Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a new fast-track on Aug. 25 to expedite the most critical Housing Court cases. While some organizations applaud the program, others say the program fails to address larger, systemic issues.
According to a press release from the Office of the Mayor, the fast-track program will “take on the city’s most persistently negligent landlords.” Housing reports, the release says, can drag on for long periods of time which forces tenants to live in dangerous conditions under landlord neglect.
“When a building is dangerous, when an elevator is out or when a landlord has abandoned their responsibility to provide a safe home, tenants should not have to wait months or years for relief,” Mamdani said.
The New York Apartment Association, however, said that the plan may be operating on too many presumptions.
“This plan creates a presumption of guilt for violation cases and presumption of innocence for nonpayments,” said Kenny Burgos, CEO of NYAA in a press release. “This creates a two-tiered legal system that won’t fundamentally improve housing.”
NYAA cited a New York City Housing Partnership Survey, which found that more than 60 percent of respondents cited declining rent collections as the cause of financial distress, and called for an equivalent fast-track for owners recovering unpaid rent.
During the launch of the fast-track program at the New York City Housing Court, Mamdani was asked about differentiating from truly negligent landlords and those who struggle with affordability themselves.
“We’re talking about cases where a third of the building is facing some kind of serious violation,” Mamdani said. “When it comes to law, everyone has to follow it… If a landlord is not able to follow the law, then they should not be the landlord of that property.”
According to the Office of the Mayor, the fast-track order applies to buildings with one third or more units experiencing hazardous Class C violations such as heat, hot water, electricity and gas.
The Legal Aid Society was one of a handful of organizations that applauded the fast-track program’s focus on New Yorkers being forced from their homes unjustly.
“For tenants displaced by a vacate order, every additional day away from home can mean disruption to their employment, their children’s education, their health care and their sense of stability and community,” it said in a press release. “This new policy is a significant and long-overdue reform that will provide much-needed relief to families who have already endured the trauma and uncertainty of being forced from their homes.”
Similarly, The New York State Association for Affordable Housing expressed support for efforts to make the Housing Court more efficient in hearing serious cases. However, it called upon officials to address larger flaws across the entire housing court system.
“New York’s Housing Court system operates at an enormous scale — the largest of its type in the nation — averaging about 350,000 filings annually for the past 20 years,” the NYSAFAH wrote in a statement. “A system operating at that level, for that long, is not suffering from a narrow, fixable glitch — it is structurally broken.”
While NYSAFA applauded efforts to speed up operations, it said that the fast-track plans announced this week “will have a limited impact.”
