By introducing a resolution to oppose the exemption of Stony Run, a 266-unit apartment complex in Kingston, from Emergency Tenant Protection Act (ETPA) rent regulations, Sara Pasti, the first-term alder for the ward which contains the apartment complex, has come down decisively on the side of tenants.
Her resolution opens yet another front in the constant skirmishing which surrounds both rental housing affordability and availability in communities all across the Hudson Valley.
Picking a side appeared inevitable. No other topic in Kingston has so predictably brought throngs of residents to the city hall council chambers, month after month, year after year, to harangue and lecture their elected representatives.
Pasti, an émigrée of New York City who spent 18 years in Beacon, a city recently transformed by development, recognizes gentrification when she sees it.
“In Beacon, before my six years on that city’s council, I chaired the comprehensive plan committee because when I saw the Dia was going there, I knew what was going to happen,” she said. Still, Pasti added, nobody could have foreseen what happened during the pandemic, “… when people fled from New York City up here with more money than anyone in the region had. And that was I think what’s caused a lot of this housing crisis. People have come up who have more means than the people who generally tend to live in the region.”
Pasti, a Wesleyan Phi Beta Kappa graduate, was Neil Trager director of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz for a decade. She moved to Kingston during the pandemic.
The proposed deal
Opposing the exemption from state rent regulations that Stony Run is seeking appears to put Pasti in the camp alongside other alders more dependably sympathetic to tenants’ concerns. Pasti, who describes herself as both a pragmatist and a social progressive, denied that the housing emergency had radicalized her perspective. “When it comes to things that I think are really going to better the quality of life of people here in Kingston and my constituents,” she said, “I go issue by issue.”
By the time Pasti was elected to the common council after an August 2023 appointment by mayor Steve Noble to an unexpired term, Kingston’s housing emergency had already been declared. Rent regulations for a portion of the city’s rental housing — Stony Run among them — had already been enacted. The bold regulatory agreement now under fire had already been brokered between Noble and Stony Run.
If the apartment complex would agree to constrain its rents to a range of workforce affordability rental thresholds for 40 years, Noble had proposed, the city would bless the transfer of the apartment complex to non-profit ownership.
Properties owned by non-profits are among a class of buildings such as hospitals, monasteries and asylums which are exempt from state rent regulation.
Should the city’s affordable rental availability crisis come to an end, the regulatory agreement also provided for extending rent regulations to existing tenants as though they were still in effect, with the understanding that it would be the city, not the state, which would be responsible for enforcement. The agreement was ratified by the common council.
Major repairs needed
Pasti requested the presence of city legal counsel at last month’s community development and housing committee to guide the alders into the weeds of the regulatory agreement.
“I wanted to pass this resolution essentially in support of the tenants who are there and who are currently protected by ETPA,” Pasti said. “But my question is, since we do have an emergency declaration in effect, and we still are subject to ETPA, why would we then be interested in seeing these units removed from ETPA protections?”
Committee members shared a litany of issues which they said demonstrated a laissez-faire attitude towards complying with the existing tenant regulations which appeared to contradict the Stony Run’s claim of a charitable mission.
“They’re getting some pretty significant tax exemptions,” added alder Michele Hirsch, “so it’s not very clear if they’re earning more, but there’s still some major, major issues going on there.”
“This used to be a luxury apartment complex and has just gone downhill,” Pasti explained. “The current owner you know has been taking some steps working with building safety to address some of the concerns on a case-by-case basis, but there’s still major repairs that need to be made.”
Pasti said she’s been working with the Stony Run tenants for the entirety of the time she’s been on the council.
“I’ve developed a good working relationship from when Jenna Goldstein was the tenant organizer for Kingston,” Pasti said. “We had a system in which the tenants would call her because they knew her, and then she would call me and I would call the building department and the building department would send an inspector to address the situation. Complaints that had to do with lack of heat and other issues that arise when you have a large apartment complex. The building department knows me.”
Alder Michael Tierney, formerly on the Rent Guidelines Board, the body charged with recommending regulation of all affected apartments in Kingston, asked Pasti whether any of the tenants had received a negative rent adjustment, as mandated by the board in 2022.
“Not to my knowledge,” responded Pasti.
Full council decides
Giving cover to landlords of rent-regulated buildings in Kingston who’ve been slow to abide by the rent guideline’s board’s legally enforceable recommendations has been a years-long fog of legal challenges making their way through the courts.
Enforcement of the ETPA is the responsibility of a state agency, the Office of Rent Administration.
Whether emergency tenant protections continue on in Kingston depends in no small part on the forthcoming ruling from the Court of Appeals on arguments which took place on May 15th.
Kingston’s tri-annual rental housing vacancy survey is also currently under way. A vacancy rate finding of five percent or more would end rent regulations in Kingston.
Pasti’s discussion ended with the committee’s unanimous support, with alder Jeanne Edwards absent from the meeting, to advance the resolution opposing rental-regulation exemption to the full common council on June 3.
“We’ve been listening to this for a couple years now,” remarked committee chair Steve Schabot, “so yeah definitely, I’m a yes.”
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