Housing Courts

Specialized courts designed to handle legal disputes between landlords and tenants—known as housing courts or landlord-tenant courts—became a popular idea in cities throughout the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The impetus to establish housing courts came from widespread dissatisfaction with existing dispute-resolution mechanisms on the part of both tenants and landlords. Proponents of the idea maintained that housing courts would, through expertise and economies of scale, be able to resolve disputes both expeditiously and equitably. By the time enthusiasm for the housing court idea began to wane in the 1980s, many of the nation's largest municipalities, including New York City, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Boston, had established housing courts.

Landlord-tenant relations have always been intense and fractious. Each party to the landlord-tenant relationship seeks something from the other. A tenant seeks the best quality home at the most affordable price. A landlord seeks to maximize economic return at minimal expense. Because of [Page 354]this tension, legal disputes between landlords and tenants are commonplace. Yet because the balance of power in the legal relationship has rested firmly with landlords and tenants had few substantive and procedural rights, methods for dealing with disputes were historically relatively simple, and expeditious legal issues were rarely raised or litigated.

Eviction proceedings are the most common legal disputes between landlords and tenants. Since the early 19th century, all jurisdictions in the United States have had summary proceedings statutes to govern the eviction process. Summary proceedings are accelerated legal proceedings that are designed with time constraints that are intended to allow a case to move toward judgment in a far shorter time frame than ordinary civil proceedings. By providing an expedient means to obtain court-ordered evictions, summary proceedings were supposed to encourage landlords to seek eviction in court rather than use self-help to remove tenants. For the most part, summary eviction proceedings succeeded in bringing the eviction process into the realm of the courts.

Until the 1960s and 1970s, in most jurisdictions, tenants had few legal defenses to eviction proceedings. However, during that period, in response to tenant activism that was sparked by the civil rights movement, most states adopted the implied warranty of habitability: the notion—novel at the time—that a tenant's obligation to pay rent was contingent on a landlord's providing a habitable dwelling. In addition, housing codes; federal, state, and local housing development and rent subsidy programs; rent regulation (in some jurisdictions then and in fewer and fewer jurisdictions over time); and new procedural safeguards against eviction, along with the warranty of habitability, had, by the 1970s, made landlord-tenant law into an increasingly complex body of law.

In large municipalities, such as New York City, eviction proceedings, proceedings brought by tenants against landlords for repairs, and municipal lawsuits against landlords for code violations were all brought in separate courts that had general jurisdiction over a wide variety of lawsuits in addition to housing matters. Although tenants began to have more substantial defenses to landlords’ eviction claims and legal remedies for landlords’ misfeasance, these rights remained more theoretical than real, because it was virtually impossible for tenants to assert their rights on their own in these separate forums. Landlords were also dissatisfied because these new rights had made summary eviction proceedings less summary.

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