Testimony: Rent Stabilization Outside of New York City

Testimony: Rent Stabilization Outside of New York City

Testimony before the Assembly Standing Committee on Housing

Thank you for the opportunity to offer comments at today's New York State Assembly hearing on rent stabilization in localities across New York State. My name is Oksana Mironova, and I am a senior policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), a nonprofit organization that promotes economic opportunity for New Yorkers. We use research, advocacy, and direct services to champion a more equitable New York and to address the effects of the state's housing affordability crisis.

CSS is over 180 years old and has been at the forefront of advocacy for better housing conditions since the beginning, from the city's first tenement laws in the 1800s to contemporary organizing for strong tenants' rights. Our research into rental market conditions outside of New York City points to the need for immediate intervention. Skyrocketing rents are causing housing instability, evictions, and homelessness for tenants across the state. We strongly support Senator Kavanagh's and Assemblymember Shrestha's Rent Emergency Stabilization (REST) Act (S4659A/A4877A) as a rapid, low-cost method for expanding housing security and affordability in New York State.

Housing instability and homelessness are increasing

Evictions

In 2024, CSS launched a statewide Annual Survey of Housing and Economic Security to better understand issues faced by the state's residents. We asked New Yorkers across the state about their experiences with evictions,^[1] and found that tenants living outside of New York City are more likely to face evictions than those within the city. For example, nearly 23 percent of tenants surveyed in Syracuse reported an eviction attempt in 2024-10 percentage points higher than in New York City and statewide. Highlighting the need for suburban tenant protections, survey respondents from Long Island reported the largest share of owed back rent and eviction attempts (22 percent) of any New York subregion.

Latino and Black tenants in New York State are most vulnerable to housing instability associated with evictions. In 2024, 31 percent of Latino respondents had either been evicted or moved out of a fear of being evicted in the past, compared to 12 percent of non-Latino New Yorkers. Fourteen percent of Black households in our survey experienced an eviction attempt in 2024, compared to 9 percent of white households.

Homelessness

In our 2025 survey, fielded less than a month ago, we asked respondents to describe their housing situation, and identified high instances of visible and invisible homelessness. We found alarmingly high instances of homelessness among respondents in the Capital District: 8 percent of all respondents and nearly one in five of low-income respondents-those earning under 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL)-reported staying in a shelter, temporarily staying with friends or relatives, or not having any place to live. Additionally, around one in ten low-income respondents in Long Island, Monroe County, and Erie County reported being currently homeless.

Source: CSS 2025 Annual Survey of Housing and Economic Security

Our recent findings can be contextualized in a longer trend of rising homelessness across the state. In a 2024 report,^[2] we highlighted skyrocketing street homelessness and shelter stays in urban, suburban, and rural counties from 2014 to 2024, including:

• 366% increase in Ithaca/Tompkins County.
• 363% increase in Wayne, Ontario, Seneca, Yates Counties.
• 313% increase in Jamestown, Dunkirk/Chautauqua County.
• 132% increase in Utica, Rome/Oneida, Madison Counties.
• 85% increase in Newburgh/Middletown/Orange County.
• 81% increase in Kingston/Ulster County.

Rent stabilization is popular among New Yorkers

The expansion of rent stabilization is a cost effective and fast policy tool for protecting tenants at risk of eviction, displacement, and homelessness. Unlike other policy interventions, the expansion of rent stabilization has minimal public costs.

New York State's current rent stabilization system-codified with the implementation of the Emergency Tenant Protection Act (ETPA) in 1974-has provided stability and tenure protections to over a million households in New York City and a few adjacent downstate counties. Our research has shown that New Yorkers in other part of the state understand the value of rent stabilization. In 2024, we asked over 4,700 residents living in places that have not adopted rent stabilization if they would like to see it implemented in their community: 81 percent of respondents-including 89 percent of suburban and 81 percent of rural residents-support its implementation.^[3]

Landlords are blocking localities from helping tenants

The 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA) allows any locality in the state to opt in to rent stabilization. Cities and counties first have to prove that their housing market is in a state of emergency, by showing that their rental housing vacancy rate is below 5 percent via a vacancy study. While this narrow requirement may have made sense at the time of ETPA's implementation in 1974, it has become a weapon wielded by landlords to block the expansion of rent stabilization.

In Kingston, Newburgh, and Poughkeepsie, city governments moved to opt into rent stabilization after 2019, spending thousands of dollars on vacancy studies to prove a fact well known to tenants: the studies ultimately showed that these Hudson Valley cities are, indeed, in a housing emergency. Lacking the tools to challenge rent stabilization on substantive grounds, landlords turned to legal challenges to vacancy study methodologies, weaponizing bureaucracy to block policies that would have put a limit on the profitability of their rental properties.

These lawsuits have prevented the expansion of rent stabilization in the Hudson Valley. They have also had a chilling effect on other cities and counties in the state. Cash strapped municipalities are reluctant to move forward with their HSTPA own opt-in processes, knowing that their vacancy studies will be challenged in the courts.

REST Act modernizes our rent stabilization system

Senator Kavanagh's and Assemblymember Shrestha's Rent Emergency Stabilization (REST) Act (S4659A/A4877A) will simplify the process for opting in to rent stabilization, ensuring true home rule over an aspect of housing affordability, one of the most serious issues facing families around the state. Municipalities will be able to use a wider range of data to declare housing emergencies, including rent burdens and homelessness rates. The REST Act offers additional benefits, including letting localities decide the types of buildings that are covered by rent stabilization. This would allow cities and counties to tailor their rent laws to respond to local rental market needs.

Taken together, our findings show that housing instability and homelessness are widespread across New York State, disproportionately affecting Black and Latino tenants, and that residents overwhelmingly support rent stabilization as an urgently needed solution. The REST Act will help modernize and expand the state's rent stabilization system.

Thank you again for the opportunity to offer our comments. For more information or if you have any questions, please contact Oksana Mironova at [email protected].

Notes

[1] For more information, please see our March 2025 report, "Preventing Eviction in New York State: A Snapshot of What Works and What Doesn't."

[2] For more information, please see our January 2025 report, "Homelessness and Evictions are Rising Across New York State: The Housing Access Voucher Program Is the Solution."

[3] For more information, please see our February 2025 brief, "Across the State, New Yorkers Support Rent Stabilization and Good Cause."

Issues Covered

Affordable Housing

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