Since its inception in 2020, the Ithaca Tenants Union has worked to protect tenants, who make up 74 percent of Ithaca’s population. As a volunteer organization, the ITU has developed a tenant help line, holds a weekly meeting to address tenant issues and helps organize housing complexes.
With these efforts has come a push for rent stabilization, which puts a cap on the amount by which landlords can raise rent. In New York this measure is called the Emergency Tenant Protection Act.
To better inform community members about the union and similar New York housing justice organization’s efforts to pass this policy locally, the ITU hosted a Rent Stabilization Town Hall at Tompkins County Library on Saturday morning.
The Ithaca Common Council voted to pass a new housing inspection fee structure on March 5, with some approving members hoping it would increase revenue and modernize Ithaca’s inspection and permitting system. Others, such as Patrick Kuehl ’24 (D-Fourth Ward), believe the new ordinance will raise fees for small property owners and decrease them for large property owners.
In an email to the Common Council, Kuehl said this change is “unacceptable.”
“We can say that we will reevaluate the fee structure once we have implemented the system into [OpenGov], but for the meantime this inequity will continue to exist, and we will send a powerful message to our community,” Kuehl wrote. “I believe in increasing fees to cover costs but currently we are squeezing the little guy while giving a break to the big one.”
Rent stabilization is a potential solution to counteract changes to housing costs like those due to the new housing inspection fees. The town hall provided attendees with information regarding the state of the housing crisis in Ithaca and launched a canvassing program for rent stabilization according to Genevieve Rand, an organizer with the ITU.
Organizers posed attendees with questions at the beginning of the town hall asking what respondents would do with their money if their rent was stabilized, whether rental costs have ever made their housing insecure and what percent of their income goes to rent.
Attendee responses varied, with some saying they would pay off debt, save for retirement while others would buy food if their rent was stabilized. Some expressed that they had to “move out of [their apartment],” “live in unsafe housing” or were “homeless” for a time due to housing insecurity. Responses ranged from needing to spend 21 percent to 100 percent of their income on rent.
First passed in 1974, the ETPA is New York’s version of rent stabilization, said Rand in an interview with The Sun. The original policy applied to “non-rent controlled apartments in buildings of six or more units built before January 1, 1974” with a vacancy rate of less than 5 percent and could only be adopted in New York City and Westchester, Rockland and Nassau counties.
The Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 changed the geographic restriction of the ETPA so that it could be passed in other parts of the state but required towns to conduct a vacancy study to declare a housing emergency before it could be adopted. Rand said that while New York City conducts an annual vacancy study, most other towns like Ithaca do not.
Since Ithaca does not regularly conduct vacancy studies, it would have to create its own, “and the process for doing that is full of problems,” Rand said. “The real estate industry just pokes holes in every single aspect of every single study. A lot of landlords don't comply with the study, because the way that it's done relies on them self-reporting their own vacancy rates. And no city has the infrastructure or the staffing to actually verify whether what landlords are telling them is true.”
Vacancy rate is not the most accurate way to determine whether there is a housing crisis, Rand said, as homelessness and rent prices as compared to wages are bigger factors.
While over half of apartments in New York City are rent stabilized, only 10-20 percent of buildings in Ithaca would be covered under the ETPA because of newer developments. People living in West Village, mixed-use buildings downtown, and near Ithaca commons are at risk of “being pushed out of the city” but would not be protected by the ETPA, according to Rand.
To mitigate these challenges, the ITU is trying to pass the Rent Emergency Stabilization for Tenants Act, which would make a vacancy study optional and allow communities to use data such as homelessness rates and U.S. Census Bureau statistics to declare housing emergencies. It would also lower the rental unit threshold from six to one and so that buildings covered by the act would update every 15 years.
Hannah Shvets ’27, candidate for Ithaca Common Council Ward 5, has made rent stabilization a core aspect of her platform. The New York Working Families Party, ITU and Ithaca Democratic Socialists of America, among other local progressive groups, endorsed her campaign. She attended the town hall and said it was “amazing” to see Ithaca residents who do not organize for the issue attend.
“It was really cool to hear the [ITU] talk about ways in which the REST Act will make it easier to opt into rent stabilization … so it can impact as many people as possible,” Shvets said. “[Passing the act is something] that I want to incorporate into my campaign as well. If I'm elected, I want to work with county and state allies to get this passed.”
Shvets emphasized that development will not be curbed if the ETPA or REST Act gets passed locally. For development to be successful, she said the housing being built must be affordable for residents — a problem she believes the Common Council should address.
“It's horrifying that so many people are being forced to choose between paying their bills to make ends meet and being able to go to the doctor,” Rand said. “That shouldn't be a position that people in our community are put in. We have the power to give security to people to prevent that, and it's inexcusable that the city administration has not taken the actions it's already funded to do to prevent this.”
