There’s no shortage of crises plaguing the city of New York at any given time. In times past and present, a major concern has been housing — both in its accessibility and in maintaining a sense of security. The number of evictions taking place across the city is alarming to say the least, as a whopping 18,007 residential evictions took place in 2018.
Oftentimes, it is presumed that an eviction is the fault of the tenant. There are plenty of issues that could result in a tenant being evicted from a building: falling behind on rent or exceptionally disorderly or dangerous conduct, among other things. However, the enormity of evictions has raised eyebrows in recent years, leading many to believe something more is at play here.
Three advocacy groups — Right to Counsel NYC Coalition, JustFix.nyc and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project — have banded together to investigate and analyze the increasing number of evictions across the five boroughs and the landlords responsible for them.
“We want to shift the narrative from evictions as an individual problem that’s the fault of the tenant to a citywide crisis,” says Manon Vergerio, a member of the Anity-Eviction Mapping Project. “That’s where the map comes in handy.”
Worstevictorsnyc.org tracks evictions block-by-block, where users can see where there’s the highest concentration of evictions and which landlords are abusing their power and filing an excess number of evictions annually.
“It’s a business tactic,” says Vergerio. “It’s a strategy for landlords.”
The raising number of evictions, the group found, is largely due to landlord and their hope of pushing out tenants who occupy rent-stabilized apartments — these tenants pay below the market-rate on their units. Landlords have taken up issues with these tenants, taking them to housing court over ludicrous issues knowing full well many of them won’t be able to afford a lawyer to defend them, resulting in their eviction from the unit. Once they are out, landlords can find tenants who will pay higher rent, in turn making them more money. For this reason, high-risk eviction areas often go hand in hand with areas of gentrification.
New York City passed a law in 2017 which gave all tenants a right to an attorney in housing court, which will hopefully help combat the unaffordability of legal help in cases where a tenant is being unfairly targeted and pushed from their home.
In addition to the map that tracks evictions, the creators have compiled a list of landlords most guilty of filing excessive evictions. Among them is Ved Parkash, who evicted 66 families in 2018. Parkash also has a history of ignoring his tenants’ needs, data revealed, neglecting one person so much that they almost died from a disease spread through rat urine.
While data on Parkash was available due to the high number of units he’s responsible for, unfortunately not all high-eviction areas have names associated with them. This is due to the fact that buildings with fewer units are not required to register with the city, and others simply aren’t legally registered. However one big name identified by the map is the New York City Housing Authority, meaning many of the tenants evicted in 2018 lived in public housing.
Those responsible for worstevictorsnyc.org are hoping that by making this data public and accessible to everyone, they can shed light on the severity of the eviction crisis.
