The Good Cause question

LaKeisha Ward is a cancer survivor and mother to a daughter with high-functioning autism. About three weeks ago, Ward received notice from Torres Turn Key, her single-family home’s property management company, that the landlord had ordered her to move out.

“I was told I had done nothing wrong and that several of the landlords sent out paperwork and that they wanted their properties empty,” she explains.

Ward is currently facing a holdover, which is when an individual stays past their lease as provided by a landlord. When a tenant’s lease isn’t renewed, they are given 60 days to relocate before the landlord can pursue an eviction case in court. 

Though Ward was given the option to relocate to another Torres-owned property, uprooting herself and her daughter wasn’t feasible. Since Torres wanted to keep the properties empty and raise rents for future renters, Ward, and tenants like her, were urged to find new housing before Sept. 1, Ward says. 

The situation could change for residents like Ward. In April, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the Good Cause Eviction law, which sets regulations that property owners must abide by when raising rent or evicting a tenant. The legislation was made mandatory for New York City, with other  municipalities statewide given the option to opt-in based on their needs. In the city of Rochester, the push for tenant protections has reached a critical point with proposed legislation currently in committee, but there is a long road ahead.

Tenant associations and organizers have rallied in numbers behind individuals like Ward to bring awareness to their situation in efforts to emphasize the importance of Good Cause protections. City Council has hosted hearings to gauge public support for proposed adoption of Good Cause, which could be voted on this month.

Landlords and property owners, however, have criticized the legislation as a flawed approach to balancing the relationship between them and their tenants, with claims that limits on rent increases and tenant protections would prevent them from maintaining the integrity and value of their properties. Should Good Cause be enacted, they say, the difficulty they would face in evictions would impose a significant burden on city courts and force property owners to raise their standards when evaluating new tenants. 

“It’s a serious infringement or limitation on the principle of owner property rights. It is going to seriously restrict what I can do relative to tenants who are problematic,” says Joe Hanna, landlord and owner of Hanna Properties.

Recent history

In 2022, City Council pushed to pass the Eviction Reduction Law. Its justification for establishing local regulations in tandem with the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 stemmed from the HSTPA’s lack of a requirement for landlords to provide actual cause when evicting a tenant—one of the core foundations of Good Cause protections. To do so, landlords had to prove:

■ nonpayment of justified, reasonable rent;

■ violation of a substantial obligation in the lease, barring possession of the unit;

■ nuisance or damage to the unit;

■ occupancy of the unit in violation of law;

■ use of the unit for illegal purposes;

■ unreasonable refusal to allow the landlord to access the unit for the purpose of repair, improvement, or advertisement for sale; or

■ reasonable recovery for the unit for their own immediate personal use.

The proposed Eviction Reduction Law made exemptions for buildings where:

■ the owner resides in the building, and rents out a maximum of two units;

■ use or residency is tied to employment, and that employment is being terminated; and

■ rent regulations or evictions are subject to state or federal law such that “good cause” is necessary to terminate tenancy.

The legislation failed after Councilmembers Mary Lupien and Stanley Martin sought to keep the bill in committee as a means of garnering the necessary support for the issue. At the time, Lupien was Council vice president and formed a coalition with Martin, and Councilmember Kim Smith.

During the process of discussion, the city’s legal department evaluated the legislation and cited conflicts with the state constitution that would have opened Rochester to potential lawsuits from landlords if enacted. The Eviction Reduction Law ultimately fell in a 6-3 vote, with the majority opposing it.

“We do not think that it would have been illegal, but there was a lot of fear of a lawsuit,” recalls Lisle Coleman, tenant organizer for the City-Wide Tenant Union, a grassroots organization focused on furthering tenant rights and protections. “Ultimately, while the three Council members who were introducing the bill wanted to take more time, it was rushed through committee and then voted down by the majority of Council.” 

Enactment of the statewide Good Cause Eviction law cleared the way for another attempt to pass local legislation.

“Passing (Good Cause) at the state level obviously had a major impact on where we’re at today, because it took all of those arguments away,” says Lupien. With the opportunity to adopt New York’s legislation and tailor it to Rochester’s needs, City Council’s concerns now pivot to accommodation.

Landlord concerns

Many landlords think Good Cause would make it much more difficult to evict a tenant who, for instance, is a nuisance to neighbors or fails to properly maintain the premises, Hanna says.

To evict a tenant under Good Cause, Hanna says: “I have to have an attorney at $350 an hour, I have to have a (neighboring) resident who’s willing to go to city court to complain or testify that the tenant is doing these things that we allege to be happening. How often do you think that is going to happen?”

While a landlord has 90 days to notify a tenant of their eviction, a tenant can terminate anytime with one month’s notice—and can simply choose to not pay rent. 

“We had to evict a tenant because of his housekeeping,” Hanna says. “He was so bad that germs and bugs were going to other people’s apartments. It took me five and a half months to evict this person—it cost me about $2,500 just for this one case.” 

Should Good Cause be enacted, according to Hanna, landlords would face even more difficulty. Though the Good Cause legislation was drafted in good faith, he says, there’s insufficient focus on the potential consequences that could arise from such protections.

“We have a definite shortage of housing for low-income people. There’s no question about that. What (Good Cause) is going to do (is) landlords are going to raise their standards,” Hanna adds. “They’re going to be much stricter in their screening of tenants within fair housing parameters.” 

Assemblyman Demond Meeks, who is a proponent of Good Cause legislation, doesn’t believe that landlords won’t have a say in the matter. (In 2020, Meeks and others were arrested while protesting the eviction of Cilenda Florence-Yarde, a public school teacher who lived in the Corn Hill neighborhood.)

“We talk to landlords and have an opportunity to engage (with) them, and show them word for word, ‘Hey, this is what the legislation calls for, it doesn’t lock you up in a manner (that) you can’t have a voice in as it relates to your property,” said Meeks, who spoke to the Beacon a couple of months ago. 

“Even if you came into a bind, where, ‘Hey, I’m a landlord, I own this property, but my child fell upon hard times, and I’m sorry, I need to use this property to move my family in,’” he adds, “you still have to give a person reasonable time to move out, but you can get your property back.”

Hanna stresses the difficulty in bringing eviction cases to city court over the nature of providing adequate notice to tenants.

“As it stands now, without Good Cause, if you’ve been with me more than two years, I have to give you 90 days notice, which is fine. I have no problem with that.” 

Good Cause legislation, he says, would “impose a tremendous burden on the landlords and the courts to try to rectify the many, many cases.”

Current implementation

Rochester’s proposed implementation of the legislation follows many of the same guidelines as those instituted in New York City, and Kingston and Albany—municipalities that followed suit after the state enacted Good Cause into law. To evict a tenant under Good Cause, landlords must prove:

■ non-payment of rent;

■ violation of a substantial obligation of the lease;

■ nuisance in the unit or on the property;

■ substantial damage to the unit or the property;

■ interference with the comfort and safety of the landlord, or other tenants;

■ violation of the law from tenant occupancy;

■ use of the unit or property for illegal purposes

■ unreasonable refusal to landlord access;

■ recovering possession of the unit for landlord use;

■ demolition or withdrawal of the unit from the housing market; or

■ tenant refusal to agree to reasonable changes or rent increases.

Certain exemptions are provided to landlords under Rochester’s proposed implementation of the law. Under the proposed legislation, landlords who own 10 properties or fewer are exempt under the Small Landlord Exemption. Additionally, property units with rent exceeding the fair market rent by 245 percent are exempt from Good Cause protections. In Monroe County, the fair market rent is $1,307 for a two-bedroom unit. 

In Albany, where Good Cause legislation passed on June 2, these exemptions are for landlords who own one unit, or exceed the fair market rent by 300 percent. Other implementations in Kingston and Ithaca maintain the one-unit small landlord exemption, but do not gauge the fair market rent exemption any lower than 300 percent. 

Possible impact

The city of Rochester has 54,000 properties with 69,000 individual residential units. According to the proposed legislation, properties subject to Good Cause protections (independent of being included or exempt) include buildings that are not owner-occupied and have a certificate of occupancy issued before Jan. 1, 2009. Buildings that are not owner-occupied with valid certificates of occupancy yields an aggregate of nearly 24,000 properties with approximately 62,000 rental units. 

An analysis using the city’s BuildingBlocks platform and the City-Wide Tenant Union’s list of properties with two to 10 units shows that 9,981 properties would be exempt from Good Cause under the current proposed legislation. 

Ultimately, nearly 20,000 buildings in the city—including those eligible for exemption— would be affected should the legislation pass. Similar metrics are estimated by the tenant union, which claims that up to 39,000 tenants would not be protected under the proposed law.

Neighborhoods subject to Good Cause protections include University Avenue, Maplewood, and Homestead Heights. Most exempt properties lie in the South Wedge, Cobbs Hill, and Charlotte.

One of the concerns tenant organizers have is the claim that property owners are able to evade Good Cause protections by exploiting the Small Landlord Exemption.

“It’s very easy to make LLCs that hide the fact that you might have 40 or 50 properties but you’ve made eight (companies) to split them up under,” says Coleman. “We think that the only way to provide crucial transparency for this is by closing the LLC loophole, by doing the max of one building owned by the landlord (reducing the exemption from 10 owned properties to one).” 

Under Rochester’s Good Cause, 10,005 buildings would be subject to new protections out of 19,986 eligible properties. Of the total eligible properties, however, approximately 43 percent are owned by LLCs. Though many of these are based in Monroe County, some are in Buffalo, like BBNE Properties LLC. Others are based in states like California and Florida. Some are listed outside the United States altogether.

Coleman notes the difficulty in combing through BuildingBlocks to find the number of properties or LLCs that are owned by a landlord. For instance, 31 LLCs are listed at 18 River St., the address of OneSeven Realty. Fifty-seven owners who account for over 160 properties list Tickle Realty as their owner address. Buckingham Properties has nine LLCs, 23 properties and 504 residential units. Conifer Realty has the same number of companies, which account for 10 rental properties and 1,580 residential units.

According to small landlords like Jay Molis, however, claims of an LLC loophole represent a greater misunderstanding in transparency.

“The city of Rochester requires landlords to register. When you register your property with the city of Rochester in their civics app, every LLC has to provide (the names of the people) that own the LLC,” he says. As it pertains to the state’s legislation, “they want the names of the people from that LLC; it doesn’t matter if you’re in partnerships or anything else.”

According to Rochester’s Civic Property Management Portal, individuals looking to register several properties owned by different LLCs they own or control would have to maintain independent accounts for each LLC they own. Alternatively, users could incorporate their LLCs into one “master LLC” that allows them to streamline one account for registration and maintenance purposes. 

In both cases, the user would have to also incorporate a separate account as the property manager should they choose to designate themselves as such. In the event property owners were different for each LLC, that notion would have to be registered in the portal with respective Building Owner Registry applications. 

To effectively close the loophole tenant organizers claim, however, the portal would have to recognize the parent company as the effective owner of each property independent of their LLC designation. It is unclear if this is accounted for when registering properties.

The road ahead

Whether it is a lack of transparency or a misguided approach to balancing the relationship tenants have with their landlords, concerns over the proposed legislation are many. 

For tenant organizers like Coleman, Rochester’s proposed legislation is a step in the right direction, but may not account for tenants like Ward.

“The locality has a lot of discretion (in adopting legislation), and they can create their own discretion or discretionary exclusions,” says Ryan Acuff, tenant organizer and education coordinator for the City-Wide Tenant Union. “By voluntarily excluding a majority of the eligible rental buildings in the city of Rochester, we think that’s arbitrary and would be tragic, and would not provide the stabilization that this law was meant to give the localities to provide.” 

Organizers like Acuff have continued to rally behind tenants through representation and visibility of their stories and experiences. Ward is currently being represented by Coleman and the City-Wide Tenant Union. For this group, Good Cause is imperative, especially to the many Rochesterians who face the threat of housing instability.

As Ward considers her options, relocating poses unique challenges. Finding stable housing that can accommodate her needs is a reality she would not have to endure under Good Cause.

“It’s not like I can go back to work. I’m on stage four (cancer survival), but I also have a child with a disability and (moving is) going to throw her into a whole temper tantrum. Now she has a change, and I have to find a safe neighborhood because that’s a social disability,” Ward mentions. “I have to make sure it looks safe for her.”

City Council and the City-Wide Tenant Union are each working to get public input and spread awareness. Last month, the union sought to bring attention to the eviction of Yadira Susseth, a mother of eight also facing a no-cause eviction. Susseth owes no rent and has not violated her lease—under Good Cause protections, she would not face the threat of housing instability.

“I suffer with anxiety now because of all the stress they put me through. And not only that, my children have gone through a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress, not being able to concentrate in school because these people want to evict me,” she says.

City Council is holding public hearings on the proposed legislation. In her appearance outside Susseth’s home, Lupien detailed the four public input sessions in each quadrant of the city as well as her interest in voting on the bill this month.

At the first of these sessions on Wednesday, tenants and organizers voiced their concerns in more ways than one. An individual brought the cup they showered with as a visual testament to the lack of assistance they received from their landlord, and their fear that they would lose their housing if they complained. A mother and her school-aged child urged Council to enact Good Cause to protect families like hers. Others mentioned poor water pressure, accessibility concerns, and other issues their landlords fail to address.

Landlords continue to believe that Good Cause protections would disrupt the housing market in ways that would negatively affect tenants. Should their difficulties in evicting tenants increase as a result of their legislation, they claim their process of acquiring tenants would also change—becoming much more strenuous, rigid, and ultimately perpetuating the lack of housing low-income individuals face today.

“The quality of life, the environment in which you live in, which as a landlord, I have an obligation to give every tenant quiet enjoyment of their apartment, and this law is going to make it very hard for me to deal with minor violations of the lease that are having a serious impact on their neighbors,” says Hanna.

“Ultimately, protecting someone’s home that they’ve built, their family, is always going to take priority, and should always take priority, over protecting someone’s business investment,” says Lupien.

Narm Nathan is a Rochester Beacon intern, a senior at the University of Rochester and a member of the Beacon Oasis Project’s inaugural cohort. The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. Submissions to the Letters page should be sent to [email protected].