“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.”
— Upton Sinclair
Ever since the state legislature amended the Emergency Tenant Protection Act (ETPA) in 2019, the path by which a municipality in New York State could travel to rent stabilization has been through the performance of a survey of its rental housing stock. Anything higher than a five percent vacancy rate means that no housing emergency is considered to exist. Finding anything lower qualifies a municipality to opt in to rent stabilization.
Addressing the perception that the process can be cost-prohibitive for some municipalities and the results not nearly comprehensive enough, on Sep. 11, local assembly member Sarahana Shrestha put forward a bill in the Assembly titled the REST Act which seeks to present municipalities with additional options with which to adopt rent stabilization. State senator Brian Kavanagh of Manhattan sponsored the bill in the Senate.
The bill offers other metrics than vacancy rates: Whether the availability of affordable housing is ample, whether a population is rent-burdened, whether the homelessness rate locally or regionally could indicate a crisis, Shrestha feels these are also valid considerations.
In every municipality in which vacancy studies have been carried out so far, some landlords who would be affected by the adoption of rent stabilization fail to cooperate with the studies, with some claiming they are too complicated for them to understand.
In the City of Kingston, numerous LLCs representing properties which did not respond to the survey appeared as parties to an Article 78 lawsuit whose basis was in part to challenge the incomplete response rate of the city’s vacancy study.
Landlord non-filings of responses to the surveys, late filings or even filings of duplicate responses containing contradictory information have complicated vacancy studies in every municipality in which they have been conducted.
The problem is so widespread that state senator Michelle Hinchey sponsored a bill now passed into law which looks to incentivize compliance among recalcitrant landlords by finding a vacancy rate of 100 percent for the rental units in buildings which have failed to respond to a municipal rental vacancy survey.
Since 2022, the Hudson Valley Property Owner’s Association (HVPOA) has filed lawsuits in every county in which a rent vacancy study has been performed and the process of adopting rent stabilization has begun — in Ulster, Dutchess, Orange and Rockland counties. In every court, HVPOA has challenged the numbers produced by an allegedly uneven performance of a vacancy study.
Currently, when a municipality opts in to the ETPA, only rental units in buildings constructed before 1974 are placed under the regulations. The logic given is that this is because the law was adopted in the year 1974.
When the City of Kingston conducted its rental vacancy study in 2022, the survey identified a class of buildings built before 1974 which contained six or more rental units. Some 59 properties representing 1270 units were singled out for rent stabilization.
Limiting rent stabilization to only buildings with these features resulted in 3856 other apartments that were not rent stabilized. Some of these units are in buildings owned by charities or by other entities immune from rental stabilization. In effect, the owners of a quarter of the rental units have grounds for feeling persecuted when comparing themselves to the owners of the remaining three-quarters of units which were not rent stabilized.
If three-quarters of the apartment units weren’t rent-stabilized, then three-quarters of renters in Kingston also remain without legal protections against rent increases.
Shrestha’s bill aims to include all buildings constructed before 2010. The new cutoff would move forward with the passing of the years, exempting only buildings constructed in the previous 15 years — the same update found in the last year’s state-level opt-in-only Good Cause Eviction law.
Shrestha’s bill also looks to allow municipalities to adjust the unit size of buildings that are covered by regulation “so that local lawmakers can tailor the program to meet the needs of their local housing stock.”
Should REST pass, municipalities that have already opted in will need to go through the process again, said Shrestha, if they want to bring buildings built after 1974 into coverage
HVPOA executive director Richard Lanzarone views this feature of Shrestha’s bill “a radical overreach and attempt to snare almost 100 percent of rentals into the destructive world of rent control.”
“The socialists haven’t learned that 50 years of ETPA in New York City has only produced the highest rents in the world and hasn’t solved the problem,” said Lanzarone. “It won’t solve the problem in 500 years.”
Lanzarone sees the failure of rent stabilization as perpetuating the problem it seeks to correct by discouraging investment in new housing. “Notice they are not building fences to keep people out of Venezuela,” said Lanzarone. “Why is that?”
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