A Queens landlord entered an unusual court settlement last spring that let one of his tenants off the hook on more than $14,000 she owed him in rent.
The settlement marked the conclusion of a lawsuit the tenant, Jei Jan Wu, brought against the Forest Hills landlord alleging he had subjected her to a years-long harassment campaign that included him cutting off her power in midwinter and threatening her with “obscene language.”
The suit was filed on Wu’s behalf — without cost to her — by Legal Aid Society attorneys who say their ability to perform such work is hanging on by a thread because of city funding shortfalls.
In recent interviews with the Daily News, Wu said she wouldn’t know where she’d be today if she didn’t get the free legal help.
And having Legal Aid in her corner became even more important after the April 1, 2022, settlement, when Wu alleged the landlord, Peter Cai, started making her life “even more of a living hell.”
In addition to forgiving Wu’s rent debt, the settlement required Cai to refrain from any harassment as she started looking for a new apartment — but her attorneys have alleged in court papers that he started almost immediately violating the agreement by entering her apartment without permission, destroying her belongings, stealing her mail, berating her with slurs and filming her while she was undressed.
After an especially heated argument on May 27, 2022, Wu called 911 and Cai was arrested on harassment charges, prompting a Queens judge to issue two orders of protection against him that prohibited him from contacting her, court papers show.
Wu, who finally moved out of Cai’s building in December, is still fighting him in Queens Housing Court, alleging he should be ordered to cough up monetary damages for violating their settlement — and she still doesn’t have to pay a penny to the attorneys representing her.
The reason for that is the city’s Right to Counsel program.
Launched in 2017, Right to Counsel provides all low-income New Yorkers with free legal representation in Housing Court. But Wu is among the lucky ones who have actually been assigned attorneys in recent years.
The public defender groups tasked with carrying out the program have since last year had to decline to represent thousands of low-income tenants due to staff shortages driven by a combination of high attrition rates and a struggle to attract new attorneys who can make far more in private practice.
Adriene Holder, the attorney in charge of the Legal Aid Society’s civil practice, said Wu’s complex case highlights the dire need for increasing funding for Right to Counsel so wages can be boosted and staff expanded. She said her group, which is among a network of Right to Counsel providers, was at one point able to assign five staff members to Wu’s case thanks to the program.
“I’m really, really concerned as to what could have happened had [Wu] not had the support of our advocates and lawyers in this case,” Holder said.
She added: “This case was egregious, but there are a lot of cases that are egregious that go unnoticed because we can’t staff them.”
After his May 2022 arrest, Cai pleaded guilty to one charge of disorderly conduct.
Reached by phone Friday, Cai vehemently disputed the allegations from Wu, and said he only entered a settlement with her because he could not afford to keep battling her in court.
“Everything actually is a lie, but I cannot afford too much on legal fees,” he said. “Meantime, she has a free lawyer, and can do whatever she wants.”
Cai did not dispute that hostilities continued beyond the settlement, but claimed that had to do as much with Wu as him.
“She shouted on me, she called me ‘a monster,’ I called her ‘b—h,’ that type of thing,” he said. “She didn’t pay rent for years, it’s been a nightmare for me, too. I’m broke, I don’t have any other income.”
According to Legal Aid lawyer Julia McNally, Wu stopped paying rent in July 2020 because since she moved in about a year earlier Cai refused to correct hazardous conditions in her apartment. City records show the Department of Housing Preservation and Development logged 15 complaints about Cai’s two-story building on 63rd Drive last year alone, including for “raw sewage accumulation,” a mice infestation and power and heat outages.
Cai initially tried to evict Wu in 2021 over nonpayment of rent, but that filing was dismissed as a result of the harassment case, records show.
Wu, who used to work as a designer before developing a chronic disease called fibromyalgia, now lives in an apartment in Manhattan that Legal Aid lawyers helped her find and get a CityFHEPS voucher for, lowering her rental obligation.
She told The News she’s still fighting her ex-landlord in court because she needs closure.
“I still have post-traumatic stress. Right now, I am trying to learn that I can sleep without fear, but I still have the nightmares,” she said, alleging that a time Cai shut off her electricity for a full week still lingers with her as a painful memory. “I still leave the lights on when I sleep, and still have fear whenever I hear a noise in my apartment.”
Wu’s case drags on against the backdrop of a deepening Right to Counsel crisis.
Eviction filings have skyrocketed in the city since pandemic-era moratoriums expired, with 112,274 submitted in 2022, compared to 44,495 in 2021, according to data from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
Based on that trend, Legal Aid and other providers say they expect to see 120,000 eviction filings this year, and a majority of them — 71,000 or so — will be against low-income earners eligible for free Right to Counsel representation.
However, at current city funding levels, providers believe they’ll only be able to pick up 35,000 of those Right to Counsel cases, meaning a majority of those tenants would have to go without representation in court.
Holder said she fears that discrepancy will result in an eviction explosion and pointed to 2021 data from the de Blasio administration showing 84% of tenants who receive Right to Counsel representation stay in their homes.
“There are numerous ways that we have to deal with the housing and homelessness crisis,” she said. “We cannot only build ourselves out of a housing crisis. We have to keep people in their homes, too.”
To that end, Legal Aid and fellow Right to Counsel provider groups Legal Services NYC and New York Legal Assistance Group called on Mayor Adams and the City Council on April 10 to set aside $461 million in funding for the program as part of the 2024 fiscal year budget that’s being negotiated.
Adams’ executive budget proposal unveiled last week only includes $166 million for Right to Counsel contracts. A spokesman for Adams declined to comment on the providers’ funding bump request.
The push to safeguard legal representation for tenants in Housing Court has garnered support from some unlikely corners.
The Rent Stabilization Association, one of the city’s largest landlord industry groups, said in a statement it supports allocating more funds to ensure Housing Court defendants have lawyers, arguing it typically results in better outcomes for both tenants and landlords.
The association, though, said an alternative way of doing that could entail amending the law to allow the city to assign private practice attorneys for cases that Right to Counsel providers don’t have bandwidth for.
“Building owners want to keep renters in their homes — and the way to do that is through the Housing Court,” said Joseph Strasburg, the association’s president.
