Tenants Facing Evictions Increasingly Don’t Have Lawyers Despite NYC Law, Comptroller’s Report Finds
Low-income tenants are entitled to a lawyer, but more than half of all tenants appear in court without one — significantly increasing their chances of getting the boot.
An increasing share of tenants facing eviction are doing so without housing attorneys, according to a new report from New York City Comptroller Brad Lander highlighting an issue tenant advocates have been ringing alarm bells about for years as evictions continued to surge post-pandemic.
Lander’s report released Friday draws heavily from an analysis from the NYC Office of Civil Justice that found only 42% of tenants facing eviction had lawyers in housing court last fiscal year — down from 71% in Fiscal year 2021.
The report covers a post-pandemic period when the eviction moratorium ended and eviction filings rocketed up from 42,109 in 2021 to 119,834 in 2024, still slightly lower than pre-pandemic levels.
This past March saw the highest number of evictions since before the pandemic with 1,560 evictions, according to the NYC Eviction Crisis Monitor which scrapes publicly available data from state court records.
Rates of legal representation were lowest in the Bronx, which also has the highest eviction rate. Just 31% of tenants there facing eviction went to court with a lawyer, the comptroller’s report found.
THE CITY reported in 2022 that the share of tenants facing eviction in housing court who had attorneys plummeted after a pandemic-freeze on evictions was lifted, dropping to as low as 6% in a given week.
In a press conference Friday releasing the report, Lander, who is running for the Democratic primary nomination for mayor, took aim at incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who a day earlier unveiled what he referred to as the “best budget ever.”
“Somehow yesterday the mayor called it the ‘best budget ever’ but what we have is the worst housing crisis ever: evictions rising, representation falling, rents going up, more families being evicted, more families are going to end up homeless,” Lander said. “This is a crisis and we need to focus on fixing it.”
He pointed to funding for legal services for tenants which is projected to remain flat at $156 million despite the surging demand.
William Fowler, a spokesperson for Mayor Adams, clapped back at Lander’s budget dig.
“If Brad believes that permanently funding child care, education programs, and social services is a bad idea, he should just say so,” Fowler said. “While the Adams administration has their back, Brad Lander clearly does not. He seems more focused on pursuing a different job he’s unqualified for than on doing the one New Yorkers elected him to do.”
Neha Sharma, a spokesperson for the Department of Social Services, pointed to a jump in funding for legal services for tenants facing evictions under Adams in the time covered by Lander’s report from $62.4 in 2021 million to $155 million in 2025. She also said there was a change in how eviction cases were counted ha impacted the data after 2021.
“As we’ve significantly increased funding across our provider network, we’re strengthening compliance to effectively deliver on the citywide expansion by clearly outlining performance targets to reflect the program’s priorities and client needs,” she said.
Sharma added that in fiscal year 2021, 12,754 households received legal services to address eviction proceedings in housing court while in fiscal year 2024 that number was up to nearly 30,000.
The city’s right to counsel law passed in 2017 is supposed to guarantee a housing attorney for low-income tenants facing eviction. An estimated 82 percent of tenants facing eviction are thought to qualify for lawyers based on the income threshold — far more than the city has budgeted money to pay.
Tenants are vastly more likely to be able to stay in their homes when they have lawyers representing them in court. Of 41,161 households facing eviction who had lawyers between 2018 and 2023, 81 percent remained in their homes, according to the comptroller’s report.
“Without an attorney the odds of a tenant prevailing in housing court are very, very slim. There’s a reason for that. Housing law is complicated. Most tenants do not know the defenses to which they are entitled,” said Legal Aid Society Attorney Pavita Krishnaswamy, who spoke alongside Lander Friday morning. “When they raise those defenses, they are very likely to prevail, to buy themselves time, to stay in their house, to pay off debts that they may owe, and remain in the community.”
All told, about 60% of the 82,881 households who faced eviction between 2022 and January of this year did so without lawyers, according to the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition.
Last week Lander joined other candidates in the Democratic mayoral primary in backing a rent freeze next year for over a million rent-stabilized as the Rent Guidelines Board, appointed by Mayor Eric Adams mulls increases of as much as 4.47%.
Photo: Bronx Housing Court on the Grand Concourse. Source: Alex Krales/The City.
| Themes |
| • Displaced • Displacement • Homeless • Housing rights • Legal frameworks • Local • Public / social housing • Security of tenure |
