Mayor de Blasio today announced that he will almost double his spending on legal assistance for tenants facing eviction, with an emphasis on New Yorkers living in the city’s 15 most rapidly-gentrifying neighborhoods-Crown Heights, Bushwick, and Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn; Jamaica in Queens; and Tremont in the Bronx, among others.
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The city hopes this will help alleviate the problem by reducing the number of people that are forced from their homes, reports the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.).
The legal programs will cost more than $61 million annually by 2017.
In a statement, the mayor’s office says the city has funded three quarters of the MTA’s operating budget, and put in more than twice as much capital funding as the state.
“If we had an actual legal team”, said long-term shelter resident Cancel about his fellow residents’ ongoing status of not knowing how long they can stay in their building, “this might be easier for us and everybody else”.
It also says the mayor is taking the city “back to the bad old days” of graffiti-covered subway trains and broken down buses. “Whether they’re at risk of” losing their homes, he said, or “heaven forbid”, they’re already homeless.
The mayor said Monday that City Hall has launched the NYC Retrofit Accelerator.
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“Instead of recruiting surrogates to make false attacks, the state must do its job and work with the city on a fair and responsible framework to move forward”, de Blasio spokeswoman Amy Spitalnick said. Whether or not Mayor de Blasio can secure the state funding needed to build more affordable housing remains an open question.
