Ms. Hồng, 72, a Vietnamese refugee woman who has lived for more than thirty years in a rent-stabilized apartment in the Bronx, received an eviction notice two months ago after falling behind on rent due to unexpected medical bills. She applied for the city's emergency one-time loan but was rejected — an outcome that most other applicants facing her situation also encountered, as the city approved only about one-quarter of such applications last year. Her story is not an isolated case: it is a cross-section of a legal machinery operating at full capacity across the city.
Rental evictions in New York are not just a market consequence — they have become a steady revenue stream.
The eviction machine and who profits from it
The city's marshals — people who collect fees from evictions, towing, and debt collection — earned a combined income of more than 55 million USD in 2025, a sharp increase from around 37 million USD annually before. This figure shows that eviction is not merely a consequence of a strained housing market, but has become a steady revenue stream for one link in the judicial system. In the first half of 2026, an average of 1,345 eviction cases were recorded monthly across the city — still a constant pressure on thousands of renting households, including elderly first-generation refugee groups who depend almost entirely on rent-stabilized apartments to remain in the city.
Who faces the risk, and why the numbers keep climbing
Landlords in New York filed 112,000 eviction lawsuits over the past year — equivalent to about 5% of the total renting households citywide. A typical civil lawsuit takes an entire year before housing court, but a large group of landlords, including companies linked to the LeFrak organization, are appealing to the New York Appellate Division to shorten this process. This is not just a tenant issue: some Vietnamese-origin real estate investors owning a few small rental units are also caught between two pressures — protracted litigation delays the flow of rental income, while political opinion leans toward protecting tenants.
A lesson from another immigrant community
The Dominican community in Washington Heights was once a stable immigrant settlement from the 1970s, but the share of Latino residents living in New York's core urban neighborhoods has declined from 60% to 46% since 2000, and nearly half of Dominican residents have since drifted to the Bronx. In the Bronx itself — where rent is cheaper but also where many of the most vulnerable renting households are concentrated — as many as 75% of residents are considered economically unstable. This pattern of gradual displacement from center to periphery is a warning for any immigrant community holding on in New York through cheap rental housing, including the scattered Vietnamese clusters in Queens or Brooklyn.
Structural roots: from zoning laws to 70% rent increases
Today's eviction crisis stems from a trend spanning decades: median rent across the United States has risen 70% since 1995 while real wages have remained virtually stagnant. This is not a phenomenon unique to New York, but a consequence of single-family zoning regulations once used to maintain racial segregation and exclude low-income people from certain neighborhoods — a legal legacy that many American cities have not fully dismantled.
Government response and what to watch
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the City Council have just agreed to establish a new rental voucher program for eligible rent-stabilized tenants before eviction — broader than the current CityFHEPS program which applies mainly to those already in shelters. For elderly Vietnamese Americans renting rent-stabilized apartments, this is a support channel worth exploring early, rather than waiting until an eviction notice arrives. For families with relatives working as small landlords, the outcome of the appeal to the Appellate Division will determine whether the eviction process accelerates in the coming years — a change that could impact each family differently depending on their position in the housing market.