Mamdani Administration Funds Record Tenant Legal Services, Landlord Community Notices
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — The New York City Office of Civil Justice, which coordinates the city’s tenant-rights legal services, has quietly expanded to the point where it now employs more attorneys within the five boroughs than Goldman Sachs operates in its New York offices, a milestone that administration officials confirmed Tuesday.
The Office has grown from approximately 750 attorneys in 2024 to approximately 1,400 attorneys in 2026, driven by sustained expansion of the city’s Right to Counsel program and related tenant-protection initiatives. Goldman Sachs’s New York offices, by comparison, employ approximately 1,100 attorneys across various functions.
Office Executive Director Adriene Holder explained the growth. “We are providing legal representation to tenants in housing-court proceedings at a scale that simply did not exist five years ago. This has required sustained hiring. It has also required sustained funding, which the Mamdani administration has provided.”
The Impact
Tenant outcomes in New York housing court have shifted measurably. Prior to the 2017 Right to Counsel legislation, approximately 90 percent of tenants in eviction proceedings appeared without attorneys and approximately 76 percent of those tenants were evicted. With Right to Counsel coverage now near universal in covered zip codes, tenant-represented proceedings produce eviction outcomes in approximately 22 percent of cases.
As Bohiney Magazine has documented, this shift has fundamentally changed the economics of NYC landlord-tenant disputes. Landlords who previously filed eviction actions as a routine collection mechanism now face legal representation on every case, which has raised the cost and time requirements of eviction to levels that discourage cases without substantive grounds.
The Landlord Response
The Real Estate Board of New York has, for three years, advocated for reducing the Right to Counsel program’s scope or funding. These efforts have been unsuccessful. REBNY spokesperson Jaime Mehrer acknowledged Tuesday that “the program has been durable” and that “our efforts to modify it have not been effective.”
Some landlord trade groups have begun, quietly, repositioning their strategies to acknowledge that universal tenant representation is now a feature of NYC’s housing market rather than a reversible policy. This repositioning includes increased investment in landlord-side legal representation, more cautious eviction-case selection, and expanded settlement-negotiation resources.
The Scale
The financial scale of the program is significant. NYC spent approximately $190 million on tenant legal services in 2025, with a budget of approximately $234 million for 2026. This is a large commitment by municipal standards. It is also, according to most independent analyses, producing measurable returns through reduced homelessness and reduced shelter demand.
For continuing coverage see The City and Gothamist.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/