New York State Housing

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

A newly discovered 80-page housing package would have included good cause eviction, but legislators were dissuaded by Kathy Hochul’s opposition.

Sam Mellins · August 12, 2024

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins failed to pass a housing bill over Governor Kathy Hochul's objections in 2023. | Photos: NYS Assembly, NYS Senate, illie Grace Ward | Illustration: Neil deMause/New York Focus

Staying Focused

Tweet Share Email

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.

“I woke up at like 4:30 in the morning, and I checked, and there was no bill. And I was like, ‘Oh no, something has gone wrong.’”

—New York State Senator Julia Salazar

The governor reportedly threatened that she would veto the proposal if it passed. And for good measure, according to two legislative sources familiar with conversations at the time, she added threats to veto other unrelated legislation if legislative leaders even introduced the housing plan. One bill she threatened with a veto, according to the sources, was the Clean Slate Act, a bill promising to seal many New Yorkers’ criminal records, which was one of the legislature’s signature achievements of the session.

Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie subsequently backed down, and the effort publicly collapsed on June 8, the final scheduled day of the legislative session.

This was a nasty surprise to some lawmakers and staffers who had worked hard crafting the package.

The evening before the collapse, “Folks were saying to me, ‘Congratulations, Senator, see you tomorrow,’” said Senator Julia Salazar, the lead sponsor of the good cause eviction bill, which passed this year in a somewhat weakened form. “I went to bed the night before feeling like we had done it.”

“Then I woke up at like 4:30 in the morning, and I checked, and there was no bill. And I was like, ‘Oh no, something has gone wrong.’”

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.

Kingston Made Rent Law History Two Years Ago. That Was the Easy Part.

Emma Whitford and Sam Mellins

“Unlike the more than 500 bills the legislature has passed since January, no housing package was ever even introduced, let alone passed, for the Governor’s review,” Hochul’s communications director, Julie Wood, said that afternoon.

In fact, the package did exist and included measures that a majority of legislators supported, said Assemblymember Michaelle Solages, who was part of the housing working group. But since most legislators never saw the text of the draft bill, it wasn’t possible to get an exact vote count.

Solages herself wasn’t aware that a bill had been drafted until informed about it by New York Focus last month. She also said she hadn’t heard of Hochul’s alleged threat to veto unrelated legislation if the bill was introduced. “This is new to me and explains a lot,” she said.

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:

The current law exempts new buildings for 30 years after they open. Last year’s proposal would only have exempted them for 15 years.
Both the current law and last year’s proposal limited the law’s immediate impact to New York City. But in last year’s proposal, entire counties would have been able to opt in, while the current law only allows town- and city-level governments to opt in.
Both the current law and last year’s proposal exempted landlords who own 10 units or fewer from the law’s requirements. But the current law also exempts individual buildings with 10 units or fewer if the landlord lives in the building. Last year’s proposal did not contain that exemption.
The current law exempts units rented for more than 145 percent above the “fair market rent,” a metric set by the federal government. Last year’s proposal did not contain that exemption.

In one way, last year’s proposal was weaker for tenants: It wouldn’t have permitted towns with populations below 5,000 to opt in, though it would have allowed their counties to do so. This could have ended up denying protections to renters in New York’s smallest communities.

The delay of a year in implementing the law was likely critical for some precariously housed New Yorkers, Salazar noted.

“There are probably many tenants who were evicted in that time in no-fault evictions,” she said. “People who were de facto evicted by rent increases they couldn’t afford that they would have been protected from if we had passed it earlier.”

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.

Albany’s New Housing Plan Would Build Only a Fraction of the Housing New York Leaders Say Is Needed

Sam Mellins

The legislature’s 2023 proposal did include several measures that Hochul had been pushing for earlier that year to boost housing production in New York City. Those included easing the path for office buildings to become housing, allowing construction of larger apartment buildings than were permitted under existing zoning, and allowing more construction time for buildings that qualified for the 421-a tax break before it expired. A version of each of these also made it into this year’s housing deal.

But those provisions ended up with more restrictions than even Hochul’s original proposals had, something the governor may have hoped for when she blocked last year’s draft housing bill. The office-to-housing conversion measure would have required at least a quarter of new apartments to be set aside for low- or moderate-income New Yorkers, whereas Hochul’s 2023 proposal didn’t contain that requirement. The proposal to allow larger apartment buildings also contained affordable housing and union-level wage requirements.

This year’s budget agreement included versions of these proposals. The office-to-housing plank required the same amount of affordable housing as the legislature proposed last year, while the bill to allow larger buildings required slightly less affordable housing and didn’t include the wage requirement — making it more attractive for developers.

Other parts of the legislature’s 2023 bill — like offering housing vouchers to homeless New Yorkers, providing foreclosure prevention counseling, and requiring towns to plan for housing growth — haven’t become law but may be revived in future sessions, noted Moses Gates, a housing researcher at the Regional Plan Association.

“Ideas take a few years to get through the legislative process,” Gates said. “I don’t think it’s ‘We got housing done, so now we’re going to forget about it for 7 years.’”