New York City apartment evictions in 2023 not as bad as media say it is

Bleeding-heart real estate myths die hard. Take propaganda that residential evictions are surging in the Big Apple. 

The false argument was endlessly cited to support so-called “good-cause eviction” (which would have made it near impossible to boot deadbeat tenants) and, later, to whine that the watered-down version passed by the state Legislature didn’t go nearly far enough.

The New York Times’ tendentious coverage made it seem that renters were being thrown onto the street wholesale.

Gothamist wrote in January, “Evictions are surging across New York City, with the monthly rate of legal lockouts beginning to mirror pre-pandemic numbers in the second half of 2023.”

Patch howled that evictions were “up nearly 200 percent.”

But the truth is 100% to the contrary. Evictions did rise in most of 2022 and 2023 — but only because of a backlog of cases from a statewide, Covid-era eviction moratorium in effect until mid-January 2022.

The meaningful recent-eviction comparison is with the years before 2020.

The 12,139 apartment tenant evictions in 2023 were 28.6% fewer than in 2019.

What’s more, 2023 evictions were barely half the previous 20-year average (again, excluding the moratorium period). There were for example more than 25,000 evictions in 2015 alone.

These statistics aren’t from a real estate lobbying organization, but from a source that can hardly be considered a landlords’ tool: the New York City Rent Guideline’s Board, which laid out the facts in its 2024 Income and Affordability Study. You can look them up on Page 31.