In the most expensive city in the country, evictions remain lower than before COVID-19
New York City’s housing costs have reached record heights: according to Zillow, the typical market rent at the start of 2021 was $2,576. Average rent increased by more than $500 a year later and by early 2024 it almost reached $3,500. In the meantime, finding an apartment has become a huge challenge as the city experiences its lowest vacancy rate—the percentage of units that are empty—since 1968. But there’s one piece of good news for New Yorkers: eviction filings remain well below pre-pandemic averages.
In places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and Houston, landlords are filing more evictions than before COVID-19. Meanwhile, in New York City, we’re seeing the opposite. In 2019, landlords filed almost 15,000 cases a month, but in 2023 they only filed 12,000 cases per month, according to data collected by the Housing Data Coalition. And, so far in 2024, we‘ve seen an even lower monthly average.
Despite New York City’s sky high rents, the eviction filing rate in the city is now well below the national average in every borough except the Bronx. But even there, the rate has been cut in half.
What is behind these improvements? According to legal aid attorneys, advocates, and other experts in New York, a series of reforms that were implemented before the pandemic have limited evictions, including retaliatory actions and efforts by landlords to push tenants out to hike up rents.
These policies are not a silver bullet and do not consist of just one single law or requirement that changed things radically. On the contrary, New York’s ongoing change in filings is a lesson for other governments on the importance of proactively addressing tenant’s challenges, keeping long-term policies in place, and adapting over time to cover gaps.
The first milestone in this journey was Right to Counsel—formally known as the Universal Access to Legal Services Law—which was signed into law in 2017 and made New York the first city in the country to guarantee legal representation for tenants in housing courts. The law was implemented first in three zip codes in each borough, expanding to more areas each year until 2022, when it was available for tenants across the city with an income at or below 200% of the federal poverty guidelines.
According to a study conducted in 2013, before the new law, in New York just one percent of tenants had lawyers, compared to 99% of landlords. But when the policy was implemented first in a handful of zip codes, it wasn’t long until representation increased in those areas. Researchers that evaluated the first years of the program noted that tenants experienced less sentences against them, smaller monetary damages and were less likely to be evicted. Another paper described that, in areas where there was right to counsel, there were better birth outcomes for people in those communities.
Although the program has been increasing coverage every year (during the fiscal year 2023 it helped more than 43,000 households), several reports have also mentioned challenges, like the pace to increase coverage and staffing issues. A recent testimony by members of the New York City Bar Association mentioned that “there are not enough attorneys available to meet the need, with the result that thousands of tenants are going unrepresented.” At the same time they added that the initiative is “an enormous success” in terms of keeping over 83% of represented tenants housed.
For Marika Dias, managing director of the Safety Net Project at the Urban Justice Center, there’s a connection between the decrease in the eviction filings and the policy, especially as it expanded its reach.
“As right to counsel was rolled out and phased in, and more and more people had lawyers, we did start to see a drop in the number of case filings, because no longer could landlords assume that these frivolous cases were going to yield the same results,” Dias said.
Another policy, implemented in 2019, gave tenants new tools to fight displacement and likely contributed to the lower eviction levels. The Housing Stability & Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA) restricted rent increases, limited the capacity of landlords to strip units of existing rent restrictions, strengthened protections against retaliatory evictions, and limited conversions into condominiums, among other measures.
Most notably the law marked the end of vacancy decontrol, removing a common incentive for eviction. Before the HSTPA, landlords in rent stabilized units could raise rents every time a tenant left the unit. Eventually, this could lead to exceeding a rent limit that would allow the landlord to take the unit off the rent stabilization system. Some landlords would pressure tenants to leave or evict them to eventually strip the home of rent limitations.
Between this policy and the role of Right to Counsel, it is difficult to distinguish exactly how much each measure contributed to changes in landlord’s behavior. But advocates believe they both played a part in this downward trend in eviction filings.
“The results we’re seeing is that combination of [the end of] a lot of the incentives landlords had to remove tenants,” said Andrea Shapiro, director of Programs and Advocacy at the Met Council on Housing. “Eviction cases just to harass tenants out, refuse them to give succession rights, all those things which ended up off in an eviction court were removed.”
In 2020, another factor drastically reduced evictions, this time to historic low levels. As the pandemic unfolded, New York City developed and enforced strong protections for renters, which included the federal moratorium and a rent assistance program that distributed more than $2.8 billion among tenants in need. Not all evictions were stopped, but in 2021 landlords filed around a quarter of the evictions that they filed in 2019.
“The emergency rental assistance program… was just like a blanket for tenants,” said Cynthia Norris, senior director at New York Communities for Change, who now misses the impact that this policy had in previous years. “Especially for tenants that [were] backed up in rent, who lost their jobs, who lost a breadwinner in their family, who just was suffering from domestic violence, anxiety, just getting sick from COVID, anything.”
Other policies might have also contributed, such as the decision by the New York City Housing Authority to drop more than 31,000 non-payment cases that existed in housing court. The agency, also known as NYCHA, is the biggest housing provider in New York and the largest public housing authority in the country, managing more than 177,000 units across the city, with around half a million tenants.
Nonetheless, by 2022 eviction cases started increasing as moratoria expired, rental assistance funding was depleted, and landlords went back to the courthouses to file evictions again. That year, eviction filings more than doubled compared to 2021. In 2023, the city reached more than 132,000 eviction cases. And as of September, there have been 92,981 filings in the five boroughs during 2024 (more information in our Eviction Tracking System).
Although it’s too soon to tell, there’s another policy that might impact eviction trends in the future: the new Good Cause Eviction law, enacted in New York City in April 2024. This bill not only forces landlords to demonstrate a valid reason to evict tenants or to not renew a lease, but also limits rent increases to 10% or 5% plus the Consumer Price Index (whichever is lower). According to an estimate by the housing justice technology nonprofit, JustFix, up to 400,000 units of the 2.3 million rental units in the city should be covered by this policy in NYC.
It’s important to note that there’s been no month since the pandemic started when evictions have been higher than pre-COVID levels. April 2024 saw the highest filing count in this period, with 11,252 cases filed, but this was still 30% below pre-COVID averages.
“Evictions are creeping up, but they will likely never be as high as before the HSTPA,” said Matthew Tropp, director of Housing for the Legal Aid Society.
Despite this good news, the data still shows the extent to which evictions are a major challenge for the most vulnerable New Yorkers. When we analyze trends by county both in terms of total filings or by eviction rates, it becomes clear that the Bronx, the poorest borough in the city, is where most evictions are concentrated in the city.
The eviction rate in the Bronx is twice the rate in any other borough. More than a third of the eviction filings in the city during 2023 originated from the Bronx, despite it being one of the least expensive areas in New York. Households in the Bronx earn a median of $46,838, a third less than New York City as a whole, and 27.9% of its population lives under the poverty line compared to 18.2% in the city overall. These economic disparities shape eviction rates not only in the Bronx, but in other poor neighborhoods.
“Folks who have unstable income will often face non-payment evictions,” said Joseph Loonam, Housing Campaign coordinator for Vocal New York. Loonam adds that many people in low-income areas of the city live paycheck to paycheck, vulnerable to any unexpected problems in their lives which could lead to not being able to afford their rents.
Even with the reduction in eviction filing rates, several thousand families are threatened with losing their homes each month. In September 2024, the number of eviction filings in New York City was the same as Austin, Cincinnati, Memphis, Philadelphia and St. Louis combined. Many more experience housing insecurity or homelessness beyond evictions.
“Even if that is what the data is showing, I think there’s a huge part of that story that’s missing, which is the 130,000 people in the shelter system, the some 200,000 people who are doubled up, and the some 40,000 people who are on the street who have no way of getting into that market,” Loonam said.
Another caveat is that landlords might still be adapting to these new tenant protections and how to deal with issues like non-payment of rent.
“My sense is that the anti-eviction sentiment in the current political environment is very high coming out of COVID,” said Jonathan J. Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel Inc., a real estate consulting firm. “Given all the actions taken to protect tenants, it may take longer for landlords to normalize their eviction practices, and there may be an element of confusion among smaller landlords.”
At the same time, affordable housing providers are concerned about the amounts of rent owed by tenants in the post-pandemic era.
“The rental arrears crisis in affordable housing is still very acute because low-income households continue to face hardship. In turn, affordable housing owners and operators are struggling, some reaching a point that is potentially untenable, which puts people’s housing stability at risk,” said Michelle Mulcahy, director of Housing Access and Opportunity at Enterprise Community Partners. “We could see this rate of evictions rise unless we find new solutions to this challenge that both stabilize households and ensure the viability of affordable housing operators.”
Some of the solutions have already been laid out: rental assistance during the pandemic was extremely effective and New York City renters currently have the option of applying to the “One shot deal” program, which has been providing short-term emergency financial aid for more than a decade.
But the needs in New York can be overwhelming: not only is it home to more renters than any other American city, but it is also one of the most unaffordable markets in the country. The local government just approved the “City of Yes” policy, which aims to increase the supply of housing, but the effects of this might take many years to be seen.
Still, measures like Right to Counsel and the Housing Stability & Tenant Protection Act have given tenants useful tools to avoid eviction. New York City’s experience shows the power of policy not only for the city, but for the country as a whole. If other cities and states are serious about lowering their eviction rates, they need to have consistent policies over time and be willing to move forward, close gaps and improve already existing measures, like New York has done.
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