Chair Cabán on evictions in supportive housing

So I want to talk a little bit about evictions in the supportive housing space.

You guys oversee thousands of these units.

Can you estimate the number of eviction cases brought against supportive housing tenants in DOHMH-funded units every year?

So let me just say a few words at the top there, and that is that we're focused in this agency on helping to address the challenge of eviction in this city and making sure that any individual who

is facing an eviction has the right to counsel, as we are a right to counsel city, as we passed in 2017.

We need more money for that, too.

That's right.

Yeah.

So we remain committed to the work of managing this process in a fair way and in a comprehensive way.

So let me hand it to Jamie to share a little bit more.

I think we're committed to limiting, getting as close to zero as possible for evictions from supportive housing.

The purpose is to house people, and that's our goal.

We track the discharges that are related to evictions.

We've always tracked that number.

It's very low.

There were 55 last fiscal year out of, you know, at that time, 12,800 units at the end of last fiscal year.

So we'll keep an eye on that.

We issued some housing stability and eviction prevention guidance in April of this year, and a part of that was adding some new data elements to our data system to track the filing of cases, which is, I think, what you asked about, which we didn't have a data point about that.

So we've been training providers on that since April, and the data collection will be

In July for the next.

And noted that you're ramping up sort of the data collection.

Would you, so there's the 55 units, you know, estimating per year.

Do you have any numbers on how many of, like, say that 55 have been non-payments and how many have been holdovers, for example?

Yeah, so that's a, we don't have that now.

We will have that.

That is one of the pieces of information we're collecting.

Heard, understood.

This is a process question.

So when you find out that a supportive housing tenant is being evicted on a non-payment case, what's the agency response?

What are the steps?

Yeah, so I think this is outlined in our eviction prevention guidance, right, which is to service providers around the steps we expect them to take to help tenants to understand is this about a benefit issue, a budgeting issue, a behavioral health issue,

what are the matters.

And so our service providers are contracted to help tenants meet their responsibilities and assert their rights as tenants.

So it depends on the individual situation and what's driving the arrears.

Okay.

So would it be correct to say just like DOHMH's specific role in terms of the guidance is you help put it together and inform kind of what went into the guidance.

Obviously, you have, you know, housing lawyers and things also contributing to the guidance.

Does that sound?

More or less accurate.

So our guidance is to the service providers.

We're not, there's housing court and we're not.

Yeah, but I mean, obviously the guidance includes housing, the basic housing and tenant law in it.

And I'm just wondering if like, what's DOHMH's contribution to the guidance?

Is that about sort of the service provisions and what can help somebody get back on track if they're in arrears?

Like what's the involvement?

So we wrote the guidance.

It's our guidance.

It's 100% us and the guidance.

Great.

I could have asked that a lot more simply.

I apologize.

We've been doing a lot of these hearings, but thank you.

Thank you for bearing with me.