By Carlos Rojas
They say home is where the heart is. Jersey City is home to those who opposed Airbnb. He must now prepare for the coming housing crisis.
Jersey City currently has some of the most affordable units available in the area. However, its most vulnerable residents are missing something: a right to a lawyer for tenants. New York City was the first city to enact a right to counsel a few years ago. What a right to counsel does is it gives tenants the right to counsel during Housing Court proceedings.
A right to an attorney has been adopted in Newark, Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Boulder, Louisville, Denver, Minneapolis, Kansas City, New Orleans, the states of Connecticut, Washington and Maryland, and yet Jersey City does not. t have such a right.
According to Legal Aid Society, in New York, 84% of tenants who went to housing court with the proposed lawyer were able to avoid eviction. The right to counsel also avoids the situations that accompany evictions. This can include, of course, homelessness, but also problems with employment, health care and finding future accommodation with a case for eviction. They say that when the rent increases by $100, the eviction rate increases by 9%. Jersey City – if it hasn’t already – soon will be.
Black tenants are twice as likely to be evicted as white tenants, according to theroot.com. In Hudson County, 46% of homeless people are Black/African American and there were approximately 860 reported homeless people circa 2019. The number has certainly increased with COVID-19, the end of the eviction moratorium and with rising inflation, household costs and a lack of well-paying union jobs.
The right to an attorney is a moral imperative for Jersey City, and a smart imperative to save the city money in the long run. Philadelphia found that the $3.5 million invested in ensuring the right to an attorney would yield $45 million in savings in other areas.
It is also important that the services are appropriated not by paying the expenses to taxpayers, but specifically to landlords with funding like rental registration fees.
Cities have found that when a right to counsel is on the books, evictions go down. Landlords are less likely to evict when they know their tenants will be represented.
It’s about fairness and changing power dynamics in Jersey City. This city owes its most vulnerable tenants to do all they can to protect them from soaring housing prices. A right to counsel would be very helpful for low-income people and people of color, especially Black/African Americans who have been homeless for so long.
Housing should not be a commodity to be traded and speculated on, but a basic human right. The right to a lawyer puts us in the right direction.
Carlos Rojas is a resident of Jersey City.
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