To Prevent Homelessness, City Adds More Money for Anti-Eviction Services

The city is making more funds available for New Yorkers to fight illegal evictions in Housing Court in an effort to reduce the city’s persistent homelessness.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced an additional investment of $12.3 million for anti-eviction services on Monday. The city plans to use the new investment, re-directed from savings at the Human Resources Administration in combination with existing resources, to help 19,000 households in the neighborhoods where the most people are entering the homeless shelter system. They include Crown Heights, West and Central Harlem, Jamaica, Tremont and Port Richmond.

“This is about helping individual New Yorkers and individual families, but also doing everything we can to protect the affordable housing we have today,” the mayor said.

He added that many tenants facing illegal eviction live in rent-stabilized buildings and are targeted by unscrupulous landlords. But Mitchell Posilkin, general counsel at the Rent Stabilization Association, the largest landlord group in the city, called the mayor's initiative “misguided" because many evictions are legal.

“People, when they have nothing else to say and when they’re just trying to use scare tactics, the words harassment and illegal eviction get tossed around, you know, like confetti at a Broadway parade,” he said.

Anti-eviction legal services, combined with the anti-harassment tenant protection program the Mayor announced in his State of the City address in February, will cost the city $61.8 million in 2017.