The Judiciary and the Ineffectiveness of Law 14.010/20 in the Scope of Public Policies to Protect Tenants During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The real estate dynamics resulting from the capitalist production of space expresses, among other aspects, a scenario of housing insecurity in relation to rental housing, which still has little support from sectorial public policies established by law, resulting in an intensification of the logic of socio-spatial segregation. In this sense, the role of the Judiciary has played a decisive role in the production and reproduction of selectivity in the urban space from the processing and issuance of eviction orders, a fact that is aggravated in periods of crisis, such as that experienced due to the Covid pandemic. 19. In view of the murky pandemic horizon, the normative guideline for locations in countries like the USA and Spain was shifted to adapting to new rules, with a view to avoiding evictions. In Brazil, the issue was dealt with through Law 14.010/20. This research aimed to observe how the São Paulo judiciary, in civil forums in the city of São Paulo, accepted Law 14,010/20 during its period of validity, mentioning it in the decisions of eviction execution sentences, referring to residential properties, as well as using -a as an instrument of suspension of the eviction injunctions in the period. A total of 114 decisions were cataloged, rendered by 55 judges in the city of São Paulo. Among those, only 17 (14.9%) mentioned the law 14,010/20, while 19 decisions (16.66%) mentioned the pandemic. Despite the citations, only 4 decisions (3.5% of the total), rendered by three judges (5.45%), suspended evictions until the expiration date of the aforementioned law, demonstrating its low significance in the scope of evictions as a whole, bringing to the debate the need to implement other instruments that are more effective in preventing evictions, with a view to constitutional guarantees for life, health and housing during the pandemic.