It may be one of the longest-running, least-known and most mysterious
acts of gift-giving in New York City. On Monday, adhering to a
tradition they have honored for decades, the people who evict New
Yorkers from their apartments begin a two-week holiday.
The marshals, as they are known, have been taking the year-end break
for so long that no one knows precisely when, or why, the custom began.
Sanctioned by neither the New York City Marshals Association, which
represents the city’s 45 marshals, nor the city’s Department of
Investigation, which regulates them, the practice is so informal that
the exact dates shift every year and judges and lawyers often learn of
them by word of mouth.
Yet every year around the holidays, a
majority — though not always all — of the marshals stop executing
evictions, providing at least temporary relief to thousands of tenants
around the city.
“It’s one of those myths that take on the force of law,” said Jaya K. Madhavan, supervising judge of Bronx Housing Court.
Many
tenants do not even know they are being granted a reprieve. At Bronx
Housing Court last week, many tenants who had received legal notices of
eviction for nonpayment of rent had not heard of the marshals’ holiday.
When informed of it, some were skeptical. But others said the break
would provide crucial time to reach out to relatives, charities and
city agencies for financial aid.
“It is appreciated,” said
Dalena Diaz, 25, who had gone to the courthouse with her 3-year-old
daughter to try to stop an eviction that could have been carried out on
Christmas Eve but, because of the holiday and a judge’s order, was
ultimately postponed. “At least they have some type of sympathy for the
holidays.”
Housing lawyers have taken to calling the break an
“eviction moratorium,” and some said they thought it existed to provide
holiday relief to the poor. Though there are no exact statistics,
Housing Court judges and lawyers said that in late December, there are
significantly fewer evictions than other times of the year. Over all,
the marshals execute about 25,000 evictions a year.
Some tenant
advocates said they thought the hiatus was created not to benefit
tenants but to help marshals and landlords avoid the negative publicity
of holiday-season evictions and becoming, as Louise Seeley, the
executive director of the nonprofit City-Wide Task Force on Housing
Court, put it, “the Grinch who evicted Christmas.”
The marshals
themselves, a no-nonsense bunch who carry licensed handguns when they
eject people and their possessions from apartments (they can also
change the locks when no one is home), are more circumspect in
discussing the hiatus.
They call it a “year-end break,” saying
they use the time to complete annual financial statements required by
the city or to take vacations. And most eschew sentimental talk about
wanting to avoid putting families on the street around the holidays.
“It’s
the end of the year and things are slow,” said Ken Kelly, a retired
police detective who is executive director of the Marshals Association.
But
at least one marshal expressed a bit of holiday spirit in acknowledging
his plans to take a break: “Could you go into an apartment with a
Christmas tree and evict everybody and be Scrooge?” said Danny
Weinheim, 56, who is based in the Bronx and has 31 years on the job.
“Do you do that on Dec. 23 or Dec. 24? I wouldn’t do that. It’s
Christmas Eve. I’m Jewish, but it’s still Christmas Eve.”
Eviction
holidays have been challenged in other cities. In Milwaukee, there was
an informal eviction moratorium some years ago, but county judges
abandoned it in 1991 after a local landlord and the American Civil Liberties Union complained that the practice promoted the religious celebration of
Christmas. And in Detroit in the mid-1980s, a landlord sued state court
judges over an 18-day holiday moratorium, alleging that it violated the
separation of church and state and his constitutional rights.
In
New York City, landlords have taken a different approach. Though some
may privately grumble about the marshals’ extended break, landlords
have not made an issue of it.
Mitchell Posilkin, general counsel for the Rent Stabilization
Association, a trade group that represents thousands of city landlords,
said the group’s broader concern was not with the marshals’ December
hiatus, but with the rest of the year, when it can take weeks because
of court delays for warrants of eviction to be issued.
Still, lawyers for landlords say the holiday takes a financial toll.
“Owners
are basically absorbing what I would call a social cost,” said Eugene
Reisman, a lawyer who represents property owners. “They’re paying the
cost of keeping a tenant who’s not paying rent in possession of an
apartment.”
No one — not even longtime lawyers and marshals —
seems to know exactly when the tradition started. By most estimates,
marshals have been taking their holiday break for at least 30 to 40
years. “My impression was it had been around long before I started
practicing,” said Andrew Scherer, a housing lawyer for 30 years and the
author of “Residential Landlord-Tenant Law in New York.”
Since
the custom is an informal one, marshals can ignore the break and go
right on working. The only days a marshal cannot officially perform an
eviction around this time are the legal holidays of Dec. 25 and Jan. 1.
The other weekdays are, technically, fair game if a marshal decides not
to take part in the break.
Tenant lawyers say marshals have
carried out evictions in the days right before and after Christmas. “I
think there’s this sense out there that it doesn’t happen, but it
does,” said Judith Goldiner, a supervising attorney at the Legal Aid Society, which represents low-income residents in Housing Court.
Mr.
Kelly said he believed that all city marshals were taking part in the
break this year, but there was talk in Housing Court of at least one
marshal who apparently would be working this week.
Marshals are
the bouncers of this city of renters, and theirs is a difficult and
occasionally dangerous task. In 2001, a marshal, Erskine G. Bryce, was
trying to evict a Brooklyn woman when he was beaten, set afire and
killed, the police said, becoming the first city marshal killed on the
job since 1984.
Marshals are not city employees, but are
appointed by the mayor to five-year terms. They receive no city salary
but they charge by the job and, in most eviction cases, they are paid
by landlords. They are an eclectic bunch, far different from any
bounty-hunter stereotype.
“I have two guys who have Ph.D.’s,”
Mr. Kelly said. “I also have a guy who was an exterminator, and another
guy who was a haberdasher.”
Ileana Rivera, 33, a marshal based in
Brooklyn, fell into the job almost by accident, responding to an ad in
the paper in 2006. She is planning to spend part of the break
vacationing in Florida and said any benefits that tenants received
because of her time off were unintentional.
“I’m the middleman here,” Ms. Rivera said. “I just do my job. I don’t favor the tenant. I don’t favor the landlord.”
Throughout
much of the break, the legal machinery of Housing Court — the process
of landlords seeking permission from judges to have tenants evicted —
slows but does not stop. There is, however, a rush of business in the
weeks before and after the break.
On Thursday evening, tenants
who were threatened with eviction frantically headed to a courtroom in
Bronx Housing Court, seeking a judge’s order to delay their evictions
until court hearings could be scheduled.
Michelle Johnson, a
46-year-old mother of three, left the court in tears. Her request that
a judge postpone the eviction was denied. The notice of eviction she
carried stated she could be evicted as early as Monday. She owed her
landlord about $3,500, and worried about how much time she had left,
and where she could get the money, and what sort of Christmas she and
her children would have.
“I don’t even have a tree,” said Ms.
Johnson, a community organizer for a union. “I don’t know what to do.
Should I start getting boxes?”
She was unaware of the eviction
holiday, and her eviction notice mentioned nothing about it. She found
it hard to believe that she really, truly, had two more weeks, as if
she were being asked to believe in Santa Claus again.
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