De Blasio: City To Invest $12.3 Million To Prevent Evictions

De Blasio said the city will invest $12.3 million to provide free lawyers for tenants who are in housing court fighting illegal evictions. The city now spends about $34 million per year on legal assistance for residents at risk of being homeless.

In an ad to run in the Daily News and other publications Monday, the Transport Workers Union Local 100 depicts de Blasio riding a relic of old New York – a tagged-up train – with the caption, “Where are you taking us?” About 32,700 households will be helped annually. “We see how, unfortunately, so many of our fellow New Yorkers are close to the edge economically”. He’s one of dozens of people staying in a long-term homeless shelter at 60 Clarkson Avenue in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, a fast-gentrifying part of Brooklyn.

More than 58,000 people are sleeping in city shelters each night, according to the nonprofit Coalition for the Homeless.

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.

The initiative is an effort to “stop homelessness before it starts” by protecting families from “unscrupulous landlords” and keeping them in their rent-regulated apartments, said Mayor Bill de Blasio during a press conference at City Hall.

“However, giving money to legal service providers is treating the symptom rather than the cause of the problem”.

In the meantime, people facing eviction from the affordable housing they now have at least have the prospect of having better legal representation to keep them there.