Public defenders call on judge to dismiss landlord suit brought against court system

The Legal Aid Society and a number of Queens-based organizations are calling on a judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought earlier this year by a group of landlords calling on the court system to speed up eviction cases. Eagle file photo by Walter Karling

By Jacob Kaye

Several months after a group of landlords sued the state’s court system over its handling of eviction cases, a group of Queens-based organizations and the Legal Aid Society are attempting to put an end to the landlords’ lawsuit.

Make the Road NY, MinKwon Center for Community Action and Housing Court Answers filed a motion in Queens County Supreme Court with the help of the Legal Aid Society on Friday calling on a judge to deny the landlord groups’ lawsuit brought in February, which, among other things, demands the state’s court system speed up eviction proceedings.

In their motion filed last week, the community groups claim that the landlords’ suit should be dismissed because the homeowners allegedly failed to prove that they had at all been harmed by the pace in which cases are heard in the city’s Housing Courts.

Though the landlords argued in the suit that lengthy delays in Housing Court brought on by tenant attorneys have created a court system that is “tilted decidedly against the protection of landowner’s rights to their property,” the Legal Aid Society said that the petitioners had “failed to allege any concrete harm to any petitioner from any adjournments or calendaring delays in a single case.”

“While petitioners repeatedly refer to vague ‘harm to landlords,’ they fail to specify any specific harm to any specific petitioner,” Friday’s filing reads. “Indeed, despite listing a plethora of cases in the petition, petitioners fail to actually draw any causal connection between any specific action by respondents and any specific harm to petitioners.”

“Petitioners have not alleged that they have lost rent money in any specific case due to an adjournment granted over their counsels’ objection — indeed, their counsel does not appear to

have objected to a single adjournment in a single case petitioners list,” the filing continued.

Ellen Davidson, a staff attorney in the Legal Aid Society’s Civil Law Reform Unit, called the lawsuit brought by the landlords “another frivolous and meritless attempt by landlords to ramp up evictions and increase their profits at the expense of tenants.”

“It is imperative that the court be allowed to continue using its discretion to adjourn or stay eviction proceedings in the interest of justice for tenants who need additional help with understanding the court process and obtaining required services, such as translation or protective services for adults, children, and incapacitated persons,” Davidson said.

“We hope that the court will quickly reject this baseless lawsuit, and we look forward to interneving to ensure that tenants’ interests are fully represented,” she added.

Originally filed in February, the landlords’ suit was brought by 16 different limited liability companies and limited partnerships, all of which share a Manhattan address.

The lawsuit, which was brought in Queens, was filed against the Office of Court Administration, the city’s Civil Courts, its clerks and its administrative judge.

The landlords claim that the court system has failed to honor a number of elements of the state’s real property actions and proceedings law, or RPAPL, which sets a procedure for litigants and the courts to adjudicate housing disputes efficiently. The petitioners said the court’s alleged failure to adhere to the law has primarily affected summary proceedings, or the expedited processes for evictions outlined in RPAPL.

According to the landlords, the court system’s alleged failure to adhere to the law “not only undercut the very purpose of summary proceedings but have contrastingly rendered them reminiscent of bygone common-law ejectment actions which summary proceedings were designed to replace.”

“While practitioners before the Housing Court may wax nostalgic about a long-gone era in which summary proceedings trended towards and not away from efficiency, they have been collectively mired in interminable and inexplicable delays in seeking the vindication of their clients’ rights to their respective property for so long that it has surreally become ‘normal,’” the landlords’ suit reads. “Landlords have been forced to merely accept the game as rigged and trudge along the nightmarish procedure of Housing Court in the hopes that one day, far in the future, they will be able to retake and make their property economically viable once more.”

“The time-honored right to property deserves at least the minimal protections afforded it under the statutes currently on the books in this state,” the suit continued. “This proceeding appears to be the only recourse left for the landowners of this city – petitioners among them – to conform the Housing Court’s procedures to those envisioned by the legislature and, in doing so, attempt to rebuild a broken system at last.”

The landlords, who are represented by law firm Kucker Marino Winiarsky & Bittens, called on a judge to require the court system “fix trial dates” for non-payment eviction cases within three to eight days.

But according to the Legal Aid Society, the timeline would undermine the city’s Right to Counsel program, which has already struggled to get attorneys connected with low-income tenants facing eviction.

The Legal Aid Society also claimed that the lawsuit would infringe on the court’s right to control its own calendar based on the specifics of any given case.

“As if tenants facing eviction were not vulnerable enough, this lawsuit goes a step further to strip tenants of even a modicum of justice in Housing Court in an attempt to steamroll them out onto the street," said Christine Clarke, the director of Litigation and Advocacy at Legal Services NYC. "Our lawyers work hard every day to make sure that people are able to defend themselves and assert their rights to remain in their homes and not be held hostage to the whims of unscrupulous or harassing landlords. This lawsuit is a transparent attempt to stop them and I hope that the court sees it for what it is — frivolous and ­meritless.”

An attorney for the landlord group, Eric McAvey, a partner at Kucker Marino Winiarsky & Bittens, said the Legal Aid Society’s filing in the case is “effectively the tenants’ bar saying the silent part out loud.”

“Indeed, in support of intervention, they argue that petitioners’ requested relief – which is no more than having the Housing Court follow [the summary proceedings law] as written – will ‘adversely affect’ tenants by halting the interminable delays that plague landlord-tenant proceedings,” McAvery said in an emailed statement.

“We therefore do not believe that the proposed intervenors have a legitimate interest in this proceeding that would warrant their intervention and, even upon the prospective granting of intervention, we believe their arguments to be improper in this proceeding and otherwise without merit,” McAvery added.

The Office of Court Administration did not respond to the Eagle’s request for comment.