. Some people owe a very small amount of rent. Some people are just victims of landlords who want to remove them, raise the rent, or for whatever reason, get them out of the apartment. You look at that as a whole, thousands upon thousands of people losing their homes at a time of serious affordable housing shortage, record high homelessness, unemployment still high in many communities, especially among people of color, there's some real systemic problems here. That's part of what we want to look at and investigate in our project.

Brigid Bergin: Let's go to Tony in Brooklyn. Tony, thanks so much for calling The Brian Lehrer Show.

Tony: Hey, how are you?

Brigid Bergin: Doing okay. How are you?

Tony: Good, good. I just wanted to say as someone who has been through this, just to impress upon anybody listening who may be going through it, if you can just somehow figure out how to get yourself a lawyer. The difference for you, as a tenant, with a lawyer going through this process versus trying to do it alone, which a lot of people try to do, or with minimal legal aid resources available, having your own lawyer is an absolute blessing in every sense, even if it means if you're paying a little bit of rent to your landlord [unintelligible 00:08:56], stop paying your rent. I know that sounds crazy, stop paying your rent. Pay a lawyer instead. They will absolutely get you a better outcome. Most often they can even negotiate that rent you paid to them out at the end. A lawyer makes all the difference.

Brigid Bergin: Tony, thank you so much for that call. David, any reaction to that?

David Brand: Well, I think Tony is right. Thanks for calling, Tony. Lawyers do make all the difference. That was what motivated New York City to adopt the Right to Counsel program first in some zip codes, and now it's city-wide, where anyone who makes 200% of the federal poverty line, that's pretty low-income in New York City, can qualify for free legal representation through their case. Anyone in the City can get at least some consultation.

It's stretched very thin right now, the program, because there's so many filings, so many people in need, but there's a lot of data out there that when people have an attorney, they are far, far more likely to resolve their eviction case, whether that's through a settlement with their landlord, or able to access the city rental assistance or work something out so that they can stay in their home. That's definitely the case.

Brigid Bergin: Let's go to George in Westchester. George, thanks for calling WNYC.

George: Oh, you're welcome. Good morning. Thanks for taking my call back. Back n the mid-'80s I lived in a small village in Westchester. The landlord was a European couple. Once I was a month and five days behind, that was it. It moved very quickly through the village court and they began to feel bad, the landlord. The day of the eviction, when the marshal showed up, he says, "Okay, that's it." I've got my property. I'm still loading the moving truck. He said, "No, go." The landlord said, "Well, now why don't you give him a little more time?" The marshal said "I'm in control of this eviction, not them. Go." Once I turned the corner, the property was fair game.

Prepare If it happens, be prepared. If you get a marshal on a bad day, you're [unintelligible 00:11:32] so well bent. It turned out he was involved with the moving company who was under indictment for theft but never proven.

Brigid Bergin: George, thank you so much for that story. I'm sorry you went through that. We're going to go to one more caller. As a reminder, I'm speaking with WNYC and Gothamist housing reporter David Brand about this really interesting project that the newsroom has done, an eviction tracker. We're looking at the hotspots. We're going to talk about a few of them in just a moment that they found where evictions have spiked across the city, particularly since the COVID health emergency moratorium expired. That's data that really helps speak to what people are experiencing here in the city.

We've heard from a lot of tenants. Now we're going to hear from Noah in Manhattan who is calling on behalf of landlords. Noah, welcome to WNYC. Thanks for your call.

Noah: Thanks for taking my call. Look, everyone who gets evicted dominantly, by the way, for non-pay- it's almost impossible to get an eviction based on nuisance- has months if not years of advance notice of what they're involved. I have been in this business for 30 years, have cases. Almost all of my cases take at least a year, if not more. I have tenants who haven't paid rent in four to five years. Getting them out is extraordinarily difficult. There's even something called a post-eviction reinstatement that occurs even after a marshal has granted a landlord possession. There's really no actual crisis of eviction in New York City.

Now, there is a need for housing but the city and the state are not addressing that. They're simply putting the financial burden on stabilized apartment owners and they'll soon try to do that with what it's called the Good Cause Eviction Law on every single multi-family owner.

Brigid Bergin: Noah, thank you for your call, for your perspective. David, got a lot more to talk about here but let me give you a chance to respond to those callers.

David Brand: I think Noah offered some important perspective there. This is a lengthy process as long as the tenant is responding to all their notices and going to court. That's frustrating to landlords, especially like in Noah's case, sounds like he's owed a lot of back rent. You could think about from an individual perspective like this tenant owes a lot of rent. The landlord needs that rent to pay their mortgage, pay their operating costs. I can definitely see where someone like Noah and many landlords are coming from. It's a challenging time right now. You look at that across thousands upon thousands of people, and that points to some bigger systemic problems for the city that we really need to get a handle on.

Brigid Bergin: Well, let's talk a little bit about the map and where you were seeing some of the eviction hotspots. What communities did you see hit hardest by evictions and was there any common thread that would pull these communities together?

David Brand: Well, I think it's no surprise based on what we know about evictions. Prior to the pandemic about the economics in New York City that these hotspots with the highest concentrations of evictions are generally predominantly Black, low-income communities. Also, Latino communities, places like Flatbush in Brooklyn which is also undergoing some pretty significant demographic change where it's becoming whiter and wealthier and gentrifying.

We focused on, in our reporting, a specific part of Flatbush called Flatbush Gardens, which is a large rent-stabilized housing complex with about 2,500 tenants or tenant households. I guess 2,500 apartments and a third of people there are facing eviction. Over the past 18 or 19 months, there's been at least 50 evictions actually carried out.

Other places like Central Bronx, South Bronx, these are places for the past decade or so where 1 in every 10 households has received an eviction notice. That's continuing. It points to problems of low incomes, of unemployment, of very few housing options for people about rental assistance, housing vouchers not reaching the people who need them.

Another place that I think really caught my colleague, Neil, and my eye was part of Staten Island where there's a very high rate of eviction. Staten Island doesn't get that much coverage, especially when it comes to issues facing tenants and landlords as well. We think of it as a homeowner community. About 50% of residents there are renters. There's a smaller population but a very high rate of eviction in parts of Staten Island that rivals parts of the Bronx and parts of central Brooklyn, one housing complex in particular that we're going to be focusing a little more on about what's going on there and why so many people have been removed.

Brigid Bergin: Let's go to Alan in Brooklyn. Alan, welcome to WNYC. Thanks for calling.

Alan: Good morning. I often call about this but it seems to be undercovered. Most of the very expensive real estate in New York, both commercial and residential, is only valuable because transit system makes it so. You could never serve that much land if you were relying entirely on road access, and yet buildings that would be giant useless sculptures without transit subsidies are getting away with murder. They're not paying their fair share of the subsidy that keeps their buildings valuable.

If we start charging the actual benefit to those properties in a separate assessment zone, separate from real estate taxes, then we could use those funds to subsidize the rents of the poor who need to live close enough to their jobs to get there on time, and to reduce transit fares. We should not be having rises on strap hangers because the main beneficiaries are skyscrapers not strap hangers.

Brigid Bergin: Alan, thank you for your call. Keep calling. We appreciate hearing from you. He raises an interesting point. We're coming off a weekend where fares just went up. A lot of folks are feeling that today, I'm sure, David. Do you think that there is a connection between what he's talking about, that you are seeing any of these evictions spike in areas where transit's an issue as well?

David Brand: That's a great question, a great point. Rents tend to be cheaper further from transit. In a lot of those cases, there's lower-income people in those communities, but we're also seeing eviction spike where there's pretty strong access to transit, like parts of Washington Heights. There's also large concentrations of low-income New Yorkers living in rent-stabilized buildings. I don't know. I think we see it across the board.

To his point about these transit rich-areas doing more to create affordable housing is something that is being talked about a lot at the state and the city level.

In the city, we have programs like mandatory inclusionary housing to create more income-restricted "affordable" housing in new buildings. The critique of that is that most of those new units aren't targeted at the lowest-income people who need them. That's an important ongoing conversation that I know is part of the governor's housing plan and part of some of the city's goals as well.

Brigid Bergin: David, I want to ask you a couple more questions before we wrap up. You're listening to The Brian Lehrer Show. We are talking about the eviction tracker on gothamist.com, our website. It was created by our housing reporter, David Brand, with a major assist from Neil Metta who is back in school right now.

I want to talk a little bit about your follow-up story, David, about Flatbush Gardens. You mentioned it. It's one community, one of the many hotspots you found when you mapped this data. We know that every eviction case is different, but can you talk about some of the tenants that you met there and the types of circumstances that they were facing?

David Brand: I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, Flatbush Gardens, a large housing complex in Flatbush, about 2,500 apartments there. It goes back to the 1950s. We noticed a high concentration of actual evictions; people being removed, locks being changed by the marshals, but also a huge and a really striking number of eviction filings. About 2,500 people, 2,500 apartments, a third of the households receiving an eviction notice.

Yes, there were some people who were- I looked at court records- who were evicted. They owed more than $50,000 and I think they just had left long before the marshals showed up, and didn't respond to their court papers or anything. Then there were people who owed a very small amount, a relatively small amount when they got their eviction notice, maybe less than $4,000. It shows how housing court and eviction filings are really a blunt instrument for trying to compel repayment.

Some people don't show up to court. Some people get these default judgments and risk losing their apartments that way. They don't get the attorneys to help patch city or state rental assistance and/or may reach a settlement with their landlord and they really risk losing the apartment.

There's kind of a quick-to-file-an-eviction-notice mentality at that housing complex that I think is common among a lot of large property owners, large firms like this one where one person, for example, was a worker at an Arby's. She was making a decent, basically living wage, but she had a Section Eight voucher paying a portion of her rent. She was paying her portion, 30% of her income- came to like seven or $800 a month.

She lost her job. Section Eight continued to pay their portion of her rent. She couldn't make up her portion, and she needed to get an adjustment to decrease the amount that she was paying.

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

David Brand: It took several months before she was able to finally do that to reflect her much lower income since she'd no longer had her job. In that time, she racked up rent arrears for a few months, which very small amount, a couple of hundred dollars a month, it adds up to a few thousand dollars.

The landlord decided to pursue the eviction in that case, which chances are she has an attorney, she could probably reach some type of settlement, and get some type of assistance from the city, like a grant from the One Shot Deal program. It just shows that seems like an avoidable case that could result in eviction and at the very least, ties up the court system and leads to a lot of stress on the family.

Brigid Bergin: In our last couple minutes, let's talk about the resources that exist now. If a person is facing eviction. You've mentioned some of the programs. We certainly heard from some of our callers, getting a lawyer is really important. In reporting this story, what have you learned about what people can do to avoid being thrown out of their homes?

David Brand: Well, I think the main thing is just show up to court and respond to your papers. A caller, I think it was Tony, said try to get an attorney. That often happens if you are a very low-income person facing eviction at that first or second court appearance. You go into court and you try to connect with an attorney from one of the nonprofit legal service providers that are offering representation. You could also call 311. There's also several tenant hotlines out there for advice and help trying to connect with an attorney.

In terms of assistance, like monetary assistance, a big benefit for a lot of tenants and landlords was the emergency rental assistance program that the state ran, more than $3 billion distributed to landlords on behalf of tenants who owed back rent during the pandemic. Applications for that have closed. They're still making payments on behalf of applicants who got their submissions in before January. That's important.

Another huge one is the One Shot Deal program from New York City where they will pay a few thousand dollars, a few hundred dollars for people who need an emergency loan. Often, that's for people facing eviction. Then they could pay their landlord to cover their arrears.

The problem with that, they have to prove their ability to pay rent moving forward. Historically that hasn't really been a problem. The City issued those one-shot deals. It's a lot cheaper to pay a few grand to help someone stay in their house than it is to pay for them if they're in a homeless shelter, or whatever the case may be. That program has been hindered by a two-thirds rejection rate.

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

David Brand: The best way to get that One Shot Deal, to get that grant, to get the money to pay your landlord is often to work with an attorney.

Brigid Bergin: Good advice. A lot more reporting, I know, coming in this project. If you haven't yet, please check out David's reporting @gothamist.com. WNYC and Gothamist housing reporter, David Brand. Thank you so much for joining me.

David Brand: Thanks for having me.

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