New York Democrats want to make it easier for cities, towns and villages outside New York City to impose local rent stabilization as communities battle a statewide housing shortage and struggle to take advantage of bolstered protections for tenants.

With rent costs and homelessness on the rise amid stagnating wages, lawmakers are making a final push to advance a bill to empower upstate localities to take rent control, and the housing crisis, into their own hands.

"[Our] housing stock does not match the housing stock with bigger cities like New York City," said sponsor Assemblywoman Sarahana Shrestha, a Kingston Democrat.

Current law, or the Emergency Tenant Protection Act of 1974, lets localities outside the five boroughs adopt rent stabilization if they declare a state of housing emergency, or prove a housing vacancy rate of 5% or less.

But advocates and lawmakers say vacancy studies are costly to localities, use unreliable data and are easy for landlords to manipulate.

"When [a] city is considering vacancies, they're counting buildings that you can't live in, buildings that are unsafe, unfit buildings that aren't on the market," said Canyon Ryan, executive director United Tenants of Albany Inc. "How do you determine that they're marketed? The study is flawed and the REST Act answers all of those questions."

With about 10 days left this session, Democrats at the forefront of housing policy want to pass the Rent Emergency Stabilization for Tenants Act, or REST Act, to permit localities to use public data to demonstrate a housing emergency and forego a study, and determine the size and age of buildings covered under limited rent hikes.

Rent increased 30% and unsheltered homelessness went up 73% in the capital city in 2023, Ryan said.

Nine upstate cities have tried to opt into rent stabilization via a vacancy study since 2019 when the Legislature modernized the policy.

Only Kingston has been successful to date, but the Ulster County city continues to face a longstanding legal battle over the guidelines capping rent increases.

"Our Area Median Income went up 40% in four years because so many downstate people moved to Kingston," said Kingston Alderwoman Michele Hirsch, a Democrat who represents the city's 9th Ward. "And they weren't working in Kingston, so it just skewed everything upwards."

Hirsch said the council isn't backing down from its legal challenges, and will continue to fight to keep rent costs under control.

Senate Housing Committee chair Brian Kavanagh, who sponsors the measure, said the law that dates back 50 years must be changed.

Housing scarcity should not be the only factor to determine a housing emergency, he said, adding municipalities must consider local factors when opting in to rent stabilization.

"You didn't have hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers living in hotels and homeless shelters in 1973," Kavanagh said. "You didn't didn't have rates of dilapidated housing in some of our localities that you have now."

But landlords aren't pleased with the proposal and argue rent stabilization limits options for affordable housing and will not create new units.

Harriet Baldwin, co-chair of the Legislative Committee of the Apartments of New York, said the REST Act and expanded rent control would degrade the quality of housing upstate, and hasn't worked well in cities where rent control is widespread.

"We've seen over history, markets like New York City, like San Francisco, like Chicago [are] not places that come to mind as an affordable paradise for renters," Baldwin said. "That's where we've seen rent control and rent stabilization put in over time. It hasn't actually seemed to help affordability for renters or for landlords."

Baldwin, who works with Courage Property Management LLC in Elmira, Chemung County, is a small property owner who manages about 45 rental units.

Vacancy studies are important for localities to determine a housing emergency, she added, and give localities a foundation to determine what steps should be taken.

"Letting folks put in aregulation that has not been shown to help renters without having at least some basis...that just seems like creating a little bit of the Wild West in a way that's going to hurt tenants in the long run even more than it hurts housing providers ," Baldwin said.

Lawmakers said they're ready to go head-to-head with landlords in the rent stabilization debate, arguing it doesn't impose rent regulations in any part of the state. But it will all depend on what leadership wants to prioritize in the next few weeks.

"This bill has gotten a lot of support," Kavanagh said of the measure introduced in February. "I think this is something we can get done this year."

Lawmakers leading housing discussions are also fighting to get propsals over the finish line to expand housing protections and aid for elderly New Yorkers and a bill to make it easier for churches and houses of worship to build affordable housing on their properties.