1,807 New Yorkers were evicted, and over three million warrants were issued in the eight months after Governor Kathy Hochul and our legislature allowed the eviction moratorium to expire.
This violence is the daily business of mayor-appointed goons, city marshals, who make a hefty profit from throwing our neighbors onto the street.
Eviction marshals intervene at the very end of the confusing, winding path to eviction. Most evictions happen before marshals are granted a warrant. Due to harassment from a landlord, inability to obtain a lawyer, or other barriers, often tenants “self-evict,” or leave their homes because of the threat of eviction before one is ordered. Eviction marshals are not the only or even the most “productive” agents of evictions. But eviction marshals directly create homelessness and the existence of marshals is the threat that enforces all evictions. When a tenant self-evicts, they act out of fear that marshals will make them homeless. Self-eviction becomes a rational choice when it prevents interaction with eviction marshals, which always includes entanglement in the legal system and very often includes interaction with police.
While marshals, their professional association, and their paid spokesperson try to portray their work as community service in the press, it is clear that they are among the ranks of the wealthy and property-owning. In 2015, the father-son duo of Martin and Gregg Bienstock banked nearly $7 million. Acting as the hideous combination of capitalists and sheriffs, they are commission-based pigs.
In 2019, marshals banked $14 million.
Even during the supposed eviction moratoriums of 2020, marshals collected nearly $4 million from judgments.
The New York Post reported one marshal earned $5 million at the height of the Great Recession in 2010. In fact, 2010 marked their most lucrative year. These vultures arrive at scenes of carnage and fill their bellies with the scraps. In 2015, marshal George Essock Jr. drove an elderly man to fatally shoot himself inside his Murray Hill apartment when Essock arrived to evict him. The marshals’ spokesperson Michael Woloz shirked responsibility and claimed that “everything was done by the books.”
Evictions kill, while the profiteers of the eviction machine make a killing. For this reason, we demand an end to eviction marshals and the marshal system. There is no coherent end to evictions without abolishing the enforcement mechanism which enacts the violence of eviction. There can be no just remediation of homelessness in a world that allows evictions. The path to ensuring unconditional adequate housing for all can begin in good faith when the violence of displacement ends. We will destroy the eviction machine and build a future by and for the working class, and we call on all neighbors of good conscience to join us in this fight: for a future without evictions, with housing for all!
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