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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. The pandemic economy and the overdue New York State budget are colliding with each other this week and crashing into the lives of people who need housing and people on the brink of losing their housing. Here are some of the roads feeding this collision. According to recent articles by WNYC, poverty and economic instability reporter Chau Lam. The eviction moratorium that New York State put in place near the start of the pandemic expired in January.

The City of New York recently enacted a guarantee that all tenants facing eviction will be represented by a lawyer even if they can't afford to pay for one personally. The housing court system has a backlog of eviction cases that it wants to get through now that the moratorium is done, and there aren't enough lawyers to go around. The newest news today is that the groups that provide free tenants lawyers in Brooklyn and Queens say they cannot take on any new cases for this month of April because they are full up.

What's more, the state budget that was due last Friday but it's still being negotiated may or may not include a $250 million rental assistance program that Governor Hochul says would provide housing for 40,000 to 50,000 homeless or at-risk individuals. That would be huge. The state budget may or may not include a so-called Good Cause Eviction Bill that would limit many rent increases to the rate of inflation. Maybe that would be a lot this year but a lot of years not and only allow evictions for good reasons like non-payment of rent.

We have housing shortages, lawyer shortages, housing voucher shortages, and an expired moratorium all waiting for the state and the city to act, colliding with each other and waiting for city action and state action day after day. The state budget is now four days overdue. What can happen next? What should happen next? With me now is Chau Lam poverty and economic instability reporter for WNYC and Gothamist. Hi, Chau, thanks for all this reporting first of all, and thanks for coming on the show.

Chau Lam: Oh, thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Can you describe who is eligible on paper for free legal services under this program enacted by the city?

Chau Lam: Sure tenants who were sued for eviction in housing court and who earned 200% below the federal poverty line are eligible. For a family of four, that means they have to earn about $55,000.

Brian Lehrer: 200% of poverty is the so-called poverty line. A family of four making $55,000 or less, and families like that if you're listening and facing eviction, we're saying this in part, just so you know, free legal services are available. If you think you have a case against your landlord, but you can't afford a lawyer. Landlords, Chau in housing court almost always have lawyers, before this law took effect, were most tenants represented too?

Chau Lam: No, actually, the advocates said that about 97% of cases in housing courts are initiated by landlords and almost all of the landlords have legal representation while the majority of the tenants don't.

Brian Lehrer: You report that right now, there aren't enough lawyers in this program to go around. That's really the news. In fact, tenant lawyer groups say they will have to stop taking new cases for this month of April at all in Brooklyn and Queens. Tell us more, who was saying what about that?

Chau Lam: Oh, sure. In Queens Housing Court, the Legal Aid Society said that their lawyers cannot accept new eviction cases for all of April due to a confluence of factors including new cases being added to backlog of cases as well as they are also stretched thin because lawyers are leaving. In addition to the Legal Aid Society, the New York legal assistant group also said that there are lawyers are overwhelmed.

Its president says that the lawyers in that group also will stop taking new eviction cases in Queens Housing Court for the month of April. Compounding the problem is that the third group said that this-- can only accept-- this is the Legal Services NYC said that they can only accept about half of the cases that they used to. Queens Housing Court is being hit pretty hard right now.

Brian Lehrer: In the Bronx and listeners, we're going to invite you into this conversation, especially if you have a relevant story to tell as a tenant, as a landlord, as a lawyer. Hold on for a second. In the Bronx, Chau as another example, you reported that on March 1st alone, tenants in 18 eviction cases in housing court were forced to proceed without access to city-funded attorneys. Was that in-person reporting? Was there a scene there on that day in Bronx Housing Court that you can describe for us?

Chau Lam: Yes, actually, I was not there on March the first. We picked up the story a day or so later after it happened. However, I did go to visit the Bronx Housing Court on March the 10th. I was trying to find tenants to talk to. Actually the scene there was quiet because most of the court is still functioning on remote. They're conducting most of their cases, virtually. They were litigants in the courthouse but there were not a lot of them.

Brian Lehrer: Aura in the Bronx, we see you hang on. We'll take your call here in just a second. Let me invite other people in, listeners. I wonder if anybody out there right now can help us report this story. Are you a tenant or landlord who's been to housing court for an eviction proceeding since the pandemic moratorium ended in mid-January? Tell us your story. 212-433 WNYC 433-9692.

Are you a lawyer, or a former lawyer representing anyone in housing in court? Your perspective would help the rest of us understand what's going on too including, if you've recently left that profession, as Chau just said, a bunch of tenant housing lawyers have, as these legal service providers report is happening, leaving them with a shortage. Why did you leave? What needs to be done, lawyers and former lawyers?

212-433 WNYC 433-9692. Chau I'll ask you in a couple of minutes to get into that in more detail. I know we have the great resignation going on in the United States right now. One group you might not think of leaving their jobs is lawyers, but we'll find out why it's affecting tenants housing lawyers. Judge Janet DiFiore, the state's chief judge, are you listening this morning?

If you happen to be listening, please call in and tell us what you're doing to manage the backlog and the shortage. How to tenants or landlords and eviction proceedings get a fair shot? 212-433 WNYC or anyone else relevant help us report this story or you can call with question. 212-433 WNYC 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer for the WNYC and Gothamist poverty and economic instability reporter Chau Lam. Aura in the Bronx, you're on WNYC right now. Hi Aura.

Aura: Hi, good morning. Thanks for talking about this specifically around housing. I wanted to call in and share a little bit of my experience as someone who lives and works and serves in Mott Haven in the South Bronx. I work in emergency food for New York City's largest community-based food pantry, New York [unintelligible 00:08:31] Pantry. I'm also a member of my community boards.

Every time we have new proposals coming in for housing, we are privy to hearing about these projects in advance and providing our feedback and support on how to best roll out these projects. One of the things that happened actually at our most recent community board meeting is the representative from Eric Adams's office came in and was really highlighting and touting the fact that they just finished phase one of their rehousing process with specifically looking at houseless and homeless New Yorkers.

They talked about how they relocated 500 people, how they also threw away most of their property and cleaned up the area, and underneath the guise of it being better for public health to not have these areas set up for housing. In the process, they displaced 500 people. When I asked how many of the 500 had they secured housing for same day, they weren't able to provide a number. When I asked how many beds were actually available within the housing system, they mentioned, the 80 beds that were recently made available at [unintelligible 00:09:42] in the Bronx, and another 230 or so in neighboring boroughs. That isn't enough for the 500 that [unintelligible 00:09:51] I think especially more talking about housing security, it's important to recognize that like the first step should probably be making sure that we actually have

enough available for the number of people that need it.

It's an issue for houseless folks, but it's also an issue for people in housing when we see projects being proposed underneath the label of being affordable. They might be affordable for the area and median income of the city as a whole at 130,000 for a family of three annually. We're looking at our neighborhood's specific needs, like here in the South Bronx, where most people have an excessive housing burden, more than 50% of their take-home pay is going directly to rent. Then on top of it, we have insidious practices happening with our utilities and Con Edison.

We have insidious practices happening with the actual maintenance and the lacking of heat and buildings yet in the neighborhood, we are only making area median income of 33,000. The affordable buildings that are going up in our neighborhood, the 5,000 new units coming into Mott Haven are not affordable for the people who live here. I think it's a much bigger issue where we're looking just at putting the burden onto the individual, but not actually addressing a lot of this systemic thing that need to be changed around the rent stabilization and making sure things are affordable.

Brian Lehrer: Aura, in the context of all of that and thank you so much for laying it out so clearly. Do you have a particular bill or few bills that you're hoping will successfully come out of these New York State budget negotiations that could end any time now?

Aura: I think what we need are policies around rights to housing and rights to food and rights to healthcare. I think that those are a little bit bigger bite than a lot of what our officials are ready to take on at this time. I think what we could potentially start by is ensuring that we're maintaining these anti-eviction policies and ensuring that just the quality of life is being met.

Not just at the level of someone who's renting in New York, or as someone who is occupying tenants in New York, but also at the city level and at the state level, when we're providing funding that helped to subsidize the cost of housing or buildings and developments that are coming in and making sure that they're true to affordability. Even something as simple as changing the guidelines for what is considered affordable and not using a citywide area median income that skews overall house income to the higher extremes.

Brian Lehrer: At least that part is on the table though. It's one of the big mysteries that we've covered on the show and one of the big mysteries in the state budget right now is the so-called 421A, tax abatement for developers who build affordable housing. The question is how affordable, the threshold of affordable for whom, and in what neighborhoods, just in the way you were describing before. They're talking about that in some formerly smoke-filled room in Albany right now. I'm glad you're talking about it here because maybe it helps keep the pressure on to do the right thing. Aura, thank you so much for your call.

Aura: Thanks so much.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM, HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 88.1, Trenton, WNJP 88.5, Susex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey public radio, a few more minutes with WNYC and Gothamist poverty and instability reporter Chau Lam. As we talk about the backlog in housing court, after the moratorium on evictions expired in January, of course, that was a pandemic era moratorium.

You have a stat Chau, from an advocacy group that says judges are hearing eviction cases involving indigent clients every 15 minutes. They used to be every 30 minutes, which is bad enough to decide the fate of somebody getting kicked out of their home or not. How many clients are in each lawyer's caseloads under circumstances like these right now?

Chau Lam: The caseloads varies according to the experience of the lawyers. Less experienced lawyers typically carry about 25 to 30 caseloads and the more experienced lawyers will carry more than that. All the providers are saying that whether the inexperienced lawyers or the more experienced lawyers or even sometimes supervisors who typically don't carry such heavy caseloads, they are all overwhelmed.

Brian Lehrer: You quote Raun Rasmussen from the group Legal Services NYC that provides some of these lawyers, describing not just a lot of cases, but also staffing challenges you referred to this before. Is the great resignation as we call it affecting housing lawyers, even as it affects people in lower-paid service industries. We talk about people leaving healthcare because they're burnt out. We talk about people leaving the restaurant industry, other hospitality, but housing lawyers?

Chau Lam: Yes. The same thing that happens to the rest of us is happening to the legal community as well. Raun said that actually recently, he said that one of the reasons some of the lawyers quit is because they're being asked to come back into the office and some of them don't want to do that.

Brian Lehrer: I imagine these caseloads too are burning people out and I'm just speculating here, but if they can go into some other law which pays them more probably, and also just isn't quite as pressure-filled. Sometimes young lawyers do public service law for a while and then they go into things that are a little more personally comfortable as they age. Maybe there's a quicker pace of that now because the pressure is so great.

Chau Lam: Yes. The reasons vary, some people want to leave because they have a better job elsewhere. Sometimes they want to do something different, but want to stay within the same organization. I think it's a personal decision for everyone, but everyone is reevaluating what they want to do and people are making moves.

Brian Lehrer: In fact here is a legal services attorney calling in right now, Nicole, in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Thanks so much for calling up. Hi there.

Nicole: Hi. Yes, I'm an attorney at the legal aid society. I work in the Brooklyn Borough office and the great resignation is absolutely a thing in our office. The amount of cases that are being thrown our way by the courts and the office of court administration is just absolutely overwhelming. I know we are not alone.

It seems like every week the chief judge or the court administration puts out a new directive saying all new cases will be referred to a legal service provider and you're expected to file your notice of appearance within three weeks now which is oftentimes not enough time to establish a meaningful attorney-client relationship with the client.

Many of our clients are very low income, they work around the clock. Many of them, actually the majority of them have public benefits issues that need to be addressed, immigration issues that need to be addressed. We're working with bureaucracies that do not process requests that quickly. They do not act that quickly trying to get someone SII reinstated after having been terminated is not a phone call. It's an appellate process.

Brian Lehrer: That's a federal government social security program and you have to wait for that to come through before you can finish making the defense of the person at the state level and housing court. It is what you're saying, and you can't make it happen before it happens, but the court is giving you a deadline.

Nicole: Exactly. It's just, I mean, so many of my colleagues have left since the end of the moratorium and before because we anticipated that or they anticipated this and it's just a real crunch. I've just got an email today. I'm scheduled for an intake shift at court this afternoon. Several of my colleagues left in the last few weeks so there are now 15 transfer cases to be distributed among five attorneys on my team. There's a post-eviction case that came in last night at four o'clock. We are scrambling.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for making it really clear through your personal example what's going on there. Can I ask you one question since I have you as somebody in this field? This is a little bit of a pushback question, but just to get your perspective from your experience, I read that a group called the Princeton Eviction lab, which monitors evictions reported that there were about 6,000 eviction filings in New York in February, which is only a third of February, 2019 before the pandemic. A New York post [unintelligible 00:20:00]

ad used that stat to argue that the eviction Tsunami, as they call it, the tenant advocates have been predicting is not coming to pass. I'm curious if you've heard anyone address that stat or put it in context of the lawyer shortages, or the housing court backlog if there were only 6000 evictions only, but, 6000 eviction proceedings, initiated in New York in February compared to three times that many in February before the pandemic.

Nicole: I can't speak to that, I'm not familiar with the report, it's certainly not been our experience. Perhaps it's because we have fewer attorneys now to field all of the cases that are being filed. I can tell you that in the months leading up to the end of the eviction moratorium, there was the Tsunami in anticipation of that January 15th date, landlords wanting to get their cases on the calendar as soon as possible and they were filing in December in January? I don't know about any [inaudible 00:21:09]

Brian Lehrer: It certainly feels like they're coming fast and furious as you work on the ground. That's clear. Nicole, thank you much for your call. We really appreciate it. Chau to finish up and to follow up on that caller, you reported on how a housing rights coalition wrote a letter in February to the state's chief Judge Janet DiFiore and your report that a city council member is appealing to Governor Hochul this week about this crunch and this backlog and the shortage of lawyers for people who the law is supposed to guarantee representation for. Has Judged DiFiore acted on the request?

Chau Lam: No, the judge passed that on to supervising Judge Schneider to handle and the court basically says it's making a few changes but it's really not making the changes that the lawyers and the advocates are asking for.

Brian Lehrer: Which is to delay a lot of these proceedings.

Chau Lam: Exactly. Basically, what they're asking the court to do is postpone it until there is enough lawyers to meet the demand and the court is not willing to do that. As you heard from the last caller, the court is basically saying, "We will give you up to three weeks of an adjournment." That is what the court is willing to do right now and as for the councilman Shaun Abreu, he's calling on Governor Kathy Hochul to intervene and what he's asking for is for her to issue an executive order directing judges to do just that. I spoke to a spokesman for the governor yesterday and he did not weigh in on whether the governor will support that. The answer is we don't know.

Brian Lehrer: Well, as I'm sure you know from your reporting, a lot of people who do not live with economic instability, have no idea about these worlds. That's why I'm glad that our news department has a poverty and economic stability reporter and Chau, I really appreciate your reporting on that bit since you joined the WNYC newsroom. Thanks for coming on and talking about this housing court piece of it with us. We really, really appreciate it.

Chau Lam: Thank you, Brian.

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