Officials in Kingston are celebrating a state appellate court ruling that upheld the Hudson Valley city’s efforts to control skyrocketing rents.
In 2022, Kingston voted to adopt the state’s Emergency Tenant Protection Act, after an analysis found a vacancy rate of about 1.6 percent – below the state’s 5 percent threshold – allowing the city to declare a housing emergency.
Later that year, the city voted to enact a 15 percent rent reduction on rent-stabilized apartments.
The rent rules were then challenged by a group representing landlords. Tenants’ rights advocates are now heralding the appellate court decision announced Thursday. Noble spoke with WAMC's Lucas Willard...
The Kingston Rent Guidelines Board is actually under the Emergency Tenant Protection Act, a state-sponsored board. And that's why the Attorney General, Letitia James, actually represented the Rent Guidelines Board. And that board is made up of currently Kingston residents and as every new ETPA community has the opportunity to do, is to hear from residents, hear from landlords, and then be able to set both, kind of, the rent guidance for that year. And in the case of when you're first starting a new EPTA community, you're able to do what's kind of called the look-back period. Because what the intent of this part of the law is so that as the city is doing a vacancy study, as the city is preparing to move into rent regulation, they don't want to have landlords artificially raise rents to try to beat out any potential stabilization that may come in the future. And so, it includes opportunities to be able to reset rents, and to be able to make sure that landlords are not taking advantage. And so here in this case, it looks like the Appellate Division, recognized that the statutory system that we're working within, does allow for the Rent Guidelines Board to make those statements and to be able to have those look back periods.
And so, I'm, as a mayor of residents here, in Kingston, we have 1,200 apartments, so thousands of residents, I think that this is all welcome news that the Emergency Tenant Protection Act that New York State has been able to be upheld, at this appellate decision of the Third Department and that we're going to be able to keep doing our work. In the meantime, while this lawsuit was happening, the Rent Guidelines Board had basically kept rent increases to 0%. And so, that, no one has had any rent increases while this lawsuit was happening, but they also haven't had any of their rents reset, either during this time period. So, you know, we're looking forward to this. And I think, for me, the biggest part of this case was that upholding a city's right, to be able to one, participate in this expansion of the law that happened in 2019, and then also be able to conduct our own vacancy studies, using our staff and our resources. And the court, you know, unanimously upheld that the city did the right thing, the city did a good job at trying to secure vacancy rates for our community, and that the common council and the mayor did ultimately make the right decision in declaring a housing emergency for our residents.
So now, can the 15% Rent reduction move forward?
So that is something that we haven't had a time, at least myself, personally, to dig into yet. We’ll have to talk to the Rent Guidelines Board. And again, their attorney, which is the Attorney General of the State, will have to look at how they're interpreting this. And the Attorney General's office may be better to kind of give a kind of what is the next step for the rent reduction? I just personally don't know yet. It's very early on in this decision, announcement process.
Have you been communicating with other local officials and other local mayors and leaders of communities up and down the Hudson Valley about this process, this lawsuit, and now this outcome, as Kingston is not alone in high housing prices?
Yes. And so there have been communities up and down the Hudson River and across New York state, that have been interested in the outcome of this case, really, to know, when conducting one of these vacancy studies, what are the parameters? What are communities supposed to do? What can and how should they count? Because none of that was explicitly stated in state law. And so this case really laid out, what a good practice is and following our model. And so we've already talked to a bunch of communities that want to go down this road of doing their vacancy studies, and we've been able to share information with them and share examples, but everyone was waiting for this case to be settled so that we could know whether what we did was the right thing, or whether it needed to be improved upon. And I feel like at this point, you know, now folks have very clear guidance, and I will say that the most recent addition to ETPA, which was just passed and signed into law this summer, this past summer, was also an amendment by our Senator Michelle Hinchey to be able to make sure that landlords actually complied with these vacancy studies, because that is also, was the missing piece is all of this is that, you know, people didn't want to participate. And now, under the new state law, there's a requirement to participate when these vacancy studies are done.
I also want to talk about another housing development in the City of Kingston, with a cap on short term rentals being reached. Mayor Noble, can you tell me about the city's laws and regulations around short-term rentals. And what this means now that the cap has been reached.
When we looked at our zoning code a few years ago, we recognized it hadn't been updated since the 1960s. And we decided to be bold and progressive and to really rethink what zoning could mean for the future development of our city. And so, we literally threw out the whole zoning code and started scratch with a new form-based zoning code that put an emphasis on trying to build housing, and also be able to create a whole variety of new systems to encourage adaptive reuse, encourage putting housing back into the hands of people who want to live here permanently. And that's where short-term rental regulations…up until that point, the city had very lackluster and very and very weak, short term rental regulations. And so, with this new zoning code, we were able to find what we felt was a very fair and happy medium of what a right number of short-term rental units are in a city. So we used 1%. And so under our law 1% of our housing stock can be short-term rentals that are rented as full units. And so we have a little over 11,000 housing units. And so we were able to have 106 short term rentals. And so for us what that meant was that you can only have 106 properties that are fully rented year round as short-term rentals, Airbnb’s. And so that for us, who was seeing hundreds of short-term rentals at points during the last few years, we've seen a vast reduction in that. So, at least from our records, we used to have almost 300 has now been reduced to about 106. And that provided almost immediately 200 new housing units back on the market and available to our Kingston residents and for folks looking to move to Kingston. And so that's what the 106 is all about. And, for folks who violate that we've also very stiff penalties for folks who have not registered with us and who are renting anyway. And so, we have sophisticated software to be searching for those illegal rentals and then actually going after them in city court with very stiff fines for people who violate the new zoning code.
So right now, it's New York State budget season and lawmakers are working with the governor to finalize a spending plan. A housing plan that was proposed by Governor Hochul last year failed to fully make it through the legislature. What are you hoping to see come out, hopefully on April 1, when it comes to the state budget?
One of the things that we feel really strongly about is that providing incentives to communities is really helpful. We were just recently named a pro-housing community, which is part of kind of an effort to get more communities to make themselves more suited to have housing built and to support housing. But we do recognize that our residents do sometimes need additional regulations to be able to help support them and especially for so that they're not taken advantage of by property owners. And so, we've been a big supporter of Good Cause Eviction. We think that it should be really clear, on what are the reasons that people can be evicted and what are the reasons that they shouldn't be evicted. And I am hopeful that out of this budget process and going into the end of this session, we will have some really good new housing policy that, one, protects our tenants, but then also incentivizes communities to continue to build housing of all types and really be able to, for the communities that are doing a good job, they should definitely be rewarded and hopefully it will encourage other communities that have not been doing their part to step up. And I think that that will hopefully be a good mix this year in the budget process.
