Elected officials should honor the wishes of tenants who vote for them, right? Not necessarily.
In upstate New York, the newly Democratic-controlled City Council just announced it will implement good cause eviction.
“Clearly, this is something that the voters wanted,” Council President Sue Steele told the Times Union. “They made it very clear in the outcome of the last election.”
One thing I’ve learned from years of covering politics is that no one knows exactly why people vote the way they do. The reasons vary tremendously from one voter to the next. Rarely do they come down to one issue — or even issues in general.
The idea that Troy Democrats won November’s election because they favored good cause eviction is nonsense. Democrats last year (and last week in Texas) won races across the country in places that have never heard of good cause eviction.
The tailwinds that Democratic candidates now enjoy — especially a base energized by the Trump presidency — certainly were a factor in those results.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume Troy voters did elect Democrats for the express purpose of passing good cause eviction. Should they automatically enact the policy? This is a democracy, after all.
Actually, the United States is a republic. It’s a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. The leaders we elect are supposed to make decisions based on what’s best for society. “This is what voters want” is not a reason to do something.
Good cause eviction must be considered on its merits. Like any policy, it has benefits and drawbacks, as I detailed in a 2022 column. Two years later, NYU’s Furman Center spelled out the unintended consequences likely to result from a drastic version of good cause proposed for New York.
That bill, after furious lobbying by the real estate industry and a two-year statewide campaign executed on landlords’ behalf by George Fontas, was watered down by Gov. Kathy Hochul and passed in April 2024. It established good cause for most multifamily buildings in New York City and gave localities outside the city the option of implementing it. That’s what Troy is pondering now.
Albany was the first city to adopt good cause and was followed by Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Ithaca, Beacon, Hudson, Rochester, Newburgh and Binghamton, the town of Fishkill and the villages of Nyack, Catskill, Croton-on-Hudson and New Paltz. If Troy’s bill passes, the Republican mayor is likely to veto it, but she could be overridden.
Under good cause, if a tenant is not behind on rent, the landlord must offer a lease renewal — and if raising the rent more than 5 percent plus the rate of inflation (or more than 10 percent), he can be forced to justify the increase in court. The current threshold is 8.79 percent. Luxury rentals are exempt.
Hochul pushed the percentages up enough to avoid strangling rents the way her predecessor Andrew Cuomo did by signing the rent stabilization overhaul of 2019.
But landlords still hate the idea that they can be compelled to renew a tenant’s lease. That leaves eviction — a long, expensive and uncertain process — as the only way to get rid of a disruptive tenant. That can be bad news for the good tenants of a building, too. And it makes it hard to empty a building to fully renovate it.
Regulations like good cause also deter developers from building rentals, resulting in housing scarcity and higher rents.
The debate in Troy seems focused on whether tenants need the protection of good cause to be able to report possible housing violations to code enforcement without fear of retaliation. But as noted, that’s just one of many factors to consider.
One factor not to consider is the results of November’s election, where much larger forces were at play. Donald Trump has been busy on many fronts, but good cause eviction is not one of them.
Read more
How Hochul played the “good cause eviction” game, and won
“Good cause” crowd attacks homeownership plan
The benefits and costs of “good cause” eviction
