ALBANY, N.Y. (NEXSTAR) — The New York State Assembly Housing Committee held a public hearing in Albany on Tuesday to examine how municipalities outside of New York City can opt into laws that regulate rent, services, leases, and evictions to keep housing attainable. The hearing centered on the Rent Emergency Stabilization for Tenants Act (S4659A/A4877A), a proposed bill that could make it easier and less expensive to enact better tenant protections.
Proponents of the REST Act—including tenants, local elected officials, and legal experts—testified that current state law is flawed and easy for landlords to manipulate. Opponents argued that the existing legal standard should be maintained to incentivize investment.
Assembly Housing Committee Chair Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat and cosponsor of the REST Act, convened the four-hour hearing about the statewide housing crisis at 10 a.m. “We’ve seen that rent stabilization—which helps to keep approximately 1 million apartments affordable for about 2.3 million people—helps stave off displacement” in New York City, she said.
Rent stabilization is the newer of New York’s rent regulations, covering buildings built from 1947 to 1974. The older rent control system dates back to the housing shortage after World War II and applies to buildings built before 1947.
In 2019, the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act expanded eligibility for rent stabilization under the Emergency Tenant Protection Act to every county so any city, town, or village could opt in. The ETPA, first passed in 1974, lets a municipality declare a housing emergency if the local rental housing vacancy rate is documented to be under 5%. Rent stabilization under the ETPA applies to buildings with six or more units constructed before 1974.
The ETPA requires rent-regulated landlords to file an initial registration with the Division of Housing and Community Renewal and annual registration statements thereafter, detailing the regulated rent for each unit. The HSTPA also made it so apartments can’t be deregulated based on rent amounts or tenants’ income levels. Each municipality also pays DHCR a yearly administrative fee of $20 per rent-regulated unit, but that cost can be passed onto landlords.
According to Jason Mayes, Executive Director of the Hudson Valley Justice Center, the largest cities in the Hudson Valley—Yonkers, New Rochelle, Mount Vernon, Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, and Peekskill—had about one eviction for every eight tenant households in 2019. And Poughkeepsie Councilmember Evan Menist added that over 60% of residents rent, with most living in buildings with under five units that the current law does not cover.
Plus, policy analyst Oksana Mironova of the Community Service Society of New York said we’re the only state whose local housing emergencies depend on vacancy studies. Indeed, several proponents of the REST Act testified that the vacancy study requirement is expensive and unreliable, often just a legal barrier for wealthy landlords to block local government action.
Vacancy rates in cities with large student populations—like Ithaca, Syracuse, New Paltz, Poughkeepsie, and Kingston—fluctuate dramatically as seasons change. And since the 2019 expansion, Kingston is the only locality upstate that successfully opted into the ETPA. Outside of Ulster County, 16 municipalities in Nassau, 2 in Rockland, and 21 in Westchester counties adopted rent stabilization. Meanwhile, places like Albany and Newburgh were blocked by lawsuits.
Poughkeepsie, for example, voted unanimously to declare an emergency after spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on a vacancy study, but the effort was struck down in court. Nyack ran out of money for legal defense against the real estate industry and had to opt back out.
The mandated studies frequently burden local governments. For example, Albany spent over $75,000 on its study, which Syracuse City Auditor Alexander Marion said could pay the annual salary and fringe benefits for a code inspector in Syracuse. Kingston Common Council Member Michelle Hirsch said their $30,000 study relied on self reports from landlords, and that large building owners manipulated the results by “holding units offline, not renting, [and] not making them available.”
Overall, self-reporting can’t be confirmed without extensive door knocking, and vacancy studies nonetheless show high rates of non-responses from landlords. In Albany, 71% of survey respondents declared themselves exempt, while in Rochester, only about 17% of landlords even bothered to respond.
Supporters want the state to protect more tenants, pointing out that housing instability disproportionately affects New Yorkers in vulnerable populations. Hirsch said current laws exclude 80% of renters in Kingston, where 60% of rental buildings have under five units, buildings too small for protections to apply.
After Kingston declared a housing emergency, landlords issued illegal lease renewals, raising rents and pressuring tenants to sign quickly. Hirsch said that a New York City-backed landlord association sued to challenge the emergency declaration. She also claimed landlords “anticipated and exploited to manipulate results” of another vacancy study to falsely suggest the emergency was over.
Richard Lanzarone, Executive Director of Housing Providers of New York State, testified that his lobby group has spent “probably $150,000” suing to stop rent stabilization.
Mironova cited a 2024 survey showing that almost 23% of tenants in Syracuse reported an eviction attempt, ten percentage points higher than in New York City. What’s more, the survey found that 31% of Latino respondents and 14% of Black households experienced an eviction attempt, compared to 12% and 9% of non-Latino and white households, respectively.
Genevieve Rand from Housing Justice for All referred to a report that showed an “extremely strong correlation between heightened eviction rates and heightened rates of violent crime,” linking housing stability and public safety. She explained that stable rents create communities where people put down roots and watch out for their neighbors.
Hudson Mayor Kamal Johnson said that 7% of children in his city’s school district are homeless and the black population dropped by 40% over the past six years. He also highlighted broader economic impacts, noting that the hospital in Hudson has over 200 open positions, linking the lack of affordable housing to the lack of a local workforce.
Legal experts testified that the REST Act’s use of public data would be more likely to withstand legal challenges than the current vacancy study process. Ben Surface, Supervising Attorney with the Hudson Valley Justice Center, argued that, because the vacancy study is questioned for its integrity and methodology, publicly available data from state and federal agencies that has already received scrutiny would be more authoritative in court. He said that, since the state’s good cause eviction law was passed, no municipality was sued over it, so localities are “freed up from the burden of this litigation” once New York backs a housing measure.
And Rand explained that when tenants spend less on rent, they spend more in the local economy. Unaffordable rents enrich a “hyper wealthy real estate industry,” aggravating “the highest economic inequality that this country has ever experienced,” she said.
But Carl Finger, Chief Counsel of the Building and Realty Institute, wasn’t convinced. He argued that eliminating the minimum 5% vacancy rate for declaring a housing emergency would “destroy all incentive” for any landlord to invest in buildings built before 1974. He asserted that, right now, multifamily property owners are forced to foot the bill for affordable housing, which state and local governments should pay for.
But profits for rent-stabilized landlords rose 12% in New York City in the past year, according to Menist, which suggests that regulation is “not anti-landlord, it’s pro-community.”
The REST Act—sponsored by Democratic Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha and Democratic State Senator Brian Kavanaugh—would allow a housing emergency declaration based on metrics like the the rent burden for tenants, local or regional homelessness rates, and overall housing supply. It’s also supposed to protect cities from frivolous lawsuits from landlords, let localities include smaller buildings, and incorporate rolling 15-year exemptions for units with new construction.
Finger said there should be a “tri-annual survey of vacancies” so communities with “10% or more vacancies” return to an unregulated system once the emergency ends. Given the potential return, Finger said investing in residential real estate is “foolhardy” when one can safely invest in municipal bonds or Treasury securities to “get over 4% tax free.” But he argued that property owners deserve more profit than that of a passive investment because being a landlord “requires work.”
Republican Assemblymember Daniel Norber, meanwhile, questioned whether the problem lies with rent-gouging property owners. He asked witnesses if 200,000 migrants who entered New York State since 2022 had affected housing in any way in their communities. Representatives from Syracuse and Poughkeepsie responded that new Americans don’t contribute meaningfully to the housing crisis but are often victims of exploitation in the housing market because they’re unfamiliar with legal protections like code enforcement.
