Rent Stabilization Growing in the Hudson Valley

Credit: Aaron Sousa on Unsplash

Hudson Valley towns are slowly opting for rent stabilization laws as the area is struggling with having affordable housing .

Rent stabilization laws were created in 1969 for housing in New York City when the rent in post-war buildings sharply rose. Since then, rent stabalization laws have expanded and strengthened, and one million apartments in New York City alone are covered by these laws. 

Kingston, New York, first started demanding rent stabilization in 2022 from its locals who were struggling as their rents were increasing. The city became a hot spot in 2021 within its housing market, having a 90% purchasing increase by July 2021. 

During city council meetings in 2022, tenants started airing the truth of their living situations, along with the expenses that came with it. 

Brenda Miller, a resident of Rondout in Kingston, revealed additional fees, including her landlord requiring her to pay a year’s worth of rent upfront. Not only is this an uncommon move from a landlord, but it is illegal in the state of New York to do this to a tenant. Since then, Kingston has been successful in enacting the stabilization laws for renters in the town. 

As of December 2023, Newburgh, where 70% of the people rent their homes, has become the latest town in the Hudson Valley to qualify for rent stabilizations for the city. A study showed that Newburgh has 29 vacant, available units that were on the market and a vacancy rate of 3.93%. 

According to the Times Union, “...60 percent of its renters are considered overburdened, meaning they spend at least 30 percent of their income on rent. According to the most recent data available at the time of the study, no census tract within Newburgh had a cost-burden rate below 50 percent.

It was a unanimous vote among the city council members for it to pass. “We must increase homeownership, we must support ‘good-cause’ (eviction legislation), we must form a tenant-landlord association, we must have short-term rental regulations,” Councilman-at-Large of Newburgh Anthony Grice said in his statement regarding the town’s housing ordeal. 

Poughkeepsie and Albany have passed “good cause eviction,” laws that protect “tenants from drastic rent increases and establish their right to renew their leases,” per The New York Times. Rochester and Ithaca are taking steps towards opting for RSLs and Woodstock, New Paltz and Saugerties have put strict regulations on their short-term rentals. 

“People are paying totally unsustainable amounts of their income on housing,” said Executive Director for For the Many Jonathan Bix, a Poughkeepsie nonprofit that’s advocating for state and local housing reforms.

Landlords have pushed back against these laws by suing the city of Kingston three months after these stabilization laws went into effect. Kingston’s survey to get their vacancy number resulting in a 1.57% vacancy rate was criticized by Hudson Valley property owners, claiming that number is “artificially low.” This lawsuit is still ongoing. 

New York City is facing similar lawsuits from landlords based on the legalities of these rent stabilization laws, and they were rejected to be heard from the U.S. Supreme Court. Due to this, the laws will stand - a win for tenants in the city.

"We've had 70 years of rent regulation in New York City. It doesn't work,” said the Vice President of the Rent Stabilization Association Frank Ricci to CBS.