DoGooder Liberals Trying to Get Paid Off COVID: Large NYC Housing Provider for Mentally ill and Formerly Homeless People Evicting Hundreds of [mostly Black] Tenants to Collect $Millions in Back Rent

From [HERE] One of the largest providers of housing for mentally ill and formerly homeless people in New York City has started hundreds of eviction cases in an attempt to collect millions of dollars in rent that its tenants failed to pay during the pandemic, according to a new analysis of housing court records.

The housing developer, Breaking Ground, has filed to evict the tenants in about 345 of its more than 4,300 apartments since January 2022, according to SHOUT, an advocacy group for low-income and formerly homeless tenants that compiled the data. The cases came after a pandemic-era moratorium on evictions was lifted.

The analysis captures a longstanding practice among nonprofit housing providers that has been exacerbated by the pandemic, legal experts said: threatening to evict low-income tenants who are behind on rent as a tactic to prod the city to give those tenants rental assistance more quickly. The lawsuits come at a time when the city is dealing with record-high homelessness and surging demand for shelter from migrant asylum seekers.

Very few of the cases have led to evictions, but critics of the approach say that the lawsuits are an unnecessary hardship for some of the most vulnerable renters in the city, many of whom have lived on the streets or in shelters for years. They are also emblematic, they said, of dysfunction within the city’s social safety net, at a time when budget cuts are straining numerous departments.

“It’s a startling number of cases,” said Jenny Akchin, a lawyer with TakeRoot Justice, a nonprofit legal services group. “This has been standard operating procedure,” she said, “but it doesn’t have to be, and it really shouldn’t be.”

Another developer, CAMBA, has petitioned to evict more than a quarter of residents from one of its buildings in Brooklyn, according to court records.

The housing providers say the lawsuits are necessary, as a last resort, to recoup rent they rely on to operate the buildings and pay down debt.

They acknowledge that the filings are designed to trigger actions in court that can speed up the process of receiving a so-called one-shot deal — a lump-sum payment of emergency rental assistance that tenants can receive from the city’s Human Resources Administration to cover back rent.

The agency is struggling to meet the demand for one-shot deals and other cash assistance grants for tenants. In early May, the Department of Social Services said that its caseload was up 43 percent since before the pandemic. Staffing shortages are hampering the department, according to a city comptroller report. [MORE]