Good Cause Eviction suffers another defeat
Good Cause Eviction suffers another defeat
Updated Good Cause Eviction tracker
This week:
- Good Cause Eviction - courts block it in Albany and now in Newburgh, NY
- Governor Hochul and CHIP set the scene for 2023 NY housing plans
- Affordable housing projects approved by City Council in Q4 2022.
Good Cause Eviction tracker - December 2022
First it was Albany, now Newburgh, NY has seen its Good Cause Eviction law defeated by NY courts. In the Albany challenge the NY Supreme Court judge who ruled against Good Cause said, “The landlord’s right to increase rent is not conditioned upon a showing of good cause,” amongst other reasons. Albany and Newburgh will be able to maintain Good Cause rules for the time being thanks to a stay order. The stay order allows cities in NY to keep Good Cause Eviction in place until an appeal in an appellate court gets denied. Some have called this a temporary reinstatement of the law. These recent legal wins for landlords has motivated tenants to look to the state of NY as the ultimate arbiter of tenant protections.
Link to the Good Cause legislation available here.
IMPORTANT: Take a look at how today’s Good Cause Tracker has evolved from last year this time. The changes in the landscape are significant. See last year’s tracker here.
Policy priorities in 2023
1- Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP)
NY’s CHIP released its priorities for the 2023 legislative session. The priorities are split between state and city directives, and they are expected to represent the bulk of the discourse in 2022.
- State
Accessory Dwelling Units / Basement apartments – allowing for smaller homes and basement units to be legalized as a means for growing housing supply.
Housing Access Voucher Program – corresponds to Senate Bill 2804B to reform the current voucher system to allow lower-income tenants access to more housing and to ensure housing providers get paid more seamlessly
Transit oriented development – providing additional incentives for building housing near transit hubs, like removing parking requirements and the like.
- City
Loosening FAR caps – reducing density limits on real estate developments in NY (allow NY to go more vertical).
Comprehensive zoning overhaul – this could refer to one of two things. Either maintaining the current zoning framework but doing a one-time big change to the zoning code (for instance replacing industrial zoning with residential + industrial zoning), or it could be a call to reform the current mechanisms in place like ULURP or environmental reviews that dictate the procedures required to change zoning.
Vacancy rents on rent stabilized properties – CHIP has discussed this almost ad infinitum and for good reason. There is a real lack of economic incentive for owners of RS property to bring their vacant apartments back online if they must renovate thoroughly but they can’t raise rents to re-coup their money invested in renovating.
Interestingly, Good Cause Eviction and the 421 A tax abatement were absent from CHIP’s priority list.
2- Kathy Hochul
In the same vein, Governor Kathy Hochul spoke at New York Housing Conference and laid the groundwork for a bold agenda in her state of the Union come January 2023. During her talk, she highlighted the hard truths about NY’s track record in building housing:
Home prices have increased by 50% since 2015 in the NY Metro, and they have increased by 80% in the rest of the state.
More than 50% of NYC renters are rent burdened, meaning 30% or more of their gross income is spent on rent.
She called NY a “national leader in blocking housing,” and then went on to explain that other large cities are “developing new housing units at a rate two to four times the rate of New York City.
She said that suburban lack of housing development was even worse than that of NYC.
“Westchester and Long Island are at the very bottom of the list for new housing permits,” compared to other suburban areas in the country.
She went on “… From 2012 to 2021, the parts of New Jersey closest to New York City have built four to five times more housing per capita as suburban Long Island.”
This should all sound familiar if you’ve been keeping up with my newsletters. It is nice to be validated by the governor. But nothing about what she is saying is nice, and it underscores the need for drastic change. Let’s make sure Kathy Hochul hits that subscribe button sometime soon!
NYC’s score sheet for affordable housing approvals in Q4
Links to developments referenced above:
NYC has approved the above rezonings and projects to move forward in Q4 of this year. This list is remarkable because 4 out of 5 of the above projects came close to not gaining approval. The bureaucracy of NY housing development allows for a dizzying number of checkpoints and inputs from third party stakeholders. Heavy media coverage added pressure on council members to not pass these bills, as tenant organizers protested throughout the quarter. Some articles like this NY times piece point to the ~7,100 new units being approved (equal to 25% of total housing delivered to NYC market in 2022) and say that the tide is changing in NYC. Is it really?
Sources: Times Union, Governor.NY, Gotham Gazette