Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at another sign that New York City is moving back to its prepandemic routines: Housing courts are hearing eviction cases again. We’ll also look at book publishing and its role in the city’s economy.
The wheels of justice may turn slowly, as the often-quoted line says, but they are turning again in housing courts in New York City.
The city’s housing courts used to handle more eviction cases than similar tribunals in other cities. The pandemic changed things: New York State imposed a moratorium on evictions. Lawmakers extended it again and again, long after other state and federal eviction protections ended.
The New York moratorium finally expired in mid-January, and tenants have been thrown out of their homes in more than 500 cases since February, according to city data. My colleague Mihir Zaveri says that was about double the number from the preceding 20 months combined, going back to mid-2020, when coronavirus cases in New York were subsiding after the devastating first wave.
[After a Two-Year Dip, Evictions Accelerate in New York]
The number of eviction cases is still below prepandemic levels. But after the pandemic pushed thousands of people to the brink of losing their homes, the uptick is raising questions about how well the housing system can head off a wider crisis of dislocation — and not just because rents are rising again. Tenants’ advocates say a crucial new protection, a free lawyer for any low-income tenant summoned to housing court, has already reached a breaking point.
Several nonprofits tapped by the city to represent tenants are coping with staffing shortages and say they cannot meet the need. Legal Services N.Y.C. has struggled to hire new lawyers to fill vacancies caused by resignations in a tight job market. “Right now we’re trying really hard to grab every single May law graduate who doesn’t have a job,” said Raun J. Rasmussen, the group’s executive director.
Legal Services and the Legal Aid Society, another nonprofit, have called on the courts to slow the scheduling and pace of cases moving through the system. But Lucian Chalfen, a spokesman for the courts, said last week that a slowdown would “accomplish nothing,” because new cases would continue to pile up.
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New York, capital of the book business
Book publishing is very much a New York business. All the biggest publishers are based here, along with many of the smaller ones — 224 in all, according to Labor Department data cited by James Parrott of the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs.
Some 32,000 people work in the publishing industry in New York City, according to data from the Labor Department — a fraction of the number working in finance or tech. Some in the industry moved away during the pandemic, but most of the editors and agents are still here.
How important is publishing to the city’s economy? Parrott told me by email that “as an industry, book publishing has far greater significance for the N.Y.C. economy than how many people it directly employs or what their total pay is.” He also said that book publishing “is inseparable from the city’s standing as an international cultural capital and the tremendous activity associated with that.”
So New York City is still where most book business is done. But once books are written, edited, printed and bound, they have to be sold. I asked my colleague Elizabeth A. Harris about a bookseller that has a unique place in the publishing ecosystem but has closed several stores in New York City in the last decade — Barnes & Noble.
Barnes & Noble was once a villain to publishers, but now the publishing industry seems to be on its side. What happened?
In Housing Court, Tenants Are Being Evicted Again