Testimony: Rent Stabilization in Kingston
Oksana MironovaSamuel Stein
Thank you for the opportunity to submit testimony at this historic first session of the Kingston Rent Guidelines Board (RGB). We applaud the legislature of Kingston for opting into New York State’s Rent Stabilization system in order to address the crisis of rising rents and gentrification in this city. We thank the members of the newly formed Rent Guidelines Board for dedicating their time to this important process.
Our names are Oksana Mironova and Samuel Stein, and we are housing policy researchers at the Community Service Society of New York (CSS). CSS is an independent nonprofit organization that addresses some of the most urgent problems facing low-income New Yorkers, including the effects of the city’s chronic housing crisis. We have testified at the New York City Rent Guidelines Board every year for decades, providing data-driven evidence of changing dynamics of New York City’s housing market. The NYC RGB has used CSS’s research findings to better understand the New York City housing landscape and to deliberate about rent adjustments.
Kingston’s rental housing emergency is particularly severe. Whereas the state defines a housing emergency as a vacancy rate below 5 percent, and New York City’s vacancy rate was recently found to be 4.5 percent, Kingston’s vacancy rate as of June 2022 was a staggeringly low 1.57 percent. This vacancy rate appears to be worsening since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: in 2020, the vacancy rate was an already shockingly low 1.81 percent.
Under these conditions, individual tenants have virtually no market power: if their rent is too high, or if their housing is not well-maintained or dangerous, they cannot simply move and force their landlord to either find a tenant who will pay their desired rent, or to lower it to a more reasonable price. This creates a severe imbalance within the housing market, where landlords are able to inflate rents, leaving tenants with little option to either pay unreasonably high rents or to face eviction and homelessness.
Under these conditions, median rents for one-bedroom apartments in Kingston have jumped by 27 percent between 2016 and 2020, while the rents for two-bedroom apartments skyrocketed by nearly 50 percent. A majority of the city’s residents are renters. And, a majority of renters are rent burdened, or paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent.
An end of pandemic-era anti-eviction measures paired with a rental market hostile to tenants means that evictions are once again picking up in the city. In 2019, the city saw roughly 350 eviction filings. The filings declined in 2020 and 2021, but are nearing pre-pandemic levels today, with nearly 300 filings to date. While each eviction filing will not lead to an eviction, some tenants will undoubtedly be forced into worse living situations, including homelessness.
New York State Rent Stabilization system was set up to mitigate rampant rent inflation caused by power imbalances within the housing market created by extremely low vacancy rates. Kingston’s decision to opt into rent stabilization gives the Kingston RGB power to address the city’s ongoing market failure that is causing rents to skyrocket, setting the parameters for rent adjustments in 1,200 of the city’s units. The Board should heed the call of tenants and implement a rent reduction as its first adjustment. Such a bold action would act as a market correction, mitigating the impact of multiple years of unjustified rent inflation. It would go a long way toward preventing eviction and homelessness in Kingston, and would turn back the tide after years of renter hardship and landlord profit.
Thank you for your time and consideration, and for taking this historic step toward housing justice in Kingston.