Council Member Crystal Hudson
Courtesy of Council Member Crystal Hudson’s Office
No New Yorker should lose their home on a day when the weather outside could put their life at risk. Yet every year, New Yorkers watch marshals carry families’ belongings onto sidewalks while they bake in extreme heat or freeze in the bitter cold. These evictions are not inevitable— they are an avoidable harm that the City can prevent.
Extreme weather is no longer an exception in New York City. Heat waves have become a regular feature of our summers. So far this year, New Yorkers have endured 16 days above 90 degrees, with the heat index exceeding 110 degrees on some days. And summer isn’t over yet.
For some New Yorkers, a heat wave is a mild inconvenience. For older adults, people with disabilities, residents with chronic health conditions, and low-income families who often lack adequate cooling, extreme heat can be deadly.
Heat kills more than 500 New Yorkers each year. Winter cold is similarly lethal, contributing to 26 direct deaths in New York City last year.
Carolyn NortonCourtesy of Legal Services NYC
The City has a responsibility to do everything it can to protect New Yorkers when weather becomes life-threatening. One simple step is entirely within the City’s control: temporarily halt residential evictions during extreme weather.
While the City occasionally pauses evictions during severe heat or cold, as they have occasionally this summer, those decisions are made on an ad hoc basis. There is no formal policy requiring city marshals to halt evictions when conditions become life-threatening.
That should change.
The Mamdani administration should work with the Department of Investigation, which oversees city marshals, to establish a new policy requiring an automatic pause on residential evictions when temperatures exceed 90 degrees or fall below 32 degrees. The City should also notify tenants when an emergency pause is in effect so families can plan accordingly.
This is a commonsense safeguard that could save lives without creating a new program or requiring additional public spending.
As Chair of the City Council’s Committee on General Welfare and as a leader at NYC’s largest provider of free civil legal services, we have seen firsthand how devastating evictions can be. Families lose their homes after medical emergencies, bureaucratic delays, lost jobs, or landlord harassment.
Being forced from your home is traumatic under any circumstance, but being forced onto the street during a heat wave or a freezing night is unconscionable.
A recent Legal Services NYC report found that between 2017 and 2025, the City carried out an astonishing 7,554 evictions on days when the temperature exceeded 90 degrees. Nearly two-thirds occurred in New York City’s poorest neighborhoods, disproportionately exposing low-income New Yorkers to dangerous heat.
Legal Services also analyzed public data and found that 14,000 households were evicted on days below freezing, including more than 2,000 households when temperatures fell below 20 degrees.
None of those evictions had to happen on those particular days. Delaying enforcement until weather conditions improve does not erase a court order—it simply ensures that carrying it out does not put someone’s life at greater risk.
The good news is that we already have a framework for responding to extreme weather — “Code Red” and “Code Blue.”
When these emergency protocols are activated, city agencies including the Department of Homeless Services, Department of Social Services, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, NYC Emergency Management, and nonprofit partners mobilize to protect vulnerable New Yorkers from dangerous heat and cold temperatures.
The Department of Investigation should be part of that coordinated response. No family should be forced from their home while the City is simultaneously activating emergency measures because conditions outside pose a serious threat to life.
As climate change makes extreme weather more frequent and severe, our policies must evolve. Protecting tenants during extreme weather should not depend on a mayoral announcement or an emergency decision made at the last minute. It should be a permanent City policy.
Crystal Hudson is a Council Member for New York City’s District 35 in Brooklyn and Chair of the Council’s Committee on General Welfare. Carolyn Norton is Interim Chief of Litigation and Advocacy at Legal Services NYC.