IANAL, but can you show title, right, or lease in this case?
Yes. Proof of residency over the past 18 years shows right. (And probably lease)
In New York City, at least, you can’t legally kick out your adult child without taking them to court. Your choices are Family Court ( here you would need to document abusive behavior ) or a civil lawsuit in Superior Court - you can’t even pursue an eviction in housing court if you are trying to kick out an immediate family member who has lived there more than 30 days.
New York City has a legal system that is very heavily weighted in favor of tenants, they have a strong interest in preventing homelessness. Even in cases when the landlord is legally in the right ( and thats almost all of them, landlords don’t kick out good rent-paying tenants) it takes about six months and at least two court dates ( that are almost always at least 6 weeks apart .) Then once the judge rules in your favor, they stall another month before they issue the eviction notice.
Then you hire the marshal and they issue the 3 day notice ( it’s still commonly called that although the legal requirement is longer, between 5 and 10 days -I don’t remember exactly). And when you win your eviction, the city will contact your tenant directly with offers of legal aid as part of their homelessness prevention services. NYC is not a good place to be a landlord.
And it’s a breeze compared to kicking out a family member. Because legally, the home is the family home and all members of the family have a legal right to be there. I see the rationale, it prevents men from capriciously throwing their wives and kids out on the street - but it can lead to some nightmares especially when it comes to adult children overstaying.
I know about this because I had to kick out an adult child. Luckily, the adult child was not a blood relative so I was able to do it through housing court. But that was not a sure thing - the first attorney I consulted didn’t think housing court would take the case because of the parental nature of the relationship. But I got another lawyer.
That’s not true, I’m afraid. If you’re not in a priority category then you won’t get any help. Even for those who are a priority, they only have to help you if you can provide proof of that.
So at 16, when I was kicked out, the council required a letter from my mother saying that she’d kicked me out, and like many parents who kick their kids out she wasn’t particularly interested in helping me. So I mixed sleeping on the streets (and in toilet cubicles and train stations and the like) with occasionally sleeping at friends’ houses for a few months until I’d got together enough money to pay for the deposit on a rented room, then went abroad briefly (actually cheaper than paying rent) then rented a different room. TBH at this distance in time I’m not 100% certain of the exact sequence of events.
A couple of years later when I was homeless again (due to really complicated reasons) I actually was given emergency housing on health grounds, but my health was worse by then. If it hadn’t been I would still not have been eligible.
I got decent A levels at the usual age (18), though I had to do almost all my GCSEs at the same time because unsurprisingly I didn’t get many at 16, and went to uni and did all the usual stuff, and I got very used to travelling light, packing efficiently and washing and sleeping in awkward places.
I’m confused - it seems you were able to go through housing court because this 'adult child" was not a “blood relative”. But I’m trying to figure out who this “adult child” is who is not a “blood relative”- certainly if the "adult child " were adopted it wouldn’t matter, and as far as I can tell, if it was a stepchild whose parent was living with you it wouldn’t matter.
The issue , from what reading I have done is whether the adult child is a “tenant”. If he/she is supposed to pay rent of some sort ( which could include paying certain utility bills each month) or has a lease, he or she is a tenant like any other and can be evicted. The civil lawsuit (an ejection proceeding) is when the person is living there due to a family relationship and does not qualify as a tenant. There are ways to evict people with whom you do not have a landlord tenant relationship but you cannot use those proceedings to evict someone who is living there due to a family relationship. And it doesn’t have to be a family relationship with the person who is trying to get them to leave the apartment - if you read this https://law.justia.com/cases/new-york/other-courts/2013/2013-ny-slip-op-23200.html, you will see situations where stepparents couldn’t evict stepchildren and where a woman could not evict her sister-in-law.
Which,yes, means that it can take a little longer to get your adult son who as been living with you since birth and doesn’t pay rent out of your house if he refuses to leave when you tell him to and you have to go to court and get a court order and maybe have the marshals forcibly remove him . But I’ve known a number of people whose parents have told them to “get out” at various points in life - even in the few cases where the parents did it sort of abruptly, the “kids” left without needing a court case to be filed. Probably because it’s generally unpleasant to live with people who don’t want you there.
The adult child was the son of a former best friend whom I had known my whole life. I let him come live with me - for a year or two-when he was 18, he was 24 when I threw him out. And I had told him I wanted him out. And gave him more time. And second chances. And third chances. And not only did he not leave, I had to go through the entire eviction process. He wouldn’t even leave when the marshals came. They had to call the cops.
I’m sorry if I seemed to be implying that I didn’t think this happened to you or that you did something wrong, that wasn’t my intention. I just meant that in my experience most parents don’t have to resort to going to court to get their adult child to leave and there’s nothing illegal about telling the adult child ( or for that matter a tenant) to leave. What’s illegal is throwing their belongings onto the street or changing the locks without going to court.
And I don’t know what that first lawyer was thinking - an adult whom you let move in when he was 18 is not going to be considered an immediate family member unless either he was your spousal equivalent or his parent was. Maybe if you had taken in your friend’s son when he was 11 or even 15- but not if he moved in when he was already an adult.
Yeah, I realized later that the first lawyer was way off base but after I consulted with her I gave the kid another chance so about 4 months passed before I hired the good lawyer. They were an eviction mill but they were reasonably priced (my lawyer had about 15-20 other cases in 4 adjacent courtrooms the day my case was heard so they can afford to be cheap.) and responsive ( they have lawyers all over every courthouse every day. They can respond fast. But they advised me to keep it simple ( he doesn’t have a lease, I want him out)
So now he’s in some sort of NYC homeless shelter but a special one for young people and he has job counselors, housing advisors, psychologists and social workers all over him, which is what he needs. He had problems I was not equipped to deal with and I wasn’t doing him any favors. And oddly enough, we’re still sort of friends, or at least we don’t hate each other. I take him out to lunch every now and then.
I turned 18 in 1966, the height of Vietnam. I’d have probably gone into the military. There’s a real chance I wouldn’t have gone into combat because of my hearing, but I would have had a desk job or something.