Two Days Inside Brooklyn's Eviction Machine
(Hell Gate)

Two Days Inside Brooklyn's Eviction Machine

Evictions are back to pre-pandemic levels. Here's what that looks like on the ground.

On Livingston Street, across from a rundown parking lot, sits an ugly glass and steel office building where every Brooklyn tenant must go if they want to fight off an eviction. 

Brooklyn's Housing Court is where tenants end up on their worst day; they've fallen thousands of dollars behind on rent, they've just been evicted, or they're about to be. They're greeted by this squat office building, which is full of metal detectors, court officers with heavy utility belts, cracked walls, and a handful of fluorescent-lit courtrooms where New Yorkers wait, sometimes for hours, to appear before a judge—often alone, no attorney by their side.

City marshals evicted 11,253 households (and counting) in the first seven and a half months of 2025, as the city's sky-high rents kept breaking (and continue to break) records. That's around 1,500 evictions per month—the highest monthly rate since 2018, Gothamist reported. (This year also marks the first time eviction rates have returned to pre-pandemic levels, after a statewide eviction moratorium in 2020 ground housing courts to a halt for two years.)

Brooklyn has seen 32,500 evictions since 2017, the most of any borough except the Bronx, according to New York City data. But none of those evictions (at least the legal ones) can happen without a court process. Only at the end of a court case can a tenant be served with eviction papers, which gives them 14 days to move out before a landlord can hire a marshal to throw them out.

Thus, the long line, which at 9:25 a.m. on a recent weekday already stretches down the block and is still growing. A man in a black shirt and work boots half-runs, half-walks to the end of the queue, muttering, "This is crazy." An older Black woman, her checkered shirt dotted with a light mist of rain, begins to worry that she'll miss the judge calling for her to step into court.

"I hope we get in before the calendar call," she says. "I hope they don't call me."


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