Welcome to our first-ever JustFix.nyc blog post series! We’ve been hard at work for the past three years building technology for housing justice. In the process, we’ve served thousands of tenants in New York in documenting their repair issues and building legal cases against the city’s worst landlords.
Our goals for this blog are to have the chance to share back the many lessons we’ve learned along the way as well as highlight our work! While technology isn’t here to save the world, we believe that community-centered design and an systems-based approach allows us to deploy new tools that add another tactic in the fight for social justice and support the community organizers at the front lines of the fight.
This article is the first in a series —click here to read about our design and research phase and click here to read about the engineering process.
For our first post, we’re incredibly excited to talk about Eviction Free NYC, a new website that we recently launched in partnership with the Right to Counsel Coalition!
The Right to Counsel NYC Coalition began in June of 2014. [They] began as a coalition of advocates, tenants, academics and legal services providers in support of right to counsel for low-income tenants who face eviction in New York City. Right to Counsel (RTC) is an historic new law in NYC that secures free legal representation or support for all tenants facing eviction. In housing court, where historically over 90% of tenants lack legal representation and over 90% of landlords have legal representation, this law could not be more important in preventing homelessness and keeping communities together.
This historic moment for civil legal aid also presents a huge challenge for our partners in the tenant organizing and legal aid community. Legal aid providers across the city have to scale their housing practices in unprecedented ways in order to handle more than 4–5 times the number of cases they regularly receive. Furthermore, a shift in policy such as RTC also faces huge outreach and education challenges so that tenants can be more informed of their rights at the earliest possible moment. Due to these reasons, RTC is being phased in on a five year timeline based on the zipcodes with the highest rates of eviction. This makes it quite difficult for the average person to know what resources they have access to!
With Eviction Free NYC, the RTC Coalition hopes to alleviate this difficulty and compliment the organizing and advocacy efforts happening around NYC. All tenants, regardless of eligibility or type of housing, can get hyper-personalized instructions on how to deal with an eviction notice. If they are RTC eligible, we tell them how to access this right and connect with a legal aid provider. Some providers even link directly to their online intake form!
In the following posts, we are going to talk about our design and development process around Eviction Free NYC in order to shed more light on how we approach co-design with community partners, follow a human-centered design & testing process, and make engineering decisions that best fit the need of the project. We’ve had great early success with the site — over 1,000 people have visited the site in the past 3 weeks to navigate the eviction process and connect with legal resources!
We’re really proud of this work and are excited to share these lessons with the broader civic tech, access to justice, and nonprofit community!
Click here to read more about our co-design process! by Ashley, lead designer
Click here to read more about our engineering process! by Dan, lead engineer
