Legal Aid urges state lawmakers to pass measure halting evictions
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Legal Aid attorneys have urged New York Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie to reconvene their chambers to pass legislation halting evictions. Photo via Heastie’s office
By David Brand
With the state’s latest piecemeal eviction moratorium set to expire Oct. 1, tenants’ attorneys are urging New York lawmakers to return to Albany and pass meaningful legislation that will prevent tenants from losing their homes.
In an Aug. 27 letter, attorney Adrienne Holder, the head of Legal Aid’s Civil Practice, encouraged Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie to recall their chambers for a vote on a bill that would extend the moratorium until the COVID crisis subsides.
“You have a responsibility to protect the most vulnerable New Yorkers. This is not the time for inaction,” Holder wrote. “The legislature has the power to enact a robust and meaningful moratorium on evictions to prevent an unprecedented housing and homelessness crisis that will devastate low-income families already struggling to get by and cost taxpayer dollars.”
One bill, sponsored by Sen. Zellnor Myrie, would extend the eviction moratorium until a year after the ongoing COVID-related state of emergency ends. The legislation has 16 sponsors — including five of Queens’ seven senators — but remains in committee. The Assembly version of the bill has 32 backers, including main sponsor Karines Reyes of the Bronx.
In July, the state enacted a measure known as the Tenant Safe Harbor Act, which indefinitely halts evictions for people whose cases began after March 16, the first full day of New York’s initial eviction moratorium.
The law does not prevent people whose cases were adjudicated on or before March 16, however. City officials have identified at least 14,000 New York City tenants at risk of being evicted when the current moratorium expires.
The state’s top judges and Gov. Andrew Cuomo have issued a series of orders that extend the moratorium for a couple months at a time but leave tenants, landlords, attorneys and judges with little clarity about when evictions may actually resume.
Holder noted that Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington state and Washington D.C. have all already gone further than New York in suspending evictions for a longer period of time.
“If you don’t extend the moratorium, New Yorkers who were living on the brink of poverty before the crisis will face catastrophic consequences, including food instability and homelessness,” she said.
The state court system’s decision to no longer extend eviction moratoriums lends even more urgency to the effort to pass legislation to protect tenants from becoming homeless, tenants’ attorneys and lawmakers say.
New York City’s top Civil Court judge, Anthony Cannataro, said Aug. 26 it was time for the courts to “take our hands off the issue of policymaking around evictions.”
“Which groups should be evicted, which groups shouldn’t be evicted,” Cannataro said during a meeting with Bronx attorneys. “Those are clearly heavy policy-laden decisions and those are matters for the other two branches of government to deal with.”
Stewart-Cousins and Heastie did not respond to requests for comment.
