Innocent Tenant Wrongly Evicted by City Sues to Challenge Unconstitutional “Public Nuisance” Procedures

April 12, 2016, QUEENS, NY—Legal Services NYC’s Queens program has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the City’s controversial “public nuisance” procedures which permit the eviction of innocent tenants without any prior notice or opportunity to be heard before their apartment doors are sealed by the police (Photo: The April 12th NY Daily News exclusive).

Press coverage: NY Daily News, Gothamist, Gawker, Univision

Plaintiff Austria Bueno, her husband, and their two children had been peacefully residing in their NYCHA apartment for nearly five months when the police sealed their apartment door based on the illegal activity of previous tenants who had vacated the apartment months before Ms. Bueno and her family moved in. Using the provisions of the public nuisance law—a decades-old law that was created to close strip clubs and sex shops in Times Square—the City had obtained an order from a Queens County judge without giving Ms. Bueno any notice or opportunity to appear in court and explain the City’s error. Relying on the City’s misleading papers, the judge issued the sealing order under the assumption that the illegal activity that had occurred ten months earlier was still ongoing.

“I don’t understand how the City could evict me before I had a chance to talk to a judge,” said Ms. Bueno. “My family and I did nothing wrong, but we were locked out of our apartment for five days, and I lost two days of work. How can this be legal?”

Robert Sanderman, Ms. Bueno’s attorney at Queens Legal Services, said that City law allowing tenants to be evicted without any of the judicial protections normally associated with eviction proceedings constitutes a violation of the Constitution’s due process clause. “Just based on the word of the NYPD, tenants are being sealed out of their apartments with no prior hearings,” he said. “To make matters worse, the City fails to investigate whether criminal activity is actually continuing at the time it runs to court for the emergency eviction orders.”

Public Advocate Letitia James expressed deep concerns about the legality of the City’s procedures. “The circumstances cited in this case fly in the face of assurances made to me by the Corp. Counsel,” she said. “It is disgraceful that the City is displacing people from their homes without due process, and as Public Advocate I will fight against this injustice.”

Concerns about the City’s eviction practices have been the subject of numerous recent articles in the media, including an extensive investigative report produced jointly by the Daily News and ProPublica in February. Although the City initially indicated that it would be re-examining its practices, a review of recent court filings suggests that the misleading and negligent practices have continued unabated. Legal Services NYC is seeking an order from the federal court to put an end to the City’s unconstitutional procedures.

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Contact: Kate Whalen, 646-442-3654, kwhalen (at) legalservicesnyc.org