Advocates demand overhaul of struggling Right to Counsel program
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The City Council’s Committee on Oversight and Investigation heard testimony from attorneys, housing advocates, tenants and judges on the current hardships the city’s Right to Counsel program currently faces on Thursday, Oct. 30. Photo Gerardo Romo / NYC Council Media Unit
By Noah Powelson
New York’s Right to Counsel program saw some improvement in 2025 after struggling for years, but is still performing well below expectations as incoming federal cuts spread anxiety about the program’s future.
Attorneys, housing advocates, tenants and judges testified before the City Council’s Committee on Oversight and Investigation on Thursday, calling on elected officials to fully fund the city’s Right to Counsel program. The committee meeting was organized partly in response to a recent report from the Independent Budget Office that found that more than half of eligible households are not currently receiving representation in Housing Court despite the existence of the Right to Counsel program.
The RTC program, which partners with legal aid organizations to provide free legal representation for tenants facing evictions, saw its lowest record of eligible persons served in 2024. A recent report from the city’s Independent Budget Office said that just 34 percent of eligible New Yorkers are receiving RTC services, largely due to structural issues and lack of funding.
New York City Administrative Judge Shahabuddeen A. Ally was one of the prominent voices calling for further RTC investment at the City Council meeting, saying the city’s Housing Courts need more attention and assistance.
“As a court system, we are committed to seeing the Universal Access to Counsel program and the city’s broader eviction prevention efforts to succeed,” Ally said. “For that to happen, these programs must be supported and fully funded to meet the scale and urgency of the need.”
In 2024, the city’s Housing Courts saw more than 131,000 new residential landlord-tenant filings, 130,000 motions and more than 100,000 orders to show causes. Each Housing Court judge oversees an average of 2,400 cases per year.
Ally said the city had hired five new judges for Housing Court this year; and noted that while RTC representation rates are low, new case filings are at a historic low.
The Office of Court Administration had successfully acquired large budget increases from the state government for several years in a row, and while a properly funded court system is necessary to ensure housing disputes are addressed fairly, Ally said programs like RTC are equally as vital.
“Housing Court is no longer the same institution it once was, in large part due the Universal to Access program,” Ally said. “The complexity of housing law, the scale of our dockets and the stake to our litigants demand continuous innovation and partnership.”
Despite the progress, visible gaps remain apparent as legal service providers struggle to hire staff and acquire resources needed to address the skyrocketing demand for housing representation.
A coalition of legal aid organizations, including The Legal Aid Society, Bronx Defenders, CAMBA Legal Services, Queens Defenders, BronxWorks and others called on the city for further support of the RTC program and to change their contract terms.
The coalition demanded the city increase funding for RTC, raise the case rate to $7,500 per case and end the 10 percent contract penalty. The coalition argued the current contract terms ends up delaying payments for work already done, and makes budgeting for the future difficult as they seek to hire new staff to meet demands.
“At a moment when the eviction crisis has continued unabated, the city is severely under-funding a program that is objectively successful in both moral and economic terms,” the providers said in a joint statement. “Every eviction prevented creates huge savings to the City by avoiding shelter costs and protects the most vulnerable New Yorkers.”
Providers said the current contract structure — which pays less than 60 percent of the actual cost of eviction defense — forces non-profit legal organizations to subsidize the program out of pocket and threatens their long-term viability.
First established in 2017, the RTC program aims to provide all New Yorkers facing eviction with free legal counsel, an oftentimes crucial factor in determining if a tenant will win their case. The program saw early success and produced results, but the rapid expansion of program eligibility without sufficient funding and the shifting Housing Court regulations threw the program into disarray.
In 2019, the state passed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which established a litany of new tenant protections that caused many eviction cases to progress through the courts at a much slower pace. HSPA, among many reforms, required landlords to give tenants longer notices ahead of hearings and increased the amount of time tenants have to answer legal filings and lengthened the time permitted for adjournments.
While the reforms allowed many tenants to stay in their homes longer, it also had the side effect of increasing the burden on legal aid organizations who are becoming increasingly overwhelmed with longer cases without extra pay.
Around 97 percent of general eviction cases were resolved within a year prior to the pandemic. In 2023, only 87 percent of eviction cases were resolved in a year.
In September of this year, the city’s Independent Budget Office released a report detailing how a lack of funding and systemic changes to eviction law has left the program unable to keep up with demand.
Eligibility for representation in Housing Court under RTC more than doubled from 2022 through 2024, roughly a 110 percent increase. But in that same time, government funding for RTC only grew by roughly 33 percent.
In 2022, 50 percent of tenants in Housing Court had representation. In 2024, that number dropped to just 35 percent leaving a vast majority of New Yorkers eligible for RTC services without a lawyer.
In response to the growing concerns around RTC, Administrator Scott French at the Human Resources Administration told the committee panel on Thursday that he remains optimistic in the future of the program.
The RTC program saw the highest overall number of clients receiving full legal representation for their cases during 2025, as opposed to brief legal assistance like consultations or simple advice. Funding for tenant services also increased significantly from $165 million in 2024 to $228 million in 2025.
During 2025, French said the Office of Civil Justice-funded organizations provided legal assistance to roughly 110,000 New Yorkers in Fiscal Year 2025, across approximately 51,000 households in the city.
“Universal access, by force of larger events, has had to take account of dynamic circumstances and evolve over time,” French said. “We aim to continue to bring a problem solving ethos as we guide universal access through the years ahead.”
