Legal News

The Eviction Moratorium ? A Myth That Takes on the Force of Law

By Dan Slater

It’s not all doom and gloom this holiday season. Today, reports the Times, the people, known as marshals, who evict New Yorkers from their apartments, will take a two-week break. The tradition is so informal, notes the NYT, that the exact dates shift every year and judges and lawyers often learn of them by word of mouth. “It’s one of those myths that take on the force of law,”� said Jaya K. Madhavan, supervising judge of Bronx Housing Court.

Housing lawyers have taken to calling the break an “eviction moratorium,”� and some said they thought it existed to provide holiday relief to the poor. Some tenant advocates said they thought the hiatus was created not to benefit tenants but to help marshals and landlords avoid the negative publicity of holiday-season evictions and becoming “the Grinch who evicted Christmas,”� as Louise Seeley, the executive director of the nonprofit City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, put it.

Eviction holidays are apparently pretty controversial and have been scratched in other cities. In Milwaukee, there used to be an informal eviction moratorium, but county judges abandoned it in 1991 after a local landlord and the ACLU complained that the practice promoted the religious celebration of Christmas. And in Detroit in the mid-1980s, a landlord sued state court judges over an 18-day holiday moratorium, alleging that it violated the separation of church and state and his constitutional rights.

“Owners are basically absorbing what I would call a social cost,” Eugene Reisman, a lawyer who represents property owners, told the Times. “They’re paying the cost of keeping a tenant who’s not paying rent in possession of an apartment.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 22, 2008 (boomark / email).