Month: March 2020

Halt Evictions in New York State During Covid-19

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New York can and should press pause on all eviction proceedings until Governor Cuomo’s Covid-19 state of emergency is lifted. It is unjust and counterproductive to make anyone defend themselves against the threat of homelessness due to a public health crisis that is outside of their control. In the longer term, the legislature should pass State Senators Brad Hoylman’s and Brian Kavanagh’s bill that would automatically stay all eviction proceedings during future emergency declarations. 

People who face eviction are often the most vulnerable to the very threats that Covid-19 poses. Go to Bronx Housing Court, where I have direct experience, on any day of the week and you will see people who are elderly, disabled, or infirm huddled in and around the courtrooms waiting for their case numbers to be called. These are precisely the groups that Governor Cuomo’s State of Emergency is meant to help protect.

Many tenants end up in housing court due to a short term drop in their income; for example, a tenant’s child gets sick so the tenant has to take unpaid time off of driving for Uber to care for his kid and falls behind on rent. The lack of paid sick leave for contractors in the gig-economy is an important contributor to evictions throughout the state. Add to this reality Mayor De Blasio’s recommendation that city residents avoid using the subway, which is many tenants’ only available mode of transportation to and from court, and you get a situation in which it is unreasonable to expect tenants to defend against and comply with eviction orders while the State of Emergency is in effect. 

Pausing all eviction proceedings would have the added benefit of slowing the spread of Covid-19. New York Housing Court is a petrie dish in which the disease can spread. The environment breeds stress and, as mentioned, brings many immunocompromised people into contact with tenant lawyers, landlord lawyers, judges, other tenants, and officers of the court. Because workers in America do not have guaranteed child care or health care, when a tenant’s child gets sick the tenant is often forced to bring their untreated kid with them to court. This could lead to a nightmare scenario in which everyone involved in New York’s courts is exposed to the virus and vulnerable tenants, lawyers, judges, and officers die as a result.

One group that is able to avoid exposure in housing court is the very group responsible for bringing the eviction actions in the first place: landlords. Because landlords often hide behind corporate entities, those who are represented by lawyers almost never show up to housing court. Expecting tenants who are struggling with Covid-19 and unemployment to defend themselves against evictions in court while their landlords can stay at home is unfair.

Some small landlords are likely to struggle financially during this outbreak too. This is not a reason to process evictions during the State of Emergency. A just policy would instead be for the legislature to set aside emergency rent assistance for tenants whose livelihoods have been impacted by the spread of Covid-19 while the State pauses eviction proceedings. The state could go further and halt all mortgage payments, the way Italy did, which would ease pressure on smalltime landlords and their tenants.


New York City already has a self-professed homelessness crisis. The State should stay eviction proceedings until the State of Emergency is lifted so that the Covid-19 crisis doesn’t make it worse.

Burying the BQE Won’t Hide Its Problems

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New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson’s proposal to bury the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway would solve the BQE eyesore at the expense of deepening car culture’s stranglehold on New York City. Replacing the BQE with parks, freight and passenger trains is a more sensible approach.

The New York Times reported that a new study backed by Council Speaker Corey Johnson recommends replacing the BQE with a car tunnel. Some of the article’s sources wonder how NYC will pay for this $11B project. The answer sits in the bumper-to-bumper traffic all around us. The BQE’s drivers should pay to modernize it — if New York won’t give free rides on the subway then neither can it afford to on the BQE. A more apt question than how we will pay for BQE maintenance is: why replace the BQE at all?

The BQE, whether it’s above or underground, adds massive unfunded healthcare and quality of life expenses that likely dwarf the estimated $11B project cost. Removing cars from the BQE would avoid thousands of future BQE-caused premature deaths from pollution, traffic violence, and childhood asthma. Replacing the BQE with mass transit would restitch the neighborhoods that the BQE ripped apart and give Brooklyn a multi-generational economic boost that an underground freeway can’t deliver. 

No immutable law forces us to rebuild car right-of-ways where a dilapidated ill-conceived Robert Moses totem stands. City after city has removed freeways like the BQE without causing spikes in traffic elsewhere. We could shut down the BQE to cars and lay tracks for a Brooklyn-Queens electric rail that would actually serve the pedestrian supermajority of NYC. Combining electric rail with the parks proposed in Comptroller Scott Stringer’s plan would put NYC on the vanguard of waterfront urban development. Would this be expensive? Absolutely. It would not, however, cost as much as it does to give free waterfront NYC real estate to single-occupancy vehicles. Asking permission from the driving minority to reclaim the city’s roads benefits no one and leaves us playing catch-up with the developed world.

Opponents of transit-oriented development claim that trucks need to be able to deliver goods. But developed cities require most large trucks to leave their cargo at the edge of the city center where smaller, more efficient delivery bicycles, trains, and EVs can then pick up and distribute cargo. Any plan for the BQE teardown should build on the growth of NYC bicycle and electric delivery and contemplate a new era of clean, last-leg delivery in NYC. A tunnel would entrench a system in which oversized diesel trucks are prioritized and sacrosanct. The $11B slated for this project could go a long way towards an intra-city freight train network to replace the less efficient BQE.

Transit-first proposals reduce traffic for drivers and increase the quality of life for the rest of us. Council Speaker Johnson should dream bigger than his current proposal and support a car-free BQE filled with electric trains, not car lanes.