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4. Description Our cities contain an invisible underclass: tenants. To be a tenant means to be permanently insecure, to be between homes, broke, unhealthy, and tired. Tenants are subject to a place called Housing Court, where their human right to a home is judged. In Housing Court, tenants are punished for being poor, for being immigrants, for being women, or for being Black or brown. This is a book about the tenants whom I have served over twenty years as an eviction- defense lawyer. Here, I reflect on their stories, their struggles, their resilience, and their dignity.In New York City, hundreds of thousands of tenants are sued in Housing Court each year. Many are sued over and over again. Tenants must also fight for basic needs like running water, heat, cooking gas, and to live without rats, roaches, and bed bugs. For many tenants, Housing Court intersects with criminal court, family court, drug treatment, halfway houses, and the welfare bureaucracy. Housing is either the first or the last cookie to crumble, and once it does, for many, it can8217t be put back together.Over the course of twenty years, I stood at the edge of the cliff to stand in front of as many tenants as I could before they fell to their evictions and the permanent consequences of them. Over my career, I8217ve had to ask myself, Who am I to advocate, judge, or even participate in the struggle for housing justice in New York City? Why did I get a seat at the table as decisions were made about power, resources, and access to justice? Are the ideals that I have spent two decades fighting for8212fairness, justice, and equality8212illusory? Should I have worked to dismantle this system rather than uphold it? I8217ve met too many hypocrites in this field: politicians in the pockets of real estate developers, judges who seek reappointment over integrity, lawyers who seek short-term wins, and government officials who care more about the perceived problem of homelessness than the actual problem that people can8217t afford their homes. I too have been a hypocrite. Each day, I8217ve been able to go home, enter the safety and security of my bubble, and shield myself from the pain, closing my eyes to it as I sleep in my bed. I could enter the arena of Housing Court on my own terms, able to experience the high-stakes battle for people8217s homes but never risking my own, having no skin in the game except professional pride. As a man raised in an upper-middle-class family, and with every opportunity presented to me, I won the natural lottery. Although I was born in India, a third-world country where inequality is endemic, I was born to parents who were fast-tracked to the American middle class because of what they studied (medicine) and when (around 1965, when visas opened up for doctors). I live in a loft apartment in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Brooklyn, with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge from my bedroom window. I cannot say that I understand or have ever understood what it means to live constantly on the brink of eviction and homelessness. It8217s difficult not to feel some detachment, otherness, and ignorance to this work. I8217ve made legal mistakes and moral misjudgments. I am an Indian-born outsider, observing legal and social institutions as Tocqueville did, or watching human failings like Star Trek8217s Mr. Spock. I8217ve had to accept that where I came from is part of who I am. I write

5. this to study my dual roles as an actor and observer of what shelter means for those who enter Housing Court. I write this like a person surveying the landscape in the eye of a storm. The pandemic has granted me pause to both look back and to look forward at what I have learned and what it means to me right now.

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