Pathways to Social Housing in New York: Part C Home

The way tenants’ rights laws support social housing conversions can be broken down into three categories. First, tenants have to be organized and ready to seize the opportunity to manage their housing. Having strong tenancy rights makes organizing possible because tenants are less afraid to join with their neighbors and speak up when their right to organize is protected and their right to a renewal lease is assured. Despite the protections for tenant organizing that already exist under New York State law, it is not uncommon for tenants to be evicted in response to their attempts to organize. Tenant protections make it safer for tenants to organize in their buildings and in coalitions, building the power needed to both take ownership of properties and create democratic governance structures for their operation.

Second, enacting strong tenants’ rights legislation can limit speculators’ capacity to buy, milk, and flip buildings. Rental housing is an attractive investment opportunity because landlords can raise rents quickly and exorbitantly. Tenant protections, like the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), change that fundamental calculus, bringing down acquisition prices and making them more accessible for nonprofits, tenant unions, and public agencies.

To work well, tenants’ rights laws need to be broad and universal, spanning across geographies and tenancy types. Investors have increasingly sought to speculate on a range of housing types from large apartment buildings and tenaments to single-family rentals and manufactured home communities. This has notably exacerbated the rise in property values, and rents, in parts of the state with weak or nonexistent tenant protections, underscoring the need for universal tenant protections.

Finally, strengthening tenants’ rights can illuminate the financial operations of rental housing by giving tenants the tools to challenge unwarranted rent increases and understand the true cost of building operations, divorced from landlord and investor profits. Too often, policy conversations are driven by incomplete information about landlords' financial capacity and unsubstantiated claims of landlord hardship. Transparency in building operations would both ground the public debate and, in cases of predatory or negligent management, begin to put organized tenants on equal footing with their landlords.

See here for an introduction to Pathways to Social Housing