In New York City, housing-court justice isn’t blind. Acknowledging that tenants often hold weaker bargaining power than landlords, the city has some of the strongest tenant-protection laws in the country—providing low-income renters with free legal representation, emergency rent assistance, and arbitration services.
But some tenants treat these policies as a license to stop paying rent, dragging landlords into interminable legal disputes. The city’s housing courts are straining under the weight of 150,000 new cases each year.
This dysfunction, with its delays and mounting costs, is hurting New Yorkers. The system isn’t fair to landlords—especially small ones—many of whom were only able to finance their homes by renting out additional units. It isn’t fair to honest tenants, who end up absorbing these costs through higher rents and barriers to entry. And it isn’t fair to New Yorkers as a whole, who suffer when police get swept up in housing disputes they are ill-positioned to address…