{"id":331,"date":"2019-06-21T01:10:38","date_gmt":"2019-06-21T01:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/?p=331"},"modified":"2019-06-21T01:57:06","modified_gmt":"2019-06-21T01:57:06","slug":"new-york-expanded-rent-control-will-other-cities-follow-suit-next-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/331\/","title":{"rendered":"New York Expanded Rent Control. Will Other Cities Follow Suit? \u2013 Next City"},"content":{"rendered":"

nextcity.org\/daily\/entry\/new-york-expanded-rent-control-will-other-cities-follow-suit<\/a>
\nNew York Expanded Rent Control. Will Other Cities Follow Suit? They didn\u2019t get everything they wanted, but last week, when a coalition of advocates from across New York state celebrated a package of new laws expanding rent regulation and tenant protections, it was as much of a shot in the arm for the housing-rights movement as any in recent memory.
\nIn New York City, landlords will no longer be allowed to jack up the cost of rent-stabilized apartments by 20 percent when tenants leave. The new laws also end so-called vacancy decontrol, which allows landlords to take a unit out of rent regulation when they it is vacant and the rent surpasses $2,700 a month. (Together these practices add up to the \u201cgrandaddy of loopholes,\u201d as my colleague Oscar put it last year.) New laws will also limit how much landlords can raise the rent when they\u2019re performing capital repairs on apartment buildings. For the first time, these reforms will be made permanent, as opposed to expiring every few years as usual.. And under the expansion of the Emergency Tenant Protection Act (ETPA), cities around the state will be allowed to establish their own rent-control policies during housing emergencies, defined as when the vacancy rate is under five percent.
\nIt was the alliance of tenants and homeless New Yorkers in New York City and smaller cities around the state that made the new laws possible, says Sarah Treuhaft, managing director at PolicyLink. Earlier this year, PolicyLink released a report in conjunction with the Right to the City Alliance and the Center for Popular Democracy advocating for the expansion of rent control nationwide. Expanding rent control could stabilize 42 million households, the report concluded, with low-income tenants of color standing to gain the most benefits. The report highlighted rent-control campaigns around the country, including New York\u2019s.
\n\u201cI think the New York campaign really shows the payoff of a movement-building approach long-term,\u201d Treuhaft says. \u201cTenant organizing, alliances across rural and urban communities, and campaigns to put people in office who represent the interests of everyday renters instead of the real estate lobby were all incredibly crucial to this win. And it took years to get there, so I think other campaigns should be looking at those strategies and learning from them.\u201d
\nThe ETPA was created in 1974, a state law that authorized rent stabilization in three counties surrounding New York City and amended the rent stabilization laws in the city. So the push to expand it had to take place in Albany. Housing Justice for All, a coalition of dozens of tenants groups convened as part of the Upstate\/Downstate Housing Alliance, built pressure on lawmakers as it made the case for more tenant protections. Cea Weaver, the campaign coordinator for Housing Justice for All, says that tenants in New York City and smaller cities in the state have usually been divided \u2014 and that\u2019s been an intentional strategy on the part of real estate interests, she says. Uniting tenants across the state was the most important strategy in the campaign, Weaver says. And tying tenants\u2019 rights to homelessness was a critical move as well, she says.
\n\u201cNew York has a skyrocketing homelessness crisis, and too often, homelessness and tenants\u2019 rights are separate apart from each other even though to me it\u2019s an obvious connection,\u201d Weaver says. \u201cIf you have weak tenants\u2019 rights, you are going to have a rising homelessness crisis.\u201d
\nNew York City has a strong history of tenant organizing, and, Weaver notes, it has kept much of its public housing while other cities have lost it. It has also maintained rent control in the city, though the strength of the regulations has waxed and waned. It\u2019s also the home of Wall Street and a powerful real estate lobby, and for all those reasons, the city is on the front line of the fight for better conditions for tenants.
\n\u201cFor us it was strategically critical, and also just morally critical, that we build a movement of tenants and homeless New Yorkers together, and upstate and downstate [connections],\u201d Weaver says.
\nNotably, one major reform that the Housing Justice for All Campaign failed to win was a \u201cgood cause\u201d provision, which would have prevented landlords from evicting tenants without providing a reason. Tenants in jurisdictions around the U.S. have been pushing for such provisions, with varying degrees of success. Philadelphia, for example, enacted a good-cause bill in January, though after pressure from landlords who said an inability to evict \u201cproblem\u201d tenants would harm their ability to retain \u201cgood\u201d tenants, it was altered to apply only to certain short leases. In New York, Weaver says, the \u201cgood cause\u201d provision represented the most direct challenge to the real estate industry, because it approaches policymaking from a housing-rights framework rather than a property-rights framework. Many in New York \u2014 even affordable housing advocates \u2014 still believe landlords should be able to do pretty much whatever they want with their buildings, Weaver says. The campaign will push for good cause again next year, she says.
\nAcross the country in California, lawmakers have also been debating a series of proposed changes to rent-control laws and tenant protections. Last year, Californians rejected a measure that would have repealed Costa-Hawkins, a state law that prevents cities from establishing new rent control policies. This year, state lawmakers are in the middle of debating another series of tenant protections. Shanti Singh, a communications coordinator with the California statewide renters\u2019 rights group Tenants Together, says she hopes California\u2019s lawmakers look to New York and \u201cfeel a pang (or ten) of guilt.\u201d
\n\u201cThat New York repealed vacancy decontrol is tremendous,\u201d Singh wrote in an email. \u201cCosta-Hawkins is basically the Bible of the Sacramento Capitol, and the great white whale of every tenant advocate in California. That the Upstate-Downstate [Alliance] was able to pass these protections despite a real estate lobby that is as dominant in New York as it is in California, is a great sign.\u201d
\nStill, Singh said the lack of a good cause provision in New York, and the likelihood that California lawmakers will not establish a strong provision either, were reasons not to declare total victory.
\n\u201cHaving to specify cause to evict a tenant is pure common sense, and the simple reason that the real estate industry opposes just-cause is because they want to have the freedom to evict tenants who follow the rules whenever they so choose,\u201d Singh wrote. \u201cSo there\u2019s still a lot of work to do, but we\u2019ll keep organizing more and more exploited renters until we win :)\u201d
\nThis article is part of Backyard, a newsletter exploring scalable solutions to make housing fairer, more affordable and more environmentally sustainable. Subscribe to our thrice-weekly Backyard newsletter.<\/p>\n

Mary Bolton 202-390-1208<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

nextcity.org\/daily\/entry\/new-york-expanded-rent-control-will-other-cities-follow-suit New York Expanded Rent Control. Will Other Cities Follow Suit? They didn\u2019t get everything they wanted, but last week, when a coalition of advocates from across New York state celebrated a package of new laws expanding rent regulation and tenant protections, it was as much of a shot in the arm for the housing-rights […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-housingarchive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}