Strengthen tenant protections — and not just for NYC
This year the Emergency Tenant Protection Act — the bill that enables rent stabilization in New York City and its surrounding counties — expires, and legislators will debate how exactly to renew and/or strengthen tenants’ rights.
But this year, the tenants and housing advocates of Albany are done sitting by while Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-cousins debate ETPA. We are joining our allies across the state to fight for not only the renewal of rent stabilization — but for it to be strengthened and expanded to cover the entire state.
We haven’t fully recovered from the foreclosure crisis — in the Capital Region, notices of intent to foreclose are being filed at a higher rate than they have been in over five years. As the prospect of homeownership remains inaccessible to most low-income households, public policy has failed to catch up with the reality on the ground.
The rental housing landscape in upstate New York is not at all excluded from the housing crisis. This is not solely a New York City issue. In Rochester, 64 percent of the households rent. In Buffalo it’s 59 percent and 61 percent in Syracuse. Here in Albany, 63 percent of households are renting, with a rental vacancy rate of just 4 percent.
Tenants lack even the most basic protections outside of the New York City area and are essentially at the mercy of their landlords. The right to own and profit off
property is far more sacred than the right to a stable, decent place to live upstate. This is one of the reasons why a recent ranking of renter-friendly states put New York 39th in the country, behind Alabama and Florida.
It’s also one of the reasons homelessness has skyrocketed in the state in the past 10 years. Currently more than 90,000 New Yorkers sleep on the street or in shelters.
Cuomo, Heastie, and Stewart-cousins need to do better for New York’s eight million tenants — and they can.
United Tenants of Albany has joined the Upstate-downstate Housing Alliance in the fight to ensure that, as the rent laws are set to be renewed again in 2019, upstate tenants get the protections we deserve.
Under ETPA, local governments are allowed to opt into a basic framework of renters’ rights. Tenants are given the right to a renewal lease with limited rent increases, and succession rights to family members.
The last village to opt in was Ossining, in the Hudson Valley, this past September. The measure currently only applies to eight New York counties. All tenants in the state deserve these same rights.
We’re pressuring Albany officials to remove unfair restrictions that prevent tenants living upstate from accessing basic housing rights. Our local senator, Neil Breslin, D-albany, and Assemblymember Kevin Cahill, D-kingston, are preparing to introduce a bill that would remove the geographic boundaries in ETPA.
The right to own and profit off property is far more sacred than the right to a stable, decent place to live upstate.
Entire buildings in gentrifying neighborhoods of Rochester are being evicted so that landlords can raise the rent. Our bill would prevent landlords from carrying out mass evictions, while still allowing reasonable rent increases.
Too much of the housing stock in Albany is quite literally falling down around lowincome tenants, and more than 5,000 evictions were filed in the city of Albany alone last year. Upstate tenants deserve to feel safe and protected when they assert their right to a decent place to live.
It’s time that Cuomo’s housing policy meets the needs of the whole state. This is the year tenants finally take back power in Albany, and we are going to take it back for the entire state.