A few years ago, the New York tenant movement forced the state government to strengthen and expand its rent regulation system. This was the greatest expansion of renters’ rights New York had seen in decades. In the years since, the movement has grown increasingly emboldened. But the state has grown increasingly intransigent, seemingly frozen in its tracks. While demands from tenants (and others, like single-payer healthcare advocates) have grown more and more visionary and expansive, the state government has shown only limited responsiveness, and has in some ways grown even more recalcitrant than it was prior to 2019.
Was 2024 a year of triumph or defeat for tenants? Did the housing policy fight mark the end of an era of expansion, or the growing pains of a new beginning? By taking a close look at the outcomes of the 2024 New York State legislative session, we aim to clarify the state of play and enumerate the tasks facing the movement in the short and long term. While the following analysis focuses on a specific time and place, it reflects challenges faced by many resurgent social movements seeking legislative change from reactionary local governments. It likely resonates strongest in places where, like New York City, the contemporary iteration of the Democratic party—nominally liberal, but unabashedly pro-landlord and committed to austerity—controls the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the city and state government. With this political orientation, the governing party aims to achieve two contradictory goals: securing capital’s continuing ability to expand and the general public’s ability to secure social reproduction.
New York’s 2024 housing policy fight
In April 2024, New York State’s lawmakers agreed to a consequential housing deal. The battle lines for this housing fight were drawn in 2019, when New York’s tenants won the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA). The HSTPA strengthened the state’s rent stabilization system but did not extend new tenure protections for market-rate tenants or create new resources for unhoused people. New York’s tenant movement has been fighting for new rights and resources for both groups since then, in the form of Good Cause, a nearly universal statewide eviction protection law; and the Housing Access Voucher Program (HAVP), a state rental assistance program.
For landlords, 2019 was a monumental setback. Many had built massive fortunes by systematically exploiting rent-law loopholes. More importantly, the HSTPA was evidence of a power shift from landlords to tenants. In June 2022, the legislature allowed the 421‑a program—which insulated luxury developers from property taxes—to sunset, dealing the real-estate industry yet another major blow.
Landlords went on the offensive immediately, employing a diversity of tactics to roll back the HSTPA and block Good Cause at all costs: trying to leverage a radicalized US Supreme Court to challenge the constitutionality of rent stabilization, spending millions on lobbying, whipping up a moral panic about squatters, and spreading false information about vacancies and physical distress in rent-stabilized buildings.
Some of these efforts, like the Supreme Court challenge and an aggressive vacancy deregulation bill, tanked dramatically, and took down a major landlord lobby group with them. However, landlords’ tales of woe found a sympathetic ear in Albany in 2024. After five years of lobbying, landlords were able to raise the cap on in-unit repair costs they are able to pass on to tenants, from $15k to $30k–50k.
Developers also resurrected the 421‑a program, now called 485‑x, creating an even lengthier tax exemption. While real-estate groups were not able to kill Good Cause, the millions they spent lobbying against it did not fully go to waste. The version that passed is riddled with loopholes, excluding tenants in small buildings and “small portfolios,” and initially only covered New York City. [1] And, as in 2019, homeless New Yorkers and people who simply cannot afford their rent were once again left out in the cold when HAVP did not pass. While landlords and developers ostensibly joined homeless advocates in calling for HAVP, their enthusiasm for that program paled in contrast to their enmity for tenant protections, and they did little to advance that campaign. Instead, the real-estate lobby focused far more on getting the legislature to replace 421‑a; doing so, however, meant sidelining tenants, since those negotiations were between representatives of the real-estate industry and representatives of the construction unions. Nearly all negotiation over other housing legislation was delayed until the tax question was settled, leaving tenant and homeless advocacy groups in a structurally subordinate position.
Short-term scenarios
This mix of conditional victories and unconditional defeats puts the movement at a crossroads, with a number of possible paths forward.
The outcome of the Good Cause campaign creates a clear set of next steps for the rest of New York State, outside of New York City. Each municipality can now opt in to Good Cause and can do so with stronger terms than the rules set out for New York City. Unlike New York’s rent stabilization laws, cities and towns do not need to prove the existence of a “housing emergency” (defined as a habitable vacancy rate below 5%), a facet of the law that has been weaponized by upstate landlords to block cities from opting in. Localities with tenant-friendly (or at least not tenant-hostile) local governments will likely opt in to these protections, and tenants will fight for the most expansive coverage possible. Over the summer, Albany, Kingston, and Poughkeepsie adopted more expansive, local versions of the state Good Cause law. This strategy, however, will be challenging in a great many more politically conservative localities, some of which—like Troy—have tenant majorities. In such places, tenant struggle may be redirected toward local electoral fights to produce a government willing to vote for Good Cause, and do so on favorable terms.
New York City tenants, who secured a weaker form of Good Cause than many sought, face a different set of steps and dilemmas. First, organizers must educate those who are covered by the new law and make sure they are primed to use it. Good Cause is essentially a tenant’s legal defense against evictions or unwarranted rent hikes, so tenants must know they have this protection in order to use it. This will involve mass popular education through both in-person means (public meetings and door-knocking) and via mass communications (mailings and social media).
New York City tenants hope that the law that passed represents a first step toward more expansive coverage—something closer to the bill as introduced by Senator Julia Salazar, which would have covered far more tenants and challenged more rent hikes. Achieving this would mean organizing tenants who should be covered but are excluded from the current protections, and mobilizing in Albany at a large scale, likely for several years. This strategy could win incremental victories each legislative session, or perhaps a wholesale strengthening of the law. It presents an organizing challenge, though, as it requires activating a very specific subset of the broader tenant movement—for example, New York City tenants in buildings under 10 units, whose landlords do not own more than 10 units in total and do not live on the premises—and convincing the legislature and governor to reopen a contentious issue they largely consider settled.
If New York City tenants hope the existing law is a step toward broader protections, they also fear that it is a new high-water mark they will be forced to defend against encroachments each year for the foreseeable future. The history of rent stabilization in the 1990s and 2000s suggests this may be a reasonable concern. Rent stabilization suffered from a litany of loopholes that were steadily added to the program, which provided landlords the opportunity to raise rents dramatically and ultimately withdraw homes from stabilization altogether (Kadi and Ronald, 2016). Even this year’s budget contained a rollback to the 2019 rent laws, suggesting the state government may continue to pit the interests of one group of tenants (market-rate renters who now have Good Cause protections) against another group of tenants (rent-stabilized tenants, whose landlords can now raise rents on vacant apartments by larger sums).
For New York City’s homeless activists, and for low-income tenants who need rental assistance to avoid becoming homeless, the defeat of HAVP for the fourth consecutive year was a severe blow. Advocates for this program have little choice but to reorganize, build up support, and try again in the coming year. But if the state government refuses to add new ongoing expenses to the budget, which seems to be the primary reason for their refusal to pass this broadly popular program, there are no clear options for curbing homelessness. There is simply no way to house extremely low-income people without some form of ongoing subsidy, whether it is paid to the builder, the renter, or the operator of the housing (public, private, or nonprofit). Politicians will continue to decry the worsening homelessness crisis, but if they will not support efforts to rehouse people or prevent evictions, the crisis will only grow more acute.
Long-term scenarios
In the coming years, tenants across New York State will fight to opt in to rent stabilization and Good Cause, while working to keep these two regulatory frameworks from buckling under pressure from the real-estate lobby. At the same time, tenant organizers and homeless advocates will work on long-term campaigns to expand rent regulation and the city’s social housing stock, while pushing for policies that turn the tide on homelessness.
Expanding tenant protections will be central to any long-term housing justice plan. Enacted 50 years ago, the state’s Emergency Tenant Protection Act (ETPA) enabled the state’s rent stabilization system, but also froze it in time, excluding most unsubsidized buildings constructed after 1974. Written with New York City’s dense neighborhoods in mind, the ETPA excludes buildings with fewer than six units. Reforming the ETPA to cover newer buildings could be a next organizing step. According to an analysis conducted by Theo Ham for the Community Service Society, expanding ETPA could bring 2 million homes into rent stabilization. Eliminating the construction date would result in approximately 500,000 new units being eligible for rent stabilization across New York State; eliminating the unit-count requirement would result in approximately 1 million eligible units; and eliminating both would result in an additional 1.7 million eligible units. Further, between 1994 and 2019, the city lost more than 300,000 rent stabilized units to deregulation. Re‑regulating those units, and rolling back rents in illegally deregulated apartments, could be another organizing avenue.
By containing speculative land pricing, stronger rent regulation would create the environment for social housing conversions and development, another goal of New York’s tenant movement. For a few years, organizers have been championing the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), which would create the legal framework for tenants to convert their buildings into social housing. A longer-term campaign, calling for the creation of a Social Housing Development Authority, seeks to empower the state government to develop and rehabilitate social housing across New York State on a major scale. This would restructure the state’s housing landscape, reducing rent burdens and eviction rates. Furthermore, an expansion of the city’s social housing stock, paired with a permanent rental assistance program like HAVP, would help address the city’s longstanding and worsening homelessness crisis.
Bigger demands, greater resistance
Politically, New York is in a moment of regression. Hard-won housing laws, like the HSTPA, are under attack by both the real-estate industry and elected officials. At the same time, however, the movement has embraced some of the boldest programs in decades and is finding support from a growing base of precariously housed New Yorkers disillusioned with the status quo. The tenant and homeless movement hope it can push the legislature to adopt its programs, but fears that repeated political setbacks could diminish its momentum. The real-estate industry and its political backers hope they can maintain the status quo while beating back recent tenant victories, but fear that a worsening housing crisis could threaten their fiscal and political base. While the balance of power is clearly tipped toward the industry and its defenders, both sides appear unsure what the future will hold.
Bibliography
- Kadi, Justin and Ronald, Richard. 2016. “Undermining housing affordability for New York’s low-income households: the role of policy reform and rental sector restructuring”, Critical Social Policy, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 265–288.
