Legislators Wrote a Bill in 2023 to Address the Housing Crisis — But Never Got to Vote on It

It may seem like ancient history, but 2023 was supposed to be New York’s “year of housing.” For months, Albany seemed poised to finally address the state’s long simmering crisis of high rents, unaffordable mortgages, and homelessness.

Instead, in early June last year, the legislative session ended in failure and acrimony after multiple attempts at reaching a housing deal failed. Legislative leaders blamed Governor Kathy Hochul for opposing a housing package they said they’d put together, while Hochul’s office shot back that legislators had never introduced a major housing bill, let alone passed one.

The claim that legislators had never introduced a bill was true. But it was misleading.

In fact, legislators had written a 14-part proposal containing measures ranging from new tenant protections to boosting office-building-to-housing conversions. That draft bill was never made public, but New York Focus obtained two nearly identical versions of it, both dated to the final days of the legislative session.

The draft did not include the core of Hochul’s housing plan last year: measures requiring towns and cities to make plans to increase their housing supply, which is something that some experts believe is a necessary part of solving New York’s housing crisis.

“They had a bill,” said Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator for the tenant advocacy coalition Housing Justice for All. “The legislature got cold feet after having conversations with the governor.”

As the legislative session rushed toward its scheduled June 8 close, legislative staff shared the details of their proposal with Hochul’s team and were preparing to bring it to a vote, according to multiple legislative sources who asked for anonymity to discuss internal conversations. Hochul was not pleased with the package, they said. It included a measure, known as good cause eviction, that would have strengthened tenants’ ability to contest rent hikes — and which Hochul staunchly opposed.

In January 2023, Hochul unveiled an ambitious plan that aimed to dramatically boost new housing construction across the state. The legislature rejected it almost out-of-hand.

Opposition was particularly fierce in the suburbs of New York City, which have some of the lowest rates of new housing construction in the country. That failure to add new homes is one reason for the state’s sky-high rents and home prices, according to experts.

After this rejection, the legislature formed a closed-door working group to respond with a new proposal. Their secretive efforts burst into the open when talks publicly collapsed on June 8, the last scheduled day of the year’s legislative session. That afternoon, Heastie and Stewart-Cousins issued a rare joint statement saying that the two houses of the legislature had reached a deal but “could not come to an agreement with the governor” to pass it.

At the time, Heastie and Stewart-Cousins published a bullet-point list of policies they said they’d agreed on, but didn’t mention that these had been fleshed out into proposed legislation. Hochul and others used this omission to imply that they were bluffing about having reached a deal.

A central provision in both versions of the 80-odd-page draft bill reviewed by New York Focus was a law known as good cause eviction, designed to give tenants the ability to challenge hefty rent hikes in court.

A version of that law was enacted in this year’s legislative session, capping off a yearslong campaign by tenant activists. (Pro-tenant legislators got Hochul on board by pairing it with pro-development tax breaks that Hochul supported.) But in several respects, the version that failed last year would have offered tenants more protections:

Though it was strong on tenant rights, the legislature’s bill did not have measures to address the shortage of housing outside of New York City.

“Nothing on the table was tackling the status quo of allowing local governments absolute power to ban new homes,” said Annemarie Gray, executive director of the pro-development group Open New York, who reviewed one of the versions of the bill obtained by New York Focus. “Until we’re talking about state-level tools that ensure that we’re building new homes, it’s just not a serious housing package.” Open New York strongly supported Hochul’s proposal to require towns to allow more new housing.

The draft bill also did not include what was then Hochul’s top housing priority for New York City: renewal of a program known as 421-a, which offered billions of dollars in tax breaks to developers who built apartment buildings with some affordable units. A version of the program was renewed this year.