Newburgh rent control blocked after landlord suit
Vacancy rate study inaccurate, some say
NEWBURGH — A group of landlords is challenging Newburgh’s housing emergency declaration in state Supreme Court, alleging that the city did not properly conduct a vacancy study to demonstrate the lack of housing that allows it to opt into the state Emergency Tenant Protection Act.
In response, on Wednesday afternoon, Orange County Supreme Court Justice Sandra Sciortino blocked the city of Newburgh and the state Department of Housing and Community Renewal from enforcing the ETPA, pending a final court decision. A court date is set for April 5.
The landlords are represented by the nonprofit Hudson Valley Property Owners Association and two LLCS — New Jersey-based Chadwick Gardens and Delaware-based Nutopia 203 Grand, each of which owns one property in Newburgh. They jointly filed the lawsuit on Tuesday against the city of Newburgh, the Planning Department, Mayor Torrance Harvey, the City Council and the state Division of Homes and Community Renewal.
They claim that Newburgh’s study contained a litany of mathematical and categorical errors. Among them are that the study improperly counted at least two units overseen by charitable nonprofits, which its methodology said it would exclude; that it counted some units that were converted to residential use after 1974, when the ETPA was enacted; that some respondents’ survey answers were incorrectly tabulated; and that it included 87 “disqualified” units in the denominator, but not the numerator, of the fraction used to determine the vacancy rate, thus yielding a lower percentage of vacant units.
Correcting for those errors, the survey results show a 7.56 percent vacancy rate, not the 3.93 percent vacancy rate reported by the city, the plaintiffs allege.
The argument is similar to the one the Hudson Valley Property Owners Association used when it challenged the vacancy study in Kingston, which was the first Hudson Valley city to opt into the ETPA. The court battle complicated Kingston’s efforts to begin regulating units. The landlords ultimately lost and now they are in the process of appealing.
The ETPA requires the vacancy rate to be 5 percent or less in buildings with six or more units constructed before 1974. The law, which allows a municipality to regulate rents, was first enacted in New York City in the late 1960s and was expanded to Westchester, Rockland and Nassau counties in 1974. It became an option for all communities in the state when the state Legislature modified the law in June 2019.
Newburgh released the results of its study in November. It was closely modeled after similar studies in Ossining, Rochester and Kingston. Per the terms of the ETPA, the survey was only sent to property owners of units that would be eligible for rent stabilization. Some properties it excluded were buildings that underwent substantial renovations after 1974; buildings, such as hotels, built for commercial uses before 1974 but converted into rentals later; and units owned by hospitals, colleges and nonprofits.
In addition to several followups by mail and over the phone to those who did not respond to the city’s survey, staff used water department data to determine if units were truly vacant or in use, city Planning and Development Director Ali Church said.
Sixty-eight properties were included in the study, which accounted for 738 units. Of those, 622 were occupied, 24 were determined to be not currently available for rent for various reasons and 63 were vacant due to construction. That resulted in 29 vacant, available units on the market and a vacancy rate of 3.93 percent.
Benjamin Neidl, a Schenectady-based attorney who successfully challenged Newburgh and Albany’s “good-cause eviction” laws, is representing the landlords in their fight against Newburgh’s rent stabilization law.