| Date: | March 4, 2020 |
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By Caitlin Dewey | March 4, 2020
Tenant eviction rates have long been high in Buffalo, one of the poorest cities in the country.
But according to a report released Wednesday by the think tank Partnership for the Public Good, court-ordered evictions and other involuntary moves are approaching a crisis level, with as many as 13% of all renting households evicted or forced to move annually.
In 2017, the most recent year for which complete data is available, landlords filed 7,846 eviction cases in Buffalo Housing Court, according to records from the Eighth Judicial District. Of those, the Partnership for the Public Good found that more than 4,300 resulted in court-ordered evictions.
Most cases arise when tenants fail to pay rent, the report found. While a major state policy overhaul slowed the eviction process last year, there’s not yet evidence the policy reduced evictions.
“Everyone knew the problem was there, but no one had run the numbers before,” said Sam Magavern, the report’s lead author and a senior policy fellow at the think tank. “We found, however, that the numbers are just astonishing.”
The report, commissioned by the progressive neighborhood group PUSH Buffalo and based on interviews with more than 100 tenants, attorneys, judges and community organizations, illuminates a reality that some advocates say policymakers have overlooked. On an average weekday, roughly 35 eviction cases pass through housing court, drawing dozens of landlords and tenants to a dim, beige hallway on the courthouse’s seventh floor.
In New York, eviction is a multistep legal process that begins – in the case of nonpayment – in the weeks after a tenant fails to pay rent. Once a case reaches the court, a hearing officer can dismiss it, issue a default judgment, or attempt a settlement between the landlord and tenant.
Tenant advocates say they recognize that landlords need to collect regular, timely rents and enforce the terms of leases if needed. But according to both those advocates and the Partnership for the Public Good, tenants in nonpayment cases are often on the brink, paying a disproportionately large share of their income toward housing.
In a sampling of cases reviewed by the organization, rent delinquencies were typically small and often attributed to loss of income or unexpected expenses. Low-wage workers with no paid time off, for instance, sometimes fall behind over events as common as a school-age child getting sick, said Grace Andriette, the deputy director of Neighborhood Legal Services, who contributed to the analysis.
Read the full article on the Buffalo News website here.
For the full report, Evicted in Buffalo: the High Costs of Involuntary Mobility, click here.