By Benyamin Davidson
A new study has found that evictions in New York City are down. The research, conducted by New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, reveals that the number of eviction proceedings initiated and completed dropped significantly between 2010 and 2017, predominantly in cases where building owners claimed nonpayment of rent. Utilizing state Office of Court Administration records, the study also found that the average amount of rent landlords sought to recover remained constant at two-and-a-half to three months of rent, throughout the years and across the boroughs.
As reported by Crain’s NY, the improvement evident in the study, can by no means be credited to the stricter laws passed this year impeding landlords from rescinding the city’s rent-regulated housing, as the cutoff for the study was well before the law was passed. The credit cannot even rightfully all be attributed to Mayor Bill de Blasio, and his liberal ‘for the people’ policies, such as the 2017 law he enacted to guarantee legal assistance in all housing court cases. The study finds, progress was made even before 2014, when de Blasio came into office.
The research shows that evictions had already began their descent under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, showing improvements in 2012 and more dramatically in 2014. By 2016, a year before de Blasio introduced his “right-to-counsel” initiative for tenants, evictions were already down by 14.4 percent.
There were exceptions to the upbeat news— primarily in the Bronx. Despite housing less than 17 percent of the NYC population, the Bronx borough raked up 39 percent of the overall evictions in 2017. Also, disappointing was that “holdover cases”, or evictions filed for reasons other than nonpayment of rent, such as violation of the terms, actually increased overall during the course of the study. Still the holdovers never accounted for more than 16% of all eviction filings. Further, even as the number of filings and warrants fell, the number of judgments made against renters increased from 2010 levels. These landlord victories were down at 101,953 in 2010, but peaked in 2014 to 112,120, again dropping partially to 102,764 in 2017.
The research admittedly did not account for cases involving co-operative buildings, condominiums or in New York City Housing Authority developments. Also, people who left their apartments voluntarily or under some form of non-legal pressure were not counted in the study. “While this dataset does not capture displacement that occurs outside of the court, eviction filings serve as an important measure of renter instability,” the study says.
