Governor Andrew Cuomo said he would be extending the residential housing eviction moratorium until May by executive order as well as through an agreement with the state Legislature.
Making the announcement Monday, Cuomo believes further closures of the economy will not be necessary at this time, hoping to use testing as an apparatus to reopening businesses and keeping them open going into 2021.
“We’ve been working with [lawmakers] on a piece of legislation that will also extend the eviction moratorium. We want to make sure that homeowners are protected, that it doesn’t affect their credit rating. There’s no mortgage foreclosure,” Cuomo said. “We want to get to May 1, we’ll see what happens by May, but we want to protect tenants. We want to make it simple. We don’t want people evicted. We don’t want them to have to go to court to fight the eviction.”
Cuomo placed a moratorium on housing evictions early on in the COVID-19 pandemic in order to prevent New Yorkers from having to overload housing courts, as well as widespread homelessness, as a number of industries were put on pause in the interest of stopping the spread.
This story originally appeared on amny.com.
