As the proud gang of the #UnusuallyMotivated movement, we, here at Miletti Law®, are committed to creating trustworthy & distinctive content that keeps you, our unusually motivated® readers, informed and educated about diverse legal and non-legal issues that affect you or your businesses. As usual, our content is featured as videos that are posted on our YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtvUryqkkMAJLwrLu2BBt6w and blogs that are published on our website WWW.MILETTILAW.COM. We highly encourage you to subscribe to the channel and sign up for the Newsletter on the website to experience, firsthand, the unusually motivating effect of the knowledge and legal counsel bombs we drop.

While we are the authoritative force in Employment and Labor Law today, we also endeavor to shed light on a myriad of other issues that affect residents in New York and in other states as well. An example of such issues is eviction. Accordingly, in our video titled “The Miletti Law Quick Guide To Residential Evictions In Florida” and posted on August 16, 2021, we provided you with a hands-on guide into understanding evictions in the state of Florida and the moratorium on the same. By the time we created the video, the moratorium of evictions in Florida had already expired.

While this is not the matter of the day, we had predicted the likelihood that New York’s moratorium on evictions would be extended indefinitely because property owners here are powerless. We attributed this to the fact that Ron DeSantis of Florida is more of a mutinous governor as compared to the disgraced Cuomo, who by then was to be replaced by Kathy Hochul. However, your views on the same depends on which side you are, either as a tenant or landlord.

And speaking of the devil, Kathy Hochul, the new New York’s governor recently signed into law a new moratorium on COVID-related commercial and residential evictions for New York State, which will be effective until January 15, 2022. Initially, the court rejected the original moratorium on evictions stating that it was unconstitutional. Therefore, the city devised a system where although they cannot just categorically block your eviction process, they can create barriers and delay the same. While we are not interested with the politics behind eviction moratoriums, we would like to provide you with a hands-on guide into this new system, the different barriers and the mechanism behind them, and how they affect you as a tenant or landlord in New York.

For starters, landlords are supposed to provide you with some form of notice if they want to evict you, particularly for commercial or residential tenants. However, as one of the barriers, tenants can fill in a COVID-hardship related document called the “tenant hardship form” and send it to their landlords. This form is accessible online. Once they receive this form, the moratorium says that landlords can no longer oppose and evict you. However, this directive is until January 15, 2021. Unfortunately, it is highly likely that the moratorium will be extended again and there is nothing you can do about it!

However, if the landlord is convinced that the tenant is lying about their business/money having been impacted by the COVID-19 hardship or that they or a member of their family suffered from COVID-19, then they could push back and get a hearing in court.

Apparently, this is not the only barrier they created into the new system. As the governor urged during the signing of the moratorium, New York residents who continue to struggle with paying their rent should seek COVID hardship assistance by applying for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP). The city has allocated funds to this effect and more than $1.2 billion in funding has either been distributed or obligated through the program as of August 31, 2021. Currently, thousands of landlords are said to have received millions of dollars in direct payments and, therefore, the ERAP program is a better option for them. One interesting aspects about this program is that applicants to this assistance enjoy automatic protection from evictions if they qualify for assistance or receive a year of eviction protections while their application is pending.

If you are a New Yorker struggling with rent, you will be evicted if you do nothing. Generally, the city has what they call summary proceedings and, assuming that there will be no issues with the backlog, you would get a hearing as soon as possible. However, right now, courts are extremely flood such that August hearings are being pushed to be heard months later. Currently, we have such a hearing from September that has been rescheduled for January. As such, we do not expect summer proceedings to move as promptly as expected.

Another crucial thing to note is that, under the new moratorium, landlords cannot use self-help to evict you. The rule is that if it is reasonably expected that you are going to have some kind of pushback, you can just changing locks or lock someone’s mailbox, even when it concerns a commercial tenant. However, this does not mean that, as a landlord, you cannot push for a hearing if you want to.

We invite you to review the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjb__0rYhr4

Stay tuned for any updates because New York laws keep changing. In the meantime, strive to be #UnusuallyMotivated. In the interim, please reach out to us with questions and/or comments at the Contact Us page!

Always rising above the bar,

Isaac T.,

Legal Writer & Author.