Two Big Housing Problems for Kathy Hochul and the Legislature
By Michael McKee
The first big problem in the State Budget negotiations
Why won’t Kathy Hochul support vouchers to get homeless New Yorkers into permanent housing, and help endangered tenants avoid eviction? Will the legislative leaders draw a line in the sand over this? And will the legislature force Hochul to fund the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act?
Since she became governor, Kathy Hochul has refused to support pro-tenant legislation, and will not even meet with tenant advocates.
Hochul never misses a chance to do something public with major real estate lobbyists. Even though she was aware that hundreds of tenants were going to picket outside the annual REBNY Gala on January 16, she crossed the picket line and made a speech, stating that elected officials who were not present were missing a great party.
Last year, Kathy forced the Senate and Assembly to dramatically weaken Good Cause Eviction before she would agree to include it in the budget housing package. The legislative leaders wanted much stronger protections, but Kathy used her power as governor to water down the law to exclude thousands of tenants from protection.
But one of Kathy’s most outrageous positions is a flat-out refusal to support $250 million to fund the Housing Access Voucher Program (HAVP), which would keep low income tenants in their homes and move homeless New Yorkers into permanent housing.
For the last two years, both the Senate and Assembly have attempted to include HAVP in the state budget and have been stymied by Kathy Hochul’s opposition, based on her absurd claim that the program is an “entitlement” and would therefore cost the state more than the $250 million appropriated for its implementation.
It is rare that a bill attracts so much support from the majority members in both houses of the legislature. Progressive Democrats, moderate Democrats, and conservative Democrats who disagree about other bills (including Good Cause Eviction and 421-a subsidies for market-rate housing) all support HAVP.
The lead sponsors of this bill are the two chairs of the Housing Committees in both houses: Senator Brian Kavanagh and Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal.
The statewide tenant movement is united in support of HAVP. Labor unions support HAVP. Even the real estate lobby supports HAVP.
This at the very time when State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli has released a new report showing that the number of homeless New Yorkers statewide has doubled over the last year.
To let yet another year go by without enacting, and funding, this essential program would be nothing short of immoral. Such inaction by the legislature and governor would leave thousands of New Yorkers on the streets and in shelters, and deny a lifeline to poor tenants facing eviction due to their inability to pay the rent.
It seems that just about everyone in state government, with the notable exception of Kathy Hochul, agrees that HAVP is a necessary, common-sense tool to address homelessness and displacement.
Enough, Kathy. Get real. We cannot tolerate another year of delay. You need to get homeless people off the streets and out of shelters, into permanent housing. You need to help vulnerable tenants remain in their homes.
It is clear that everyone in Albany understands the importance of the hundreds of local organizations funded by the state under the long-respected Neighborhood Preservation Companies and Rural Preservation Companies programs. This year, Hochul proposes a $4.8 million cut, from $18.8 million to $14 million that keeps some groups funded, then plans to agree to restore the $4.8 million “cut” (and other related cuts) in the negotiations.
As I am the lobbyist who won the 1977 NPC enactment and initial funding, and the 1980 RPC enactment and initial funding, I can speak personally about how important these programs are. Hochul’s game-playing in the budget process is nonsense.
Thinking long term: Rather than just restoring the funding to keep the current groups in the program, the legislature should grow the program by a few million dollars every few years to allow DHCR to fund new groups.
In addition, the state legislature needs to push the governor to enact and fund TOPA, the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, which is an exciting way to create new social housing that will help solve the housing crisis. Funding at $250 million per year in the state budget is needed to get this program off the ground.
We had great grassroots tenant advocates testify at the February 27 joint budget hearing in favor of HAVP and TOPA. Legislative leaders need to force the governor to do these changes.
The second big problem in State Budget negotiations
The 40 year-old Office of Rent Administration is non-functional. The legislature needs to focus on the disastrous ORA and how it harms the expansion of rent and eviction regulation in upstate New York.
Division of Housing and Community Renewal/Office of Rent Administration/Tenant Protection Unit
An important component of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 was a requirement that DHCR1 must publish an annual report on the state’s rent and eviction protection units.
This year’s DHCR report is a 40th anniversary “celebration” of the NYS DHCR Office of Rent Administration, which was created by the Omnibus Housing Act of 1983.
A major pro-tenant gain in 1983 was to take away the role of “self-regulation” from the landlord group the Rent Stabilization Association (RSA) of NYC that was originally created in the NYC Rent Stabilization Law of 1969. RSA was in charge of enforcement and administration of NYC rent stabilization until the Omnibus Housing Act of 1983 severed the RSA from its role in landlord self-regulation.
While NYS Attorney General Robert Abrams had begun a lawsuit against the RSA in 1982 to separate it from its regulatory role based on its illegal activities2, Assembly Democrats were not willing to wait for the lawsuit, and the Senate (controlled by the Republicans) could not defend the RSA’s utter misconduct. So, OHA severed the real estate industry from any regulatory function and transferred administration of rent regulation to the state. OHA set up a transitionary period from end-of-session 1983 to April 1, 1984, when ORA became the agency in charge of enforcement everywhere in the state and New York City, and the RSA became a purely private organization, although one with an ambiguous name.
During this long transition period, tenant advocates negotiated with DHCR staff and won some gains. Tenants & Neighbors ran a months-long campaign to urge NYC and suburban tenants to file a rent overcharge challenge by April 1, 1984, and Tenants & Neighbors helped many NYC tenants file that Saturday or Sunday, April 1.
But on long term effects, we failed. Some DHCR staff proposed to make annual rent and service registration more effective: they proposed that ORA should send the registration notices to each tenant instead of having the landlord sending it; they wrote a thorough description of registration and why tenants should consider challenging it, and proposed that DHCR include a copy of the actual challenge form that the tenant had to file. These staff were all overruled: in the final policy ORA adopted, the landlord was charged with sending the watered-down registration information to the tenant, and the challenge form was not to be sent to the tenant.
Since 1984, ORA has been essentially a patronage agency, where many of the hires are friends or relatives of legislative or state agency personnel. The deputy commissioner is always a figurehead: Woody Pascal is not the only one. Woody got the job because he was a friend of Gov. David Paterson, despite an earlier scandal involving his employment at the state liquor authority that forced him to resign. (This audit is no longer on the state website of the state inspector general, so it would have to be FOILed.)
FLASH: DHCR has announced that Woody is leaving his job March 21. But publicly, nothing but positive things to say about him!
One of the more shocking failures is an utter lack of online information about the results of ETPA from 1974 to the early 1980s. For example, the DHCR/ORA website has no records of how the Nassau, Rockland, and Westchester Rent Guidelines Boards voted on annual rent adjustments until well after 1974. To cite just one significant omission, the Westchester RGB voted in 1982 for a complete rent freeze (Tenants & Neighbors editor Tim Ledwith was present that night along with hundreds of tenants; our next issue had a front page article titled “Westchester rents really stabilize”) after a great deal of tenant organizing. Yet nothing about this is on the DHCR website.
When I asked Woody whether they could find this information for the three suburban counties and update it back to 1974, he replied, “We only took this over in 1984.” I told him that DHCR took over ETPA administration in the three suburban counties in May of 1974, and only took on NYC administration in April 1984. This is a typical symptom of how dismissive the agency is of rent and eviction regulation outside of NYC. ORA staff have been outright rude and hostile to members of the Kingston Rent Guidelines Board, the only RGB to question ORA’s weaknesses.
ORA is under-staffed, but as much as it needs funding for more staff, even more than that it needs a new culture. Frankly, we need more funding to go to the DHCR Tenant Protection Unit, which will take action against landlords that fail to comply with the ETPA, rather than wait for a tenant to file a complaint.
The basic ORA program is non-enforcement. ORA does nothing unless a tenant files a complaint, and the agency overtly discourages tenants from filing complaints. ORA never explains that tenants who file complaints will not normally see results for several years. Many tenant attorneys filing complaints on behalf of tenants take the long subway trip to the ORA headquarters at Gertz Plaza in Jamaica, Queens, to file the complaints in person by the deadline and get a stamped copy of the complaint. This is because ORA constantly “loses” these complaints if they are filed by other means, and after months or years of tenants waiting for something to happen after they filed the complaint, ORA tells them that they do not have any of the papers that were filed. Tenants are told that they must resubmit their documents within 20 days, or the case will be dismissed. Readers can imagine how this affects tenants who are not being represented by a competent tenant attorney.
This is one way ORA uses to knock down the number of cases pending. An obvious anti-tenant practice by ORA. ORA staff give tenants bad advice: Instead of telling tenants to refuse to sign an illegal lease, and file a complaint against a landlord engaging in an illegal act, they tell the tenant to sign the illegal lease and file an overcharge complaint, which means it will be 2-3 years before anything happens. This is exactly what they did after the City of Kingston opted into ETPA in August 2022.
And the main pressure on ORA staff is to get the caseload down: get these cases resolved rather than focus on the substance.
Another problem is the influence of Deputy Commissioner Sheldon Melnitsky. He is not part of ORA, but is widely considered the one person at DHCR who knows enough about rent control and rent stabilization to tell them what to do when they are not clear. His goal is always to keep them from expanding tenant protections.
I have battled publicly with Melnitsky: in 2005 he appeared at a meeting of the Nassau County Rent Guidelines Board and persuaded the board members to go into an illegal executive session to discuss what they should vote on, then come back into public session and vote on it. More than one hundred Nassau tenants were present.
Tenants & Neighbors (my employer at the time) sued the Nassau RGB and we won at the Second Dept. Appellate Division three years later.
In 2018, the Village of Ossining finally opted into ETPA by a 3-2 vote at the Village Board of Trustees over the constant opposition of Mayor Victoria Gearity. This was the end of a ten-year campaign led by Community Voices Heard. Two years earlier, Gearity won a 3-2 vote against opting into ETPA, and most of the Ossining tenants who were the leaders of the 2016 campaign were displaced by huge rent hikes by 2018.
Because Ossining was the first village in Westchester to opt into ETPA since Rye in 2006, the Westchester RGB had to meet to adopt special rent adjustments for leases in Ossining, as well as to adopt a Fair Market Rent Guideline to guide ORA in deciding Fair Market Rent Appeals (FMRAs) filed by Ossining tenants to challenge the initial ETPA rent.
Not a single Westchester RGB member understood what the FMRA meant, despite instructive testimony by Tim Collins, a leading tenant attorney and former e.d. of the NYC Rent Guidelines Board, and by myself, including our suggestion that they delay the vote and meet with us to better understand the issue. Sheldon Melnitsky intimidated the board by telling them that if they made the FMRA period go back two years to the 2016 vote, the landlords would sue, and that to avoid a lawsuit they should limit the period to six months before the 2018 vote. That is what the WRGB voted.
P.S. The landlords sued anyway.
Tenant Protection Unit: Hope for the Future
The TPU is a separate unit, not controlled by ORA, and has the power to go after landlords who fail to comply with the ETPA or RSL. ORA actually has this power also, but does not use it.
In March 2024, Housing Justice for All asked for a meeting with top DHCR staff including Commissioner RuthAnne Visnauskas, TPU Deputy Commissioner Pavita Krishnaswamy, Deputy Commissioner Betsy Mallow, and others.
The HJ4A committee consisted of Naomi Dann, HJ4A chief of staff; attorney Marcie Kobak of Legal Services of the Hudson Valley; For The Many organizer Jenna Goldstein of Kingston; Allison Dentinger of Hudson Valley Justice Center (at that time Allie was finishing law school; now she is an attorney); and myself. I had earlier detailed problems of non-compliance in Kingston.
RuthAnne immediately agreed to a meeting and suggested inviting Woody Pascal and April Gray-Huertas of ORA. I replied immediately that we were not willing to have anyone from ORA at any of these meetings, that we wanted to discuss problems with ORA in Kingston. RuthAnne agreed immediately.
These are smart people. They have to understand how incompetent and ineffective ORA is. RuthAnne, Betsy, Pavita (who departed last August) could never say so publicly, but the evidence is overwhelming.
Beginning in March and over the next several months, we had a series of meetings with top DHCR staff about the problems in Kingston (the only upstate municipality where ETPA is actually in effect), and with the issues DHCR faced with getting the Hudson Valley TPU in place. DHCR is now putting the TPU in effect in Poughkeepsie, a very good location.
This is a positive step forward. We have nothing but thanks to DHCR on this one.
Additionally, DHCR recently appointed Jooyeon Lee as the new Deputy Commissioner of the TPU. Jooyeon brings a wealth of experience to this role. She holds a BA in Political Science (2003) and a JD (2007) from NYU. From 2007 to 2015, she worked as a staff attorney in the Housing Unit of Bedford Stuyvesant Community Legal Services Corporation. She later served as Deputy Director and then Director of the Housing Unit at Brooklyn Legal Services, from 2016 to the present. Jooyeon’s extensive background in housing law and advocacy is a positive development for the TPU, and we look forward to her leadership in addressing the ongoing challenges.
IN SUM:
The Legislature needs to try to change the RSL/ETPA laws. But you need to change the ORA culture: Enforce the law. And send more to the TPU and expand the TPU.
Can budget negotiations include this?
We need the legislature to close loopholes involving demolition. The Senate and Assembly were ready to do this last year but the bill was killed at the end of session.
Similar loopholes with substantial rehabilitation must be ended, where landlords can claim their buildings are exempt from ETPA on grounds that somewhere between April 1, 1974 and 2025, 75% of systems were replaced or upgraded in the building. Woody Pascal told the Kingston rent board last June that 11 of the 59 to 64 buildings that might be subject to ETPA in Kingston had filed applications with ORA claiming that they are exempt on the basis that sometime between April 1, 1974 and August 1, 2022, 75% of the systems had been replaced.
We must also preserve Mitchell-Lama, preventing co-ops from exploiting loopholes to convert their properties to non-Mitchell-Lama status that allows shareholders to flip their apartments at market rate.
Senator Kavanagh and AM Sarahana Shrestha have filed a bill to remove some of the most absurd and difficult impediments faced by upstate municipalities who want to opt into ETPA. Some of this, including deleting the required vacancy survey snapshot, must be enacted THIS SEMESTER.
Deputy Majority Senate Leader Mike Gianaris and Assembly Housing Committee chair Linda Rosenthal are introducing a bill to restructure the entire rent guidelines board system designed by the real estate industry, and despite some improvements over the years, the basic flawed design still remains and still puts tenants at a disadvantage.
This is a lot to force into the budget talks. But legislators who care about tenants and care about these issues need to make sure that these things are either resolved in the budget, or make sure that if they are not resolved in the budget they do not disappear by June 12.
Michael McKee has been a tenant organizer and advocate in New York State for 55 years, since 1970. McKee, who has served as Tenants PAC treasurer for over 25 years, is currently on medical leave while he undergoes treatment for a recently discovered brain tumor, but he is still devoting as much time as possible to the Tenant movement. He will be publishing a series of weekly manifestos until the end of session in June. Michael cut his teeth in the early 1970s organizing for Met Council on Housing, the oldest tenant union in New York City, and in the early-mid 1970s was a force in founding the first statewide tenant organization, New York State Tenants & Neighbors Coalition. In the 1970s and 1980s he was co-director of the statewide Peoples Housing Network which trained hundreds of tenant leaders and organizers and helped Tenants & Neighbors develop. Between 1975 and 1993 he was an officer of T&N including its statewide president for several years, and from 1993 to 2006 he was a T&N staff member until his retirement that year. Since 1997 he has served as volunteer treasurer of Tenants Political Action Committee, which was formed with the specific goal of helping the Democrats take control of the state senate. In 2018 the Rent Stabilization Association sued him for $40 million for alleged defamation. State Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit in March 2023, and despite RSA’s attempt to appeal, this dismissal was upheld unanimously by the Appellate Court in 2025. For the last six years he has been an active member and adviser to Housing Justice for All, the statewide coalition.
The agency calls itself HCR, which stands for Homes and Community Renewal, but the legal name of this troubled agency is DHCR, not HCR.
How RSA got its name
Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP) began in 1966 as a private trade association of landlords, and the Rent Stabilization Association (RSA) was founded three years later. What many New Yorkers do not know is that RSA did not rise up from the grassroots. It was created by legislation, as a central feature of the New York City Rent Stabilization Law (RSL) of 1969. This law enacted rent and eviction protections for the first time for post-1947 buildings, which up to that time had been exempt from rent controls, and whose residents were being slammed with huge rent hikes and were pressuring the City Council for relief. The Council was on the verge of amending the NYC Rent Control Law to include post-1947 properties. (At that time the City had the power to enact its own laws, without state permission; that is a story for another time.)
The RSL was drafted by a committee of three members of the administration of Mayor John Lindsay and three representatives of the real estate industry. Lindsay appointed no tenant advocates. Years later I met all six of these men, only one of whom is still alive. This law was designed as an experiment in “industry self-regulation.” A deliberate compromise by John Lindsay, who hated rent control.
The very name “rent stabilization” was meant to undercut “rent control.” I have never agreed that calling it stabilization makes it more salable. I believe the opposite.
The law mandated creation of a “real estate industry association” which owners of post-1947 buildings were required to join, and to pay dues to be used solely for administration and enforcement of the law. A Rent Guidelines Board was established under the law to vote on annual rent adjustments, tied to lease renewals and therefore designed to make tenants nervous, unlike the old rent control law where tenants could stay without leases and without fear.
An enforcement agency was also set up, the NYC Conciliation and Appeals Board, but the CAB was under the direct control of the RSA, which starved it for funds and stuck it with a weak Rent Stabilization Code, regulations that tilted the system fundamentally in favor of landlords.
One feature of this design that is still with us today is that no enforcement occurs unless a tenant files a complaint. Academics have criticized the NYC RSL as the weakest rent law in the U.S. Over time it has been strengthened in many ways, along with its sister state law, the Emergency Tenant Protection Act of 1974, but the basic weak structure of the RSL/ETPA remains.
Despite the prohibition of use of dues for anything other than enforcement and administration, RSA misspent millions of dollars to sue New York City, to sue the NYC Rent Guidelines Board, to commission studies that purported to show the negative effects of rent regulation, and to lobby the state legislature and city council against the very law they were charged with enforcing. Because the RSA’s code contained no requirement for landlords to register rents and services with the CAB, rent overcharging was rampant. Tenants complained to the Koch administration, which had the power to discipline or even suspend the RSA, but Mayor Ed Koch (who had been the lead sponsor of the 1969 RSL when he was a member of the City Council) refused to act. Tenants turned to Attorney General Robert Abrams, who in the late 1970s and early 1980s sued many prominent landlords for overcharging their stabilized tenants, forcing them to return hundreds of thousands of dollars of illegal rent hikes.
In 1982 Abrams sued the RSA, seeking an order in Supreme Court to suspend the organization’s registration – put it out of business. The Abrams lawsuit was mooted by the Omnibus Housing Act of 1983, state legislation that made a number of good reforms including severing the RSA from its administrative and enforcement roles, and assigning those functions to the NYS Division of Housing and Community Renewal. OHA ended the 14-year experiment in industry self-regulation, whereupon the RSA became a mere trade association, albeit one with a counterintuitive name. Legislative aides who negotiated OHA calculated that the RSA was allowed to keep $8 million dollars in dues collected under city law in the deal. Some thought this money should be returned to government instead of helping the RSA get a start as a private organization.
The most powerful industry group in New York City (indeed, in the state) has always been the Real Estate Board of New York, which is well more than a century old. Unlike RSA and CHIP, REBNY is careful about its image, as it wants to be seen as an important civic organization that contributes to the stability of the most important city in the world. REBNY will not get involved in unsavory activities.
REBNY mainly represents developers and owners of commercial real estate. But many of its members also own residential properties that include rent-controlled and rent-stabilized units, and have joint memberships.
For close to six decades, RSA and CHIP have jockeyed for power. Sometimes REBNY joins them, but often sits the fight out if they think it is too controversial.
When the RSA hired Joe Strasburg in 1994, the CHIP executive director who thought the job should have gone to him disappeared a couple of years later, and CHIP’s public profile diminished a lot. RSA claimed in the 1980s that it represented 25,000 owners of residential real estate, and decades later it made the same claim. CHIP claimed to represent 4,000 owners of regulated apartment buildings.
Martin injected new life into CHIP once he was hired as executive director in 2018, following the end of Jeff Klein’s political career. He transformed the group into an aggressive advocate for the landlord agenda, and apparently overspent the budget – which in part apparently led to the merger with RSA. Martin excels at social media and adopted some of the kinds of grassroots tactics used by the tenant movement.
Adopting the new neutral-sounding name, “New York Apartment Association” solves a quandary that has caused confusion for the last 55 years: the name Rent Stabilization Association suggested it was a defender of rent stabilization when in fact the group has done everything in its power to end tenant protection laws.