There was an interesting article in the NY Times about NYC housing court. The article centers on a lawsuit by the tenants in two buildings in Brooklyn. Their first complaints of inadequate heat began in December 2013. City inspectors have gone there and issued violations. The tenants have a lawyer and have been pursuing their case in housing court during the past year. There have been occasional court dates with limited opportunity for testimony, but the case is nowhere near completion. The landlord's lawyer is actually asking the judge to rule that all the testimony which has taken place in the past year should only be treated as relevant to one "motion" requested in court and that testimony not be considered in any decisions on the case as a whole. In other words, once the motions were eventually decided, testimony and evidence presentation to decide the actual case would have to start over from the beginning - stretching the case out for who knows how many more winters.
We're already talking about more than an entire winter with inadequate heat, and no end in sight for the case. According to the NY Times, it's not unusual for housing court cases to drag on for long periods. This is not a matter of one problematic judge and the cases assigned to him. One factor is housing court has too few facilities, so each judge has huge numbers of cases, but that isn't all.
I found myself thinking about this. NYC has a Democratic mayor (who's viewed as being especially progressive) and a Democratic City Council. New York State has a Democratic governor and a large Democratic majority in one house of the state legislature. Granted, the GOP has a small majority in the other house of the legislature.
I asked myself, how much have the tenants had to pay in lawyers fees and other legal expenses over the course of this case? How much have they had to spend on other items (electric heaters and higher electric bills, etc.)? What other financial losses have they experienced (one tenant was suspended from her job after taking time off for a 1-year-old daughter with repeated colds). Will taking off from work for court appearances threaten other tenants' jobs? How long will they be suffering with inadequate housing? How long will they be living in limbo wondering how many more winters they will have to endure without action against the landlord?
Disclaimer: I'm not telling anyone to do the following. Sooner or later, that baby girl is going to die of pneumonia or some other tenant is going to be pushed beyond endurance. Somebody's going to hire a hitman. It'll be cheaper than all the expenses the tenants have piling up now. It'll clear things up a lot quicker (maybe years sooner) than housing court. Maybe the rest of the tenants will end up better off. Of course, New York taxpayers will end up spending a huge amount of money prosecuting that one tenant, and even more money for that tenant's room and board in prison. (Perhaps, the jail cell will be better heated than his apartment?)
The question is: What are those Democratic elected officials doing to give tenants a better alternative than a hitman? What are they doing to save taxpayers all that money? What are they doing to maintain a fair rule of law, rather than legally crushing anyone who gives up on an unfair legal system?
Coincidentally, in the last few months I heard a news report saying Brooklyn had become rated as the nation's "least affordable" housing market. It's not that NYC landlords as a whole are doing poorly. It's not that anyone is forcing businesspeople to become landlords in buildings that don't make as much profit as they'd like. Oddly enough, there are currently radio ads by the association of landlords with rent-regulated apartments. The ads try to tell us the reason rents are so high is because the government regulates their rent increases. I find myself talking back to the radio, "Let me see if I got this straight. What you're telling me is, if the government lets you raise rents as high as you want, what you'll do is lower rents?"
Landlords are using twisted logic, lawyers, lobbyists and anything else they can to make the least affordable housing in the nation even less affordable. What are all those Democrats doing?