https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...e-housing.html

I think they should look into every industry to make sure bad actors dont take advantage (and that's selling beer and ciggs to young teens and etc) but i have community leaders (who chat with a lot from back home) telling me the BIGGEST ISSUE nowFACING NYC is the low to middle income people left dead-broke after paying rent (many cant afford that!)... I think NYC for the first time is going to be left with tens thousands of people NOT being able to pay rent. so lets not loss focus on the real issues the voters had in mind when electing leaders to be their true saviors.

But an investigation by The New York Times illustrates how the Orbach Group and other mega-landlords exploit a broken and overburdened system. In one of the busiest courts in the nation, errors often go uncaught and dubious allegations go unquestioned. Lawsuits are easy to file but onerous to fight. Landlords have lawyers. Tenants usually don’t, despite a new law that aims to provide free counsel to low-income New Yorkers.

Landlords rely on what amounts to an eviction machine. A cadre of lawyers handles tens of thousands of cases a year, making money off volume and sometimes manipulating gaps in enforcement to bring questionable cases. Punishable conduct is rarely punished.

Process servers, required to notify tenants that they are being sued, sometimes violate the law. Among tenants whom servers had supposedly talked to in person, The Times found several who were abroad at the time. One had been dead for years.

Judges sometimes unwittingly ordered the eviction of tenants who had no idea they had been sued.

“When they sent the marshal, they never gave us no notice,” said Zanden Alzanden, a Yemeni immigrant who was evicted from his home in the historic Dunbar Apartments in Harlem when he was in the hospital in January 2017. “Nothing on door, ever. Only that day, the marshal coming in, my son and an old guy sitting in there: ‘Boom boom, get the hell out of here.’”