Margarita Ortiz lives in a 7-by-10-foot, $375-a-month studio in a single-room occupancy brownstone in Washington Heights. Since she moved into 560 West 184th Street last May, she has gone for months without heat or hot water. Mice crawl across her stove. Her sink leaks nonstop, and the narrow communal hallway is strewn with garbage bags.

There's no tenant organization in the building. The other residents are too scared, Ortiz says. Mostly immigrants from the Dominican Republic, they're frightened of being deported and worried about angering the building's drug dealers with a united front. But without a tenant association to back her up, Ortiz hasn't brought her landlord to court for the 250 building code violations against the SRO.

City Limits Magazine


April 1999:
Feeding Frenzy

Her landlord's attorney says that the owners are working to correct the violations, but Ortiz says the problems have gone unchanged for the nine months she's lived there. "It's not fair," she says. "He's supposed to fix all the problems that are inside the apartment."

Ortiz is in Housing Court, though--as a defendant, facing eviction for not paying her rent for her dirty and dangerous apartment. It's the only way she can see to get her landlord in front of a judge.

In past years, Ortiz could have turned to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development's legal office. There, one of a squad of lawyers with the sole job of enforcing the housing code could have put the weight of New York City behind her fight to get her leaks fixed and her heat turned back on.

But today, that's no option. Severe cutbacks have crippled the Housing Litigation Bureau (HLB). Just four years ago, the bureau had 46 attorneys; now, according to their union, only 18 are taking cases.

Though cutbacks are a familiar theme in the Giuliani era, the city's housing department has suffered some of the harshest. And the stakes here are particularly high. The city's entire mechanism for enforcing building laws runs through Housing Court. It's up to these city lawyers to go after the city's repeat scofflaws--the incorrigible slumlords who repeatedly run buildings into the ground and fleece the most vulnerable tenants. Quietly, the Giuliani administration has devastated this safety system.

The cutbacks among building inspectors--from 332 at the beginning of the decade to 224 today--are well documented. But few outside Housing Court have noticed the demise of the litigation bureau, which acts as the legal muscle behind the inspectors. It's as if the police had no prosecutors to back them up.

"We've seen fewer and fewer cases litigated by [the Housing Litigation Bureau]," says Angelita Anderson of the nonprofit City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court. Judge Jerald Klein, who has served in Manhattan's Housing Court since 1987, agrees. "There is absolutely an appreciable and noticeable decrease in staff, and there is a substantial reduction in the amount of activity the HLB does," he says.

The numbers back them up. In 1990, 12,786 code-related cases were heard in Housing Court, according to the Mayor's Management Report. In 1993, the mayor's office broadened its calculations to include in that number every case opened. Even with that more generous measure, the number of code violation cases dropped to 9,925 by 1998--a 22 percent decline.

And that doesn't tell the full story. Of those cases, more than 80 percent were filed by tenants. In practice, it's now up to tenants to try to enforce the city's laws--to bring offending landlords to court and try to ensure that judges' orders get carried out. It's no surprise that they don't have much success. Many withhold rent instead, putting themselves on the verge of eviction.