In Housing Court, the Line for a Lawyer Starts Before the Doors Open

By 8:40 on a Tuesday morning, the line outside Brooklyn Housing Court at 141 Livingston Street already stretches past the metal detectors and halfway toward Boerum Place. Tenants clutch plastic folders of rent receipts and notices from the marshal. By the 9:30 calendar call, the judge in one resolution part has 214 names on the list and about 40 minutes to get through them.

The volume tells the story. Landlords filed an average of 11,800 new eviction cases a month across the five boroughs during the first half of 2026, putting the city on pace to top 140,000 filings this year for the first time since 2019, when roughly 145,000 cases hit the courts. The Bronx courthouse at 1118 Grand Concourse remains the busiest per capita, while the Queens court at 89-17 Sutphin Boulevard has added evening calendar sessions twice a week to absorb the overflow.

New York's 2017 right-to-counsel law guarantees an attorney to any tenant facing eviction who qualifies by income, and the city has since expanded eligibility. On paper, the program is a national model. In practice, legal services providers turned away an estimated 28,000 households last year because they lacked the staff to take the cases. Court data reviewed by advocates show roughly six in ten tenants now appearing without a lawyer, up from about four in ten three years ago.

The math is unforgiving. Providers say they need about 950 staff attorneys to meet demand and currently field closer to 640. Starting pay for a housing attorney at a nonprofit hovers near $76,000, caseloads regularly exceed 80 active files, and annual attrition runs about one lawyer in four. A $38 million state funding bump approved earlier this year has helped, but hiring and training a new housing attorney takes the better part of a year.

The marshal's office knows my name by now. I still don't have a lawyer.

'This is my fourth time taking the day off work,' said Doreen Alston, 61, a retired school lunch aide from Canarsie who is fighting a nonpayment case over $6,200 her landlord says she owes. 'The marshal's office knows my name by now. I still don't have a lawyer. They told me to come back in September and maybe somebody will be free.'

Landlords paint their own strained picture. Attorneys for small property owners say the average arrears in their cases now run about 14 months, and they blame rising insurance premiums, fuel costs, and repair bills for pushing owners to file. Most cases still end the same way they always have: not with a trial, but with a hallway stipulation in which a tenant agrees to a payment schedule and a landlord agrees to hold off the marshal. The difference is that the hallways are more crowded, and only one side usually has counsel drafting the paperwork.

The court system has reassigned 12 additional judges to housing parts and expanded a mediation pilot, but the median case still drags on for 11 months and five appearances before resolution. City marshals executed about 5,800 lockouts in the first half of 2026, a 19 percent increase over the same period two years ago, though still below pre-pandemic levels.

Council members are weighing a $41 million supplemental appropriation for legal providers when the fall session begins, and providers say the money cannot move fast enough. Alston's next court date is September 2. She plans to arrive at 8 a.m., before the line turns the corner.