In an often passionate conversation, State Sen. Brian Kavanagh (D-Northwestern Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan) traveled to South Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge yesterday to speak on the state’s recently passed Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019.
Kavanagh’s discussion on the subject came at the Bay Ridge Democrats club monthly meeting held at at the Bridgeview Diner, 9011 3rd Avenue in Bay Ridge.
The Act is actually a series of laws meant to protect tenants that strengthens tenant protections for residents of the nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments in the city. According to the New York Observer, the city has 966,000 stabilized apartments – or slightly less than half of the city’s 2.2 million rental units.
Kavanagh said with rent laws coming up for renewal this year, legislators knew that housing was going to be a big topic of conversation.
“We had all these tax programs that were intended to create new affordable housing,” said Kavanagh, Chair of the Senate’s Housing Committee.
Kavanagh spoke about how past laws made housing unaffordable for all and noted how the housing committee spent a lot of taxpayer money on housing programs in the past. But for every new affordable housing unit they would create, Kavanagh shared, they would lose affordability due to rent regulations.
Kavanagh stated that vacancy bonus laws “added a prevision that every time a unit became vacant, the legal rent went up by 20%.”
This could happen every year and Kavanagh said many landlords charged an application fee for the apartment. Landlords will charge multiple individuals application fees. After choosing one tenant for the property, landlords end up “pocketing all the other fees,” he said.
The discourse has been that landlords have had the upper hand for years. According to Kavanagh however, “basically all of that changed this year.”
“We eliminated the previsions that allowed those units to be regulated. We eliminated the vacancy bonus, we tightened up the process where landlords can invest money in their buildings, and expect to get a return,” he said.
Additionally, Kavanagh says the laws have been made permanent. “Every three years they would come up for renewal and the landlords would try to use that as leverage.”
Now, due to the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, they are no longer laws with an expiration date. They stand as regular, legislative law, he said.
Meeting attendees raised concerns about tenant rights and wanting to be sure both tenants and landlords were well versed in this legislative change.
Andrew Dazzo, 34, questioned whether landlords were going to comply with all the new rules.
“I am wondering about what’s being done about constituent education… the tenant community at large and landlord community at large, in terms of actually saying this in different languages and all that. I can imagine a lot of landlords are gonna try and slow roll, or not comply,” said Dazzo.
Sebastian Riccardi, 44, shared this concern stating, “most tenants are never going to be able to figure this all out on their own.”
The Senator responded stating, “In terms of educating people, we are arranging with the assembly a tutorial for elected officials and their staff; because in many cases they’re going to be the ones explaining this to individuals. But we are trying to produce some kind of tenant-friendly pamphlet that’s like know your rights, what’s changed, on the senate side.”
