Free Eviction Lawyers Tied to Fewer ER Visits in NYC Pilot Zip Codes

A study of more than 8 million emergency room visits by New York City residents who were uninsured or on Medicaid found fewer ER visits in the first 10 zip codes where the city’s Right to Counsel program gave low-income tenants free lawyers in Housing Court, a finding that lands squarely on the side of the eviction process landlords deal with every day.

Why it matters

Right to Counsel is not a courtroom footnote for owners. It is the reason eviction cases that used to move in weeks now take months, because a represented tenant can raise defenses, demand discovery, and negotiate a cure or a payment plan instead of defaulting. The study, led by Dr. Katherine Chen, an assistant professor at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, and published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, is the first attempt to measure a health outcome tied to that slower pipeline. The city rolled the program out five zip codes at a time starting with a 2016 pilot, chosen for high rates of shelter entries and evictions, before going citywide in March 2020. For owners in zip codes that got counsel years before the citywide expansion, including parts of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, Harlem, the Bronx’s Tremont and Kingsbridge, and Staten Island’s North Shore, this is the clearest outside data yet on what the program actually changed in those neighborhoods.

The numbers

Researchers found at least 26 fewer ER visits per 10,000 residents in the first 10 Right to Counsel zip codes roughly 30 months after implementation, with the drop among children reaching 32 fewer visits per 10,000. The article reported no overall percentage change, and later expansion phases beyond the first 10 zip codes showed no measurable shift in the ER-visit rate, a gap the researchers did not explain. The same data also showed ER visits tied to mental health and substance use disorders rose in the same areas over the period, a detail that complicates any clean read of the result.

What’s next

Chen was careful about causation, calling Right to Counsel “one leading, possible explanation” for the drop rather than a confirmed cause. For landlords and portfolio owners in the city, the practical read is unchanged regardless of mechanism: zip codes with longer Right to Counsel history are also zip codes with more entrenched legal representation for tenants, which means slower case timelines, more negotiated outcomes, and less predictable possession dates in Housing Court. With the program citywide since March 2020, that dynamic no longer varies by zip code, it is now the baseline for every eviction filing in the city. For more on the forces shaping the city’s rental stock, see our New York market coverage.