UPDATED July 19 | In April, New York adopted the Good Cause Eviction Law as part of a long-awaited housing deal in the new state budget, complete with rent increase limits and eviction standards for landlords. Tenant organizers there had been fighting for years to pass a statewide law that would protect renters from excessive rent hikes and unfair evictions.
But organizers say the version of the bill that passed paled in comparison to the legislation that they’d championed, replete with exemptions that leave out millions of renters. Most notably, the new protections only apply to New York City. Municipalities in the rest of the state will have to opt in, leaving more than 2 million upstate New York renters fighting for what some advocates are calling the “Swiss cheese” version of good cause protections.
“Our goal was definitely a statewide mandate,” says Ryan Acuff, education coordinator for the City-Wide Tenant Union of Rochester. “We were never fighting for an opt-in.”
At a Glance: New York’s Good Case Eviction Law
New York City tenants who live in market-rate units built before 2009 and whose landlords own more than 10 units across multiple properties are automatically protected by the state’s Good Cause Eviction Law.
Rent increases for those tenants are limited to 5 percent plus inflation, or 10 percent, whichever is lower. Also, landlords cannot evict tenants who pay their rent and follow the terms of their lease, nor can they refuse to renew those leases without “good cause,” unless they’re planning to turn the unit over to a family member or demolish the building.
New York municipalities outside of the city must opt in to the law for their tenants to be protected.
Tenants who are not protected by the law include those who live in apartments subject to other rent regulations, certain types of assisted living facilities, condos, cooperatives, dorms, hotels, manufactured homes, seasonal rentals, and owner-occupied buildings.
Katie Sims, co-chair of the Ithaca Tenants Union, says it was “pretty offensive, honestly, to see the state government take this stance that upstate didn’t really need this tenant protection. A huge number of people who live in upstate are tenants, and they need this protection just as much as any other tenant.”
Tenant organizers still celebrate the opportunity to substantially expand tenants’ rights in New York. So far, at least three cities have opted into the state’s good cause law, Ithaca being the most recent.
But tenant organizers in the state face an uneven road ahead to get their municipalities to opt in. Some see the possibility of getting an even stronger good-cause law than the state’s, while others could be left fighting indefinitely to access even those protections.
Opting In
As rental markets outside New York City continue to experience rising prices and housing instability, affordable housing advocates and organizers in upstate New York are trying to seize any and every opportunity to ensure that as many tenants as possible are protected from unsustainable rent increases.
“We see good-cause as a powerful anti-displacement tool in a real estate market like ours that is experiencing rising property values after years of real estate speculation, where landlords refused to make investments and upgrades in rental housing and milked properties for as much value as the market could bear,” said Clarke Gocker, senior director of movement building with PUSH Buffalo, via email. “Those same landlords are ready to cash in.”
But if Buffalo were to opt into the state law, many renters in the city wouldn’t qualify for protection, thanks to a carve-out for owner-occupied buildings, which exempts buildings where owners also reside. “The predominant rental housing typology in the city of Buffalo is the so-called ‘Buffalo double’—two-family, up-and-down rental units built between the late 1800s and early 1900s,” says Gocker. “Many of these are owner occupied and, as a result, would be exempted from Good Cause should the city opt-in.”
Other upstate New York cities, like Albany, Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, Beacon, and Kingston had previously passed good-cause eviction laws, but those were struck down by state courts. Housing advocates and organizers in those cities are trying (some successfully) to get their municipalities to pass a good cause law once again, this time having to adopt what they call a watered-down statewide version, with very little room to adapt it to meet the needs of their municipalities.
For instance, tenants who live in manufactured homes (more commonly known as mobile homes) are exempt from protection. “We’ve really left out a huge swath of upstate New York. And Saratoga County, which is just north of Albany, is the most dense mobile home county in New York State,” says Canyon Ryan, executive director of the United Tenants of Albany. “Almost all low-income homeowners are relegated to these parks, and if you rent your mobile home, then you don’t have these protections, and there’s no way that you can get them.”
But there’s no question that organizers want to get their municipalities to opt in, especially when existing tenant protections are so threadbare, says Sims.
“Upstate New York has so few tenant protections compared to New York City and some of the counties surrounding it that, in a lot of ways, we’re in a completely different regulatory landscape.”
While municipalities can’t change the exemptions for owner-occupied or manufactured housing tenants, there are two components of the statewide version they can amend:
- The maximum fair market rent paid by the tenant before they’re no longer eligible for good cause eviction protection.
- The definition of a small landlord.
In the statewide version of the law, a small landlord is defined as having 10 units or less in their portfolio. (Notably, setting the portfolio size at 10 or less would exempt 52 out of the 54 lawmakers who are landlords themselves, according to a New York Focus investigation). That portfolio size may make sense for New York City, says Sims, but it doesn’t for other municipalities.
“The 10-unit portfolio size exemption that’s in the New York City [version] puts tenants in this awful place where they have to do a lot of digging [on] who exactly owns their buildings and try to find the literal people behind the LLCs,” she says. “There’s so little transparency around that. It’s so hard to find that information.”
[RELATED ARTICLE: How Hidden Property Owners and Bad Landlord Patterns are Revealed in NYC]
That’s why the small landlord component is the most critical, says Ryan of United Tenants of Albany. “We think that the most important thing is to define a small landlord as those with one rental unit in their portfolio, because they can at least, by default, assume that they have the protection.”
Last month, Albany became the first city to opt into the statewide version—setting the portfolio size to one unit, which is encouraging for other municipalities.
“It’s always positive when more upstate municipalities take action,” says Jenna Goldstein, a tenant organizer with For the Many in Kingston and the Hudson Valley. “It’s always going to result in a better domino effect that way.”
Kingston, Poughkeepsie, and Ithaca followed suit this month and opted in, amending their laws to have a portfolio size of one unit. Rochester is expected to deliberate the law in the coming months, and organizers there are hopeful that they, too, will be able to set the small landlord portfolio size to one.
🎉WE PASSED GOOD CAUSE!
— Ithaca Tenants Union (@ithacaTU) July 11, 2024
Tenants all over ithaca organized for years for the is victory, elected ITU members, flipped our council, and built a city run BY tenants FOR tenants.
Special thanks to our endorsees in office Kayla Matos and Phoebe Brown! pic.twitter.com/i1ce3AtnXK
“Anyone who actually wants this protection for tenants has been on board with the portfolio size of one,” says Sims in Ithaca.
But it’s not the same case across all municipalities.
Gocker in Buffalo says the “mom and pop” landlord trope—in which small landlords are assumed to be earnest small-business owners—is a powerful one there, which could trigger fierce resistance against opting into the good cause law there. “The biggest challenge might be shrinking the size of the portfolio exemption following Albany’s lead,” Gocker says. “It won’t happen without a lot of organizing. Members of our city council probably won’t take action independent of a public pressure campaign.”
Limited Resources on the Ground
Even if municipalities opt in, tenant organizers say the statewide law will force tenants beyond New York City to work harder to determine their eligibility for protections.
For instance, although the law states that landlords are required to inform tenants whether their unit qualifies for good cause protections and attach specific language to their lease, not every tenant has a lease. According to data the United Tenants of Albany captured last year, 44 percent of tenants in the city were on month-to-month leases or currently didn’t have an active lease. “That means that almost half of tenants don’t even have the most basic assessment of whether or not they have the protection,” says Ryan.
If a landlord doesn’t disclose whether their unit is protected under the good cause law, New York City has resources that residents and organizations can utilize, including JustFix’s Who Owns What tool. But in upstate New York, the onus is on tenants—and organizers—to figure out their eligibility.
I’m the only tenant organizer up here. I can’t build a website and build search tools as well. I’m only one person.”
Jenna Goldstein, For the Many
“There are a lot of resources for New York City’s Good Cause: there’s a calculator; there’s a [lookup tool] where you put your address in and it tells you if you’re eligible—we don’t have that up here,” says Goldstein of For the Many. “I’m the only tenant organizer up here. I can’t build a website and build search tools as well. I’m only one person. So, it’s giving the best protection to [the place with] the most resources. Upstate tenants have no resources at all.”
Albany does have a lookup tool called Albany Landlord Report Card, but few other municipalities can say the same.
“We got to engage in a little bit of an [investigation],” says Acuff of City-Wide Tenant Union of Rochester. “‘When was your unit built? If your building was built in 2008, you’re covered. In 2009? You’re not covered.’
What’s more, says Sims of the Ithaca Tenants Union, tenants will have to take their landlords to eviction court if they want to take advantage of the new protections, which may be enough of a deterrent for landlords who want to avoid a judgment against them, but for tenants too, the prospect is risky. “If you’re not 150 percent sure that you’re going to win your court case, going to court is very scary and time consuming,” she says.
“There’s a lot of popular education that needs to go into helping people know whether or not they have this protection,” says Ryan of the United Tenants of Albany. “Even we wouldn’t know, in most of these instances.”
New York State’s LLC Transparency Act would have made some landlord data publicly accessible, but Gov. Kathy Hochul vetoed that legislation, signing it into law last December only on the condition that the database of LLCs be made private, accessible only to law enforcement or government agencies, or by court order. That leaves tenants and organizers left to rely on their public officials to make database requests—which, depending on whether they were supportive of good cause legislation to begin with, they may not be inclined to do on their constituents’ behalf.
In any case, the LLC Transparency Act doesn’t go into effect until January 2026.
In lieu of a government-led public awareness campaign to educate tenants of their new rights, the burden of proof falls on organizers and tenants.
“No one is coming to save us,” says Cea Weaver, coalition director at Housing Justice for All, a statewide organization. “It’s incumbent upon us to knock on our neighbors’ doors, to get the word out, and to try to make sure that everybody knows what their new rights are and how to use them.”
Still, she holds out hope for what this law could trigger in the long run.
“This is only the beginning,” says Weaver. “As it starts to come into more and more places, people are going to use good cause eviction rights to form tenant unions, negotiate directly with their landlord around what a fair rent increase might be, demand safer living conditions and better repairs, and translate that collective action against their landlord into political power as well. I am confident that before the end of the year, many, many places will have opted into good cause, and with that wind behind us, anything could happen.”
Editor’s Note: This article was updated to reflect the fact that Poughkeepsie also opted into the law in July.
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Hello, I am happy with the new bill and it’s a victory.
My question is can a small landlord who has been caught meter sharing evict out of retailing against the tenant ?
Giving a non-renewal also out of retaliation then giving verbal permission only to give a eviction because they chose not to fix the issue in the 120 day period and again retaliate because the electric bill is now in their name ?