When the rent on Maybelle Tillman’s Harlem apartment soared almost 40 percent in only four years, the increase was practically life-threatening to her.

The 82-year-old retired nurse said she told her landlord she couldn’t afford $1,021 a month on her $2400 monthly income. A staff member at the Vantage management office that operates the Savoy Park apartments told her she should move out. “I had never been so devastated in my life,” said Tillman. “I was under so much pressure. I got sick, and when I went to the doctor, he told me my blood pressure was too high.”

Tenants at Savoy Park, an 1800-unit complex between 139th and 142nd Streets in Harlem, are accusing the new owners, Vantage Properties, LLC, which bought the buildings with Apollo Real Estate Advisors in 2006, of trying to drive them out of their rent stabilized apartments in order to rent them out at higher prices. Since it acquired the buildings, Vantage Properties has sued several Savoy Park tenants in housing court to collect rent or to evict them.
Tillman said if she ever got sued she would not have money to hire a lawyer. And if she got evicted, she would have nowhere else to live. “I really don’t have a place to go. A nursing home?”


City Council members Rosie Mendez and Alan Gerson introduced a bill today that aims to protect the rights of senior citizens such as Tillman when they are sued in housing court and cannot afford a lawyer. The Right to Counsel Bill would establish a right to counsel for low income senior citizens in eviction and foreclosure proceedings. If it passes, it will be the only place – outside of parental custody proceedings – where New Yorkers have a right to counsel in civil cases.

“Surveys and statistics have shown that when you have an attorney in court you’re likely to fare much better,” said Councilmember Mendez at a press conference at City Hall earlier today.

New York housing laws are complicated and housing court can be a scary place for tenants.

In a city where one in five senior citizens live below the poverty line and with rents rapidly escalating, seniors in New York City are increasingly at risk of losing their homes.

Public and privately funded legal services programs that already provide free legal representation to low income tenants do not have the capacity to serve everyone who needs them, according to proponents of the bill, who predict it would cost the city approximately $15 million per year to provide a free lawyer to the approximately 10,000 eligible seniors.

That cost is much lower than the costs flowing from an eviction, according to the Brennan Center Strategic Fund, which estimates that the city saves approximately $61,000 every time a senior citizen’s household is prevented from becoming homeless.

If the bill is approved, every senior citizen 62 or older whose income is below $27,000 will be entitled to a free lawyer in housing court and foreclosure cases. The income ceiling is the same one used to determine eligibility for New York State’s Senior Citizens Rent Increase Exemption Program and will be adjusted yearly in the same way.

Twenty-one Council members have expressed their support for the bill, which is a narrower version of a bill introduced last year by Councilmember Gerson that asked for legal representation for all low income tenants in housing court, not just seniors. According to Councilmember Gerson, it would cost approximately $72 million to fund his original request, which is still pending.

“There ought to be a universal right to counsel when any person faces an eviction, but immediately, we are requesting that right for our most vulnerable who, if left on their own, will be taken advantage of,” Councilmember Gerson said at the press conference.

Many senior citizens face a multitude of physical and mental health problems which make it particularly difficult to navigate a complex legal system alone.

“We need to make sure our most vulnerable citizens have legal representation,” said Judge Fern A. Fisher, the Administrative Judge for the Civil Court of the City of New York, which includes housing court. “Many, though not all, senior citizens are alone, with no family support. Many have trouble paying rent, but they often have no resources or energy to obtain access to benefits. Sometimes, just getting to court can be difficult,” said Judge Fisher.

Many senior citizens are likely targets for evictions if they live in rent stabilized units and have paid lower rents for many years, in neighborhoods where the market rent is now much higher. Approximately seventeen percent of rent stabilized units in New York City are occupied by tenants age 62 and older, according to the 2005 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey.

“In a tight housing market, these are attractive apartments for landlords to get a hold of,” said David Robinson, an attorney with the Legal Services Unit of New York Legal Services. Under certain circumstances, if the landlord makes sufficient improvements to a vacant apartment, a formerly rent stabilized unit can be rented to a new tenant at a much higher rent. “There are two costs. A tenant is evicted and the city’s affordable housing stock is reduced,” said Robinson.

“Seniors tend to be involved in rather complicated proceedings,” said Robinson, explaining that a landlord can refuse to renew a rent stabilized lease if, for example, the tenant is failing to maintain the apartment as her primary residence. There are exceptions to the rule, which can afford some protection to seniors. A tenant who has been away from home because she was hospitalized, or temporarily in a nursing home, can probably show that the apartment is in fact her primary residence. “But these are complicated issues of proof,” said Robinson. And it can be very difficult for an unrepresented tenant to win, if she is alone and the landlord has a lawyer.

Even in less complex cases, unrepresented tenants are at a disadvantage, according to Louise Seeley, executive director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court. “The way most cases are resolved is that the parties go out in the hallway to negotiate and then take an agreement back to the judge,” Seeley explained. But these negotiations are not a true meeting of the minds when “one side is represented by a regular player who is there all the time and really knows the rules and the system, versus people who don’t know any of that,” said Seeley.

And according to Seeley, even conscientious judges, who are willing to scrutinize settlement agreements more carefully and make sure the tenants understand what they are signing, often feel pressed for time and are not as thorough as Seeley believes they should be. On a typical day, a housing court judge handles as many as 80 cases.

According to Judge Fisher, judges like it when tenants are represented, “particularly where seniors are involved, where people may be suffering from some form of incapacity.”

There are already systems in place to help unrepresented tenants, but according to Seeley they are not enough. Advocates and lawyers are stationed outside housing courts to assist unrepresented parties, tenants and landlords alike. But even when a tenant gets legal advice before going into the courtroom, “often they’re so scared and intimidated by the time they get in front of the judge, that they’re too afraid to say it, or they forget what we told them to say,” Seeley said.

Places like the Legal Aid Society, MFY Legal Services and Legal Services for New York City represent hundreds of low income tenants, but they cannot absorb all of the demand.

The city spent $12.1 million on anti-eviction legal services in fiscal year 2006, according to the Independent Budget Office. One of the programs it funds is the Senior Citizen Assigned Counsel Program, a partnership between the housing court and the New York City Department for the Aging. Under this program, senior citizens receive free legal counsel for housing court as well as social services.

“We help a lot of people but we don’t have the capacity to help everyone who needs us. We’re not even halfway through November and I believe we’ve already signed on everyone we can help this month,” said Diane Lutwak, the attorney in charge of The Legal Aid Society Brooklyn Office for the Aging, which is contracted to represent tenants under the Assigned Counsel Program.

Many seniors who have to face housing court unrepresented end up in dire circumstances. Because many seniors live on fixed benefits and without a steady source of income, they are hard pressed to rent a new apartment after an eviction. That often lands them in homeless shelters, adult homes, nursing homes, or even hospitals, all of which carry a high price tag.

But not all seniors go straight into institutional care when they are evicted. Some know people they can double up with, at least temporarily. Some end up on the street before going to a shelter or nursing home.

“The pathway is often eviction, to a friend’s home, which eventually becomes untenable, because it’s overcrowded, and then to the street,” said Arnold S. Cohen, President and CEO of The Partnership for the Homeless, a direct services and advocacy organization helping homeless New Yorkers. “Through our outreach efforts, we find seniors who have been on the street for four, five, even six months,” said Cohen.

What is almost always true is that a senior citizen who is evicted from her home loses her support network, which is often in her immediate neighborhood. “Senior citizens tend to have their support system right around them. If they’re forced to move away from that, if they lose that system, they are far more likely to end up in a nursing home or emergency room, because they don’t have the people looking out for them on a daily basis like they used to have,” said Laura Abel, deputy director of the Brennan Center Strategic Fund.

The bill may find support from some landlord lawyers as well. “When you’re dealing with certain seniors, in many cases it takes a few adjournments of the case until the court appoints a guardian ad litem, or an advocate,” said Heela Capell, an attorney with the law firm of Heiberger & Associates, P.C., which represents landlords in housing court. The court appoints guardians to some tenants if it finds they are incapable of handling the proceedings on their own. According to Capell, these repeated adjournments can become time consuming and costly, so “maybe having an attorney from the get-go would be a more productive use of resources and the court’s time.”

Frank Ricci, director of government affairs for the Rent Stabilization Association, a trade association for New York City property owners, said that a program resulting in speedier proceedings would be a good thing, because “no one wants to go to housing court, owner or tenant.”

The landlords who might not like the bill are those who have been accused of trying to evict tenants so they can lift units out of rent stabilization restrictions. According to Seeley, “this will probably have a deterrent effect on landlords bringing frivolous cases, because they will know the tenant will be represented.” And it would place tenants like Tillman at ease. “I couldn’t afford a lawyer. But don’t they have those legal aid attorneys?” asked Tillman.