On Friday, March 15, the Kingston Housing Committee hosted a panel and town-hall discussion with elected and appointed officials about the housing crisis in Ulster County at the Center for Creative Education in Energy Square.
Mariel Fiori, managing editor of the Spanish language magazine La Voz and host of the radio show by the same name, acted as MC and moderated panelist statements and the Q&A that followed.
The panel included assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha, Kingston alder Michele Hirsch, county commissioner of social services Mike Iapoce, and Morgan Weinberg, chief of staff for state senator Michelle Hinchey, plus tenant representatives Katrina Houser and Marisa McClinton.
No landlord advocates attended the event.
Top policy priority for the evening was whether good-cause eviction could become law in New York State through the coming year’s budget. The language of a bill sponsored in the State Senate by Julia Salazar and in the Assembly by Pam Hunter could add protections for Ulster County’s 36,000 renters — and New York State renters as a whole.
“We have a higher chance of passing it through the budget, because some of the more conservative Democrats really don’t like good cause,” explained Shrestha, a co-sponsor of the bill. “They see this as an assault on private property.”
Worrisome to Shrestha were attempts to introduce an opt-in clause to the language.
“That’s a way of watering down the bill to a point of ineffectiveness,” she said. “If you do an opt-in, then you have to wait for all these municipalities to opt in, and you can’t assume that it’s going to be easy, because my district is not just Kingston, I also need Rosendale to opt in. I need Town of Ulster to opt in, and it’s not likely.”
DSS commissioner Michael Iapoce stated his belief that the crisis in both affordable and supportive housing involves inventory stressed beyond capacity.
“Emergency housing is supposed to be a short-term solution,” said Iapoce. “Back in 2019, the average length of time a family was in emergency housing was about eight months. People are now in emergency housing for up to three and a half years if they’re a family, or up to nine months if they’re an individual. The reason the system is so stressed is that emergency housing is no longer a short-term solution. Emergency housing is essentially the only option that we have right now. We can’t just fabricate infrastructure out of nowhere.”
Both tenant advocates had personally experienced the adverse effects of the housing market. Though employed, McClinton had to live in her car for a time. Houser had dealt with the scattering of her family to a different county after an eviction.
Iapoce said that Ulster County was still “a couple years away” from seeing the completion and introduction of new units into the housing stock. He supplied statistics.
“In 2019 we averaged 343 [unhoused] individuals [a month],” he said. “Right now, as of tonight, we have 474 [unhoused] individuals, and that doesn’t include the individuals and families that are not in our system. From the beginning and through the two most intense years of the pandemic the numbers of unhoused actually fell to their lowest: 266 a month. That was really because we had a situation where there ended up being some stability arrived at because of moratoriums against evictions.”
During this same time period, people migrated into Ulster County to purchase properties, some of whom converted them into Airbnbs, pricing out individuals and families residing in the county.
“Inasmuch as there are initiatives under way that will be meaningful and there are projects being undertaken, the harsh reality is that these projects aren’t arriving, providing any kind of support to the community, soon enough,” said Iapoce. He recommended significant steps be taken now to exert control over rising rents.
Landlord advocates oppose a good-cause eviction law, arguing that procedures built into the judicial eviction process to ensure tenant rights are protected already exist. Evicting a tenant without a court order in New York results in a Class A misdemeanor charge.
Shrestha dismissed the landlord group’s position as disingenuous.
“Right now a tenant cannot take a landlord to court,” said Shrestha. “What we want to do is if a tenant is prevented from renewing their lease or if they’re getting evicted and there isn’t one of the six or so good causes that are listed in the bill, then the landlord has to justify that eviction in court.”
The language of the good-cause law still allows landlords to raise rent by percentages tied to inflation or the increased costs of building management and maintenance.
“If they want to go beyond that increase, they either can negotiate directly with the tenant or the landlord has to justify that in court,” Shrestha said. “Landlords actually don’t like the fact that they have to go to court at all. Ideally, they want to be able to evict tenants without it being anybody’s business.”
Alder Michele Hirsch took issue with the perception that tenants are only evicted because they aren’t paying the rent.
“That is also false,” said Hirsch. “Say [a landlord] offers a new lease and it’s ten, 15, 20 percent higher than what they were paying, and they can’t afford it. [The landlord] has to take the tenant to court. That’s called a holdover eviction. Right now, the numbers here in Kingston for holdover warrants are higher than pre-pandemic levels. Those are not people that are not paying. Those are people that can’t afford the new rent.”
Numbers from the state eviction dashboard showed 27 holdover warrants in 2019. In 2023 58 holdover warrants were reported.
Good-cause eviction laws experienced a brief springtime from April 2021 until January 2022. The cities of Albany, Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, Beacon and Kingston all passed good-cause eviction laws.
The newly adopted protections were undermined in court cases brought by landlord groups.
Wary of the costs of defying growing court precedent, the remaining cities voluntarily repealed their own laws. In municipalities such as New Paltz, advocacy groups like the Legal Aid Society offered to bear the costs of fighting the court battles.
At issue is the concept of pre-emption. New York legal precedent won’t allow housing laws passed by local municipalities to contradict state housing laws.
State law permits a landlord to seek eviction following the expiration of a tenant’s lease or following a tenant’s default on rent. Additional language in local good-cause laws is seen as a restriction on rights granted by the state.
Newburgh’s and Albany’s good-cause eviction laws were found to interfere with a landlord’s right to raise the rent or evict a tenant after a lease expires.
State senator Salazar first introduced a bill to enshrine good cause at the state level in 2019.
A press release identified Mid-Hudson Valley Democratic Socialists of America, For the Many, Ulster Immigrant Defense Network, Wednesday Walk for Black Lives and the Communist Party of the USA in the Hudson Valley as co-hosts of the Kingston event.
Negotiations over the state budget continue in Albany. The deadline for the budget is April 1.
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