This month the New York City Civil Court hosted a ceremony honoring five decades of service by the Housing Court. Its mission is to ensure that both landlords and tenants have access to their own venue in which to resolve all aspects of disputes, some fairly simple, others far more complex, regarding residential housing in the five boroughs.
Officially known as the “housing part” of the Civil Court, it was created by statute in 1973—as opposed to being a “constitutional” court—to alleviate the vast number of landlord-tenant matters that were overburdening the Civil Court. Without its existence, the Civil Court would have collapsed under its own weight of cases
