By Sulome Anderson and Gianna Palmer

At 8 a.m. on a recent morning, a line of people begins to form in front of the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corp. Mothers hold small children; elderly men and women lean on canes. Many are immigrants who speak little English. Most are also in danger of being evicted from their homes.

For over 30 years, the non-profit Northern Manhattan Improvement Corp. has provided residents like these everything from free legal services to job training. Now, after cuts in funding, the organization fears it won’t be able to help local residents much longer. Ken Rosenfeld, its director of legal services, appeared before Community Board 12 on Oct. 12 to make an impassioned plea for money. “We are dying,” he said. Currently, said Rosenfeld, the organization can only function two days a week, serving 20 people each day.

One of the people in line this particular Tuesday is Annie Castillo, a mother of four, waiting to see someone from the legal services department. Castillo first met with staff here after she was sued for nonpayment of rent. She went to court, where the judge directed her to the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corp.

Here, staff told Castillo about a city program— Family Eviction Prevention Services— that prevents tenants with children from being evicted. “I filled out some documents, and that was it,” Castillo says, noting that the program will help pay her rent and give her a subsidy. “I’ll just have to pay 10 percent,” she says.

Castillo is incredibly grateful to the corporation for helping her stay in her home. “They understand everyone,” she says. “They’re really nice.”

Nearby, Louis Ceijas, who lives at 172^nd Street and Fort Washington Avenue, also waits to see a lawyer. He worries he will be forced to leave his apartment after 48 years. “The landlord gave me eviction papers,” he says.

Ceijas, 71, is at Northern Manhattan Improvement Corp.  for the first time, on the recommendation of the judge who heard his case in New York County Housing Court.  When Ceijas moved into his apartment in 1968, rent was $90 a month; now it is $1,017, which exhausts the $665 he receives in Social Security and Supplemental Security Income every month.

Rosenfeld says he and his staff do everything they can to keep tenants like Castillo and Ceijas from being evicted. “We fight like crazy,” says Rosenfeld. “An eviction is an absolute emergency for us.”

But besides fighting for its clients, Northern Manhattan Improvement Corp. is now fighting to keep its programming alive. Rosenfeld says it has experienced a huge loss in financial support as a result of the recession. “Most of our grants come from the state and the city governments,” he says. “They’ve all been cut.” One source of financial support, the Interest on Lawyers Account or IOLA, a fund that collects interest from lawyers’ escrow accounts and allocates it to a variety of free legal services, has cut its contribution by 30 percent. “That’s really bad,” says Rosenfeld. “And we were already struggling.”

In addition, the Department of Homeless Services used to provide more than $650,000 a year to help prevent families from ending up in shelters, says Rosenfeld. Now, the organization will get $200,000 a year. “I guess now, people will be going to the shelters from northern Manhattan, because if I don’t have the money to pay staff to do it, we can’t do this work,” Rosenfeld says.

Rosenfeld explains that the two mornings a week when Northern Manhattan Improvement Corp. sees up to 40 people is a far cry from what it used to do. “At one time, our doors were always open,” he says. “In the mornings, we’d take anyone who showed up.”

Because he anticipates serving enough clients to fulfill the terms of the $200,000 grant from the Department of Homeless Services fairly quickly, Rosenfeld says it’s only a matter of time before the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corp.  has to shut down intake. “I imagine that we will be able to provide all the numbers we need, all the cases we need, sometime by the end of February,” he says. “And then there’s no more money. That’s it.”

Other services provided by the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corp., such as domestic violence victims’ advocacy, community organizing and adult education programs, are also being affected by the financial crisis, Rosenfeld says. “We’re patching everything together,” he says. “But there’s no way to maintain this effort unless there are resources to do it.”

He advocates a concentrated effort, from both state and city governments, to generate money for free legal services. “I would like to see New York state, like other states have done, establish a fully funded legal services administration of some kind,” he says. “An agency with a steady flow of funding that they could count on, maybe based on court fees, maybe based on attorney registration fees, or even general taxes, that would go directly into that fund.”

That would make financial sense, he added. “Our argument has always been that it’s much cheaper to keep someone in their home,” he says, “and pay for a legal services attorney at a low, public-interest salary to do the work, than to have them be in a shelter.”

In the meantime, Rosenfeld fears for the future of his organization. “I think we’ll limp along, if we don’t find more funding,” he says. “But I don’t know for how long we’ll be able to limp along.”