On the surface, the housing deal in the enacted state budget includes many of the provisions that activists had fought for, including elements of the Good Cause Eviction bill and union wages for construction workers.
It also includes a new tax incentive for New York City developers and incentives to convert unused office space into affordable housing.
But if you dig, even superficially, into the details, there are exemptions and limitations that have caused significant consternation among most stakeholder groups.
Two examples – communities in upstate New York will need to opt-in to good cause eviction; and landlords in New York City will have a limit of $30,000 to spend on updates to rent stabilized apartments, which is double the current limit, but nowhere near the $150,000-plus they had asked for.
Tenant advocates are angry about the diluted good cause provisions in the package. At the same time, they are downplaying the grievances that developers brought to the table.
“We believe if a landlord has been maintaining a building properly and has been maintaining a unit properly, it really doesn’t need that amount of money in repairs to bring the apartment up to code and get it back on the market,” Housing Justice for All’s Cea Weaver said to Capital Tonight. “[Thirty thousand dollars] is an overcorrection for a pretty minimal problem.”
Weaver’s more strenuous criticisms were aimed at the good cause legislation she and others have worked on for five years.
“Our initial policy had a pretty robust protection, and now the Good Cause Eviction bill has been changed to be a much more limited defense in housing court, that some tenants will be able to use, but it is much smaller than the bill we had been working on for many years,” she said.
The problem, says Weaver, are the multiple exemptions to good cause: Apartments that rent for over $6,000 for a one bedroom; small landlords with fewer than 10 units in their portfolio; new construction for 30 years; and upstate cities, which would have to opt-in to good cause.
On the other end of the spectrum, the opt-in provision has upstate landlords breathing a sigh of relief.
“We are very pleased that good cause is opt-in as opposed to mandatory,” Harriet Baldwin, a landlord from the Southern Tier, told Capital Tonight.
But that respite could be temporary if a municipality passes a resolution to opt-in to good cause.
Baldwin and her partners own 140 apartment units and consider themselves small landlords. But under the new opt-in rules, she would not be exempt from good cause.
“I’m a small landlord but under the terms of this bill, if my area opted in, I would not be a small landlord,” she said.
There are a variety of other tranches of money included in the housing budget as well: For upstate New York, there is a new pot of $650 million for so-called “Pro Housing Communities," as well as $500 million to build up to 15,000 new homes on state land, and a new 421-p tax incentive to construct housing outside of New York City. The budget also includes a $40 million grant program for upstate landlords to use for rehabilitating vacant units.