As housing advocates are pushing for tenant protections in the state budget, data published by the Cornell University ILR School Buffalo Co-Lab shows that the Bronx had the second-highest eviction filing rate in the state in 2022.
Across the borough, 9.5% of renter-occupied households faced eviction filings last year, a rate higher than every county in the state other than Rensselaer County in the Capital Region, which saw 10.7%.
Julie Colon, the lead housing organizer at the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, who works with tenants facing the threat of eviction, told the Bronx Times that she isn’t surprised by the data, though the pandemic and its after-effects have uncovered some of the longstanding issues in the borough.
“The Bronx has always been the epicenter of this,” she said. “ … I’m not personally surprised by it because I’ve been here all my life, I’ve always seen it, I’ve always known it, but other people are now getting to see it.”
The Cornell data shows that there has been a boroughwide jump of 5.9 percentage points for eviction filings from 2021 to 2022, in light of the state’s COVID-19 eviction moratorium expiring in January 2022. But the rate in 2022 is still 5.8 percentage points lower than before the pandemic, with 15.3% of Bronx rental units facing eviction filings in 2019.
The university’s interactive website, which went live last Thursday, reveals tenant struggles on a district-by-district basis.
In 2022, six out of 11 Bronx state Assembly districts ranked in the top 10 — out of 150 districts statewide — for the highest eviction filing rates.
When comparing the 63 Senate districts across the state, two out of the Bronx’s five made the top 10, ranking first and second.
State Sen. Gustavo Rivera told the Bronx Times that while the eviction filing rate of 11.2% in his district is “startling,” the statewide data doesn’t show a full picture of how New Yorkers are being displaced.
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