Testimony Of Lucy Block To The New York Advisory Committee To The U.S. Commission On Civil Rights Regarding Racial Inequities In Evictions

To members of the Committee,

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on which communities are disparately impacted by evictions in New York City, in particular during the COVID-19 pandemic.

My name is Lucy Block and I am a Research and Policy Associate for the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, a membership organization of over 80 community groups across New York City working to achieve racial, economic, and housing justice. I am also a member of the New York City Housing Data Coalition, which has spent three years working to obtain, process, and analyze housing court data from the State Office of Court Administration in support of the tenant movement and tenant rights. With access to that data, I worked with the Right to Counsel coalition to analyze the number of eviction cases filed across New York State during the pandemic and where eviction filings were concentrated. My organization published our research in March.^[1]

When I first made a rudimentary map of eviction filings by zip code, I was struck by the similarity to maps I made in the early months of the COVID-19 crisis showing concentrations of cases and deaths – which are also the areas that are more densely populated by people of color. The spatial pattern was both clear and unsurprising to me, but revealed a new dimension to the simultaneous crises faced by people of color in the past year and a half: not only are communities of color getting infected with and dying from COVID-19 at a much higher rate than their white counterparts, but they are simultaneously facing eviction from their homes.

The starkest findings of my analysis emerged when comparing the zip codes with the highest rates of death from COVID-19 to those with the lowest rates of death:

• The top 25% of zip codes by rate of death saw a rate of eviction filings that was 3.6 times greater than the rate of eviction filings in the bottom 25% of zip codes. As of late February, there had been 15,517 eviction filings in the top zip codes versus 4,224 in the bottom zip codes.
• Those top 25% of zip codes by rate of death have a population that is 68.2% people of color, versus 29.2% people of color in the zip codes with the lowest rates of death.
• Eight of the ten zip codes with the highest rates of filings were over 80% people of color.^[2]

Furthermore, the geographic disparities were alarming. Eight of the ten zip codes with the highest filing rates were in the Bronx (the same zip codes that, as noted above, are over 80% people of color), as noted by the New York Times in their March coverage of ANHD’s analysis and their July 27 update.^[3] This pattern mirrors ANHD’s annual research on geographic trends of housing and related risks at the community district level.^[4] This year, we found that the ten districts with the highest overall risk scores were over 75% people of color. Eight of those districts are in the Bronx. The share of people of color in a district correlated closely with the rate of residential evictions in the first months of 2020 before the pandemic, rent burden, poor housing conditions, increases in residential sale prices, foreclosure filings, and the share of home loans made by non-bank lenders. The risk chart illuminates the diversity of risks to stable housing that are present in New York City’s neighborhoods that are most densely people of color.

As many testified in your hearings, race, housing instability, economic insecurity, and health risks are deeply interconnected and impossible to isolate. Legally-sanctioned racist policies have relegated Black communities and other people of color to housing of the poorest quality, at the highest prices, while simultaneously depriving them of access to sufficient employment and opportunities to build and maintain wealth.^[5] We need to examine the history of urban settlement and public policy in the United States to understand the staggering correlation between density of people of color, evictions, and deaths from COVID-19.

The question becomes how to undo the effects of centuries of policies that have resulted in such deep inequity, and policy solutions are not simple. With that complexity in mind, ANHD supports a range of policies to address racial inequities in housing and evictions:

• Statewide Right to Counsel for any case that would result in a tenant losing their home, regardless of income. This legislation has been introduced in New York State as A07570 in the Assembly^[6] and S6778 in the Senate.^[7]
• Good Cause Evictions legislation that limits evictions to violations of lease terms or nonpayment, gives tenants a right to renew their lease, and limits annual rent increases. This legislation has been introduced in New York State as S3082 in the Senate.^[8]
• Effective implementation of the New York State COVID-19 Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP), ensuring sufficient outreach, accessibility, and that all funds are spent within federal deadlines. The process has been riddled with technical errors and barriers to accessibility.^[9] New York State must ensure it distributes all available funding within applicable timelines so as not to relinquish any of the desperately needed relief. Technological issues must be resolved, information must be made readily available and consistent, community-based organizations must be supported given their critical role in providing tenants with assistance, and applications must be processed quickly. ERAP is one of tenants’ strongest defenses against eviction for nonpayment of rent during COVID-19, and so it must be distributed properly to avoid unnecessary and unjust evictions.
• Ensure the proper application of anti-harassment laws in New York City housing courts. Many, if not most, evictions happen before a tenant ever gets to housing court–landlords have a range of tactics to make living conditions hostile and push tenants out of their homes. New York City greatly expanded the legal definition of tenant harassment in 2017,^[10] but an ANHD analysis of housing court data showed that at most, 6.2% of harassment cases resulted in a finding of harassment.^[11] Our membership reports that housing court judges too often do not properly apply the law as written. New York City housing court judges must be educated to properly understand the law and receive clear messages from executive and legislative branches directing them to apply the law as written. If necessary, New York City Council should pass further legislation clarifying the law.
• Expansion of the Certificate of No Harassment program. Similarly to the necessity of properly applying tenant harassment law in housing court, New York City must seize the opportunity to expand and improve its CONH program, which requires landlords to obtain a certification that they have not harassed tenants in the prior five years in order to obtain permits for non-necessary construction and renovation. The program provides an important disincentive to harassing tenants without requiring tenants to take on the onerous process of suing a landlord in court.^[12]
• Stronger regulation of and oversight over multifamily lenders to prevent them from financing landlords who harass and displace tenants.  As bank regulators take steps to update the civil-rights era Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) regulation, ANHD is advocating for regulators to have the ability to downgrade banks for harm and displacement.^[13] ANHD developed a set of multifamily best practices that banks can adopt now and that regulators could require and enforce as part of the CRA exam process.^[14] The data referenced elsewhere in this testimony can inform this analysis, together with a robust community engagement process with tenants and tenant organizers. ANHD also supports stronger enforcement of similar state guidance regarding responsible lending practices for all state-chartered banks outside of the CRA exam process.
• End discrimination in renting practices based on source of income and increase rental subsidies to reflect housing markets. Voices Of Community Activists & Leaders (VOCAL–NY) developed policy recommendations based on their investigation of landlord discrimination against voucher holders and source of income. These policies would enable eligible tenants to live in apartments they can afford, stemming unjust evictions. A full list of recommendations is available in their 2020 report, Vouchers to Nowhere.^[15]
• End discrimination in renting practices based on prior involvement in housing court. New York’s Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 made it illegal for landlords to use a history of involvement in housing court as justification for denying applicants, but it does not offer tenants a private right of action to due for discrimination. Enforcement requires action by the Attorney General and carries only a small penalty of $500-$1,000 per violation.^[16] Enforcement must be expanded and penalties increased to ensure landlord compliance with the law.