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She does not qualify for unemployment benefits, because she was paid in cash. Occasionally she has sold homemade tamales and empanadas to friends in other boroughs, but the orders are infrequent. Her adult daughter, who works in a hospital, has helped support her, but she has student loans to cover. She also has two sons serving in the military.
Problems in her six-story prewar building predate the pandemic, she said, with tenants claiming that the landlord neglected long needed repairs. Arun Perinbasekar, a lawyer for the landlord, said repairs are being made and are ongoing, and that reduced rent settlements have been offered to several tenants.
In March, as several residents lost their jobs, Ms. Morales and others stopped paying rent. But moving was out of the question.
Even though the coronavirus has sparked a year of record rent cuts, mostly on luxury apartments, 96 percent of market-rate rental listings in New York City are still unaffordable to a wide group of essential workers, who made an average salary of about $56,000, but often much less, according to the listing website StreetEasy.
“An affordable apartment does not exist in New York,” Ms. Morales said in Spanish, adding that she is hoping for government-led rent forgiveness, because her debt far exceeds what she can repay.
The eviction filings are likely an undercount, Ms. Block said. Across the state, there are more than 222,000 renters, including commercial tenants, with active eviction cases — more than the population of Rochester — and the data does not include filings for towns and villages, which report their numbers differently, she said. About 177,000 cases were filed before the pandemic, but a surge of new cases are possible when the moratorium ends.
Far more renters are teetering. As of December, as many as 1.2 million renters in New York State were at risk of eviction, meaning it was unlikely they could pay the next month’s rent, according to Stout, a financial consulting firm.
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