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Senate committee advances bill letting localities opt into rent stabilization using broader criteria
Summary
A Kavanaugh-sponsored bill would let municipalities outside New York City declare housing emergencies using factors beyond a vacancy-rate survey, lower the building-age threshold to 15 years and permit regulation of 4+ unit buildings by local option; the committee reported the bill to finance amid sharp debate over incentives and affordability safeguards.
Senator Brian Kavanaugh, chair of the Senate Committee on Housing Construction and Community Development, presented Senate Bill 4659-b to allow local governments outside New York City to opt into rent stabilization using a broader set of factors — including homelessness, eviction rates and dilapidation — rather than the vacancy-rate survey that the current law requires.
The bill also would permit localities to regulate buildings that are 15 or more years old (rather than only housing older than the 1974 threshold) and to include four- and five-unit buildings at a local government's option. Chair Kavanaugh said the measure is intended to give local elected officials "the opportunity for local governments to have conversations... about whether rent regulation is justified in their circumstances." He added the bill "does not impose rent regulation on anyone."
A committee member who spoke at length warned that replacing a vacancy-rate metric with nonspecific criteria "creates an incentive" for municipalities to adopt stabilization because the municipality "doesn't pay anything" for the cost of maintaining or renovating buildings. That member also criticized the absence of means-testing or AMI-based limits, saying the change could freeze rents for higher-income tenants while failing to target lower-income households.
Other senators pressed questions about local tax-base impacts, whether rent guidelines boards could reduce legal rents, and whether the change would disincentivize new construction. Chair Kavanaugh said the measure is intended to modernize an "irrational" 1974 mechanism that looks only at older, bigger buildings and to enable localities to assess housing markets using a fuller set of indicators.
The committee voted to report the bill to the finance committee. The motion to report was recorded as moved by Senator Jackson and seconded by Senator Zahn; the clerk read the bill and the committee recorded the action as "reported." No final legal amendments or effective dates were determined in committee; the measure now proceeds to finance for cost and rule development.
