- The right to counsel program, signed into law in 2017, is meant to address the legal disparity in a city where historically only one in 10 tenants in housing court had a lawyer, while most landlords had legal representation. The program has become a model for other cities and states trying to limit displacement and homelessness amid rising rents and advancing gentrification.
San Francisco and Newark, N.J., have passed similar legislation over the past year. Now lawmakers in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Minnesota are considering statewide proposals to provide free attorneys to struggling renters.
A recent study by the Community Service Society of New York found that evictions declined more than five times faster in ZIP codes where the right to counsel law was in effect than in ZIP codes where the law was not.
This is 90% a result of rent control. As your rental apartment becomes an asset as long as prices go up and you don’t move. If you eliminated rent control then the numbers of cases would go down a lot and they would only need to go after truly bad landlords as opposed to people trying to get rid of below market renters that are locked in under legacy contracts
Yeah. I can kind of see that perspective, though I wonder how true that is. I wouldn't argue that rent control is all bad, nor would I argue that it's all good either, and I know there's different forms of it out there. Tenants rights tend to be hard to figure out because laws vary from state to state, where some states have laws that tilt more in the favor of tenants and other states tilt in the other direction. That said, there really are predatory landlords out there (especially corporate organizations that treat rental properties as nothing but financial instruments and don't even considering the importance that they own someone's home) and I think if I as a tenant ever had to show up in court, I'd love to have someone on my side to give me equal footing to a landlord with more money and legal assistance than I have. Additionally, rent control or no, if someone is being unfairly evicted, that's kind of a poor move on the landlord's part.
Back in January, I read something about tens of thousands of low-income renters nationwide could lose housing assistance, including many seniors and people with disabilities. The world is a sad place for many of us.