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Big changes are coming for Rochester’s tenants and landlords, as City Council Tuesday evening approved Good Cause protections in a bid to stave off evictions.
Introduced in June, the law will require landlords with multiple properties in New York to provide evidence of “good cause” in housing court before they can evict any of their tenants or fail to renew a lease in Rochester. It also, in effect, puts a soft cap on rent increases by excluding tenants’ failure to pay rent after an “unreasonable” rent hike from the eight Good Cause criteria included in the legislation.
“The Good Cause law prioritizes keeping people in their homes, and it is a crucial step in recognizing that at the center of community health and wellness is safe and affordable, secure housing,” said Councilmember Stanley Martin before her vote.
Rochester is now the largest city in the state outside New York City to adopt the protections after Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the state’s Good Cause Eviction law in April. The law was mandatory for New York City, but it gave other cities the option to opt in and set some of their own specifics.
Since then, 11 other municipalities have adopted the law: Albany, Beacon, Catskill, Fishkill, Hudson, Ithaca, Kingston, Newburgh, New Paltz, Nyack and Poughkeepsie. Albany, the largest, has less than half the population of Rochester.
The version adopted in Rochester is a so-called “strong” version of Good Cause. The state law allows municipalities to define for themselves two aspects of the legislation when implementing it locally. One is the percentage above fair market rent at which a unit would be exempt from Good Cause protections. The other is the definition of a “small landlord” whose rental unit or units would be exempt.
When Rochester’s Good Cause law was first proposed in June, the initial version of the legislation used the state’s threshold for the “small landlord” exemption. This would have exempted units with landlords who own fewer than 11 properties—which, according to a November report produced by City Council staff, would have excluded roughly 36.2 percent of the city’s rental market, or about 24,181 units.
The version of the law adopted Tuesday has a revised threshold that will exempt only landlords who own a single property. According to the report, this will cut the number of units exempted on “small landlord” grounds to roughly 6,155, or 9.2 percent of the city’s rental market. This lower threshold is in line with the majority of other cities that have adopted the law.
The revision was supported by a majority of speakers at public input sessions on the law and was a major point of advocacy for the law’s proponents—particularly Rochester’s City-Wide Tenant Union, which presented City Council with a letter of support for the strongest version of Good Cause alongside 36 other organizations and 430 individual signatories.
“Housing instability is at the root of so many problems facing our city, such as exacerbating homelessness and hunger, failing to meet our children’s educational needs, and undermining public safety,” said the CWTU in a statement. “Passing Good Cause is not only a step toward tackling these systemic issues—it is the vital foundation to any meaningful action.”
The vote Tuesday night was 7-2. Councilmember Michael Patterson and Council Vice President LaShay Harris voted against the proposed law.
Both Harris and Patterson criticized how the law will push eviction cases into the courts. Patterson lambasted Albany for the state law and called it an intrusion into the contract rights of both tenants and property owners. Harris said it is a step towards socialism.
The local law was passed along with three accessory pieces of legislation.
One directs the mayor’s office to put out a call for organizations to submit their qualifications to conduct an evidence-based evaluation of the Good Cause eviction law to assess its impact.
The second calls for the mayor’s office to issue a request for proposals to find coordinators for a citywide education campaign about the Good Cause eviction law to inform tenants about their rights under the law and to educate landlords on developing compliant leases.
The third measure will create an implementation task force composed of representatives from City Council, the mayor’s office, tenant organizations and landlord organizations, “to monitor and oversee the execution” of Good Cause. While the vast majority of speakers at public input sessions about Good Cause were in favor, some landlords have expressed concerns that the evidentiary standards are hard to meet and that the legislation may have the unintended consequences of incentivizing property owners to pull units off the market or adopt different standards when choosing whom to rent to.
Proponents, however, have pointed to the human toll of the city’s rising eviction rate. The total warrants of eviction issued by Rochester City Court in 2024 is projected to be 6 percent higher than in 2023, though eviction filings are projected to be slightly lower, according to the City Council report.
In a city plagued by a tricky rental housing squeeze driven by persistently low urban incomes, as was uncovered in ACT Rochester’s 2021 rental market study, it is clear that implementation will be key. This sentiment was particularly expressed by President Meléndez and Councilmember Gruber. They both emphasized that the law will not solve all of the challenges faced by the city’s housing market, and that implementation will have to be studied closely.
“If Good Cause is going to work as many hope, we need to fully understand it and be sure we get it right from the start,” said Meléndez in the council’s November report.
On Tuesday, after recounting the lengthy deliberations that went into the legislation, Meléndez said, “The job of a legislator is to do the work to deeply understand the implications of any law we pass. And given the gravity of this law, it was important that I did so. Voting is easy—governing is harder.”
The law’s specifics
At the center of the Good Cause eviction law are the eight criteria defining good cause for evicting a tenant or failing to renew a lease. These parameters are inherited from the state law. They are:
■ Failure to pay rent, except in the case of an unreasonable rent increase.
■ Violation of a substantial obligation of the tenancy, or breaching of any of the landlord’s reasonable, written rules and regulations governing the premises and failure to correct that violation within ten days of receiving a written notice about it.
■ Committing or permitting a nuisance.
■ Permitting the premises to be used for illegal purposes.
■ Unreasonably refusing the landlord access to the premises for the purposes of making necessary improvements or repairs or for showing the unit.
■ The landlord wishes to demolish the unit, make it owner-occupied, or offer it to certain family members.
■ Withdrawal of the unit from the housing rental market.
■ The tenant’s failure to agree to reasonable lease changes upon renewal.
These Good Cause criteria apply to most non-owner-occupied rental properties owned by a landlord who has more than one property. Properties can also be exempted in the following cases:
■ Owner-occupied accommodations with 10 or fewer owner-occupied accommodations (e.g. buildings) with 10 or fewer apartments.
■ The unit is subject to regulation of rents or evictions pursuant to local, state, or federal law.
■ The unit is either rent-regulated and/or an affordable housing unit subject to statute, regulation, restrictive declaration, or pursuant to a regulatory agreement with a local, state, or federal government entity.
■ The units are on or within a housing accommodation owned as a condominium or cooperative, or units on or within a housing accommodation subject to an offering plan submitted to the state attorney general’s office.
■ The units are in a housing accommodation that was issued a temporary or permanent certificate of occupancy within the past 30 years.
■ The units qualify as a seasonal-use dwelling unit under subdivisions 4 and 5 of section 7-108 of the General Obligations Law.
■ The units are in a hospital, continuing care retirement community, assisted living residence licensed pursuant, adult care facility, senior residential community, or nonprofit independent retirement community that offers personal emergency response, housekeeping, transportation and meals to their residents.
■ Manufactured homes located on or in a manufactured home park.
■ Hotel rooms or other transient uses.
■ Dormitories owned and operated by an institution of higher education or a school.
■ The units are within and for use by a religious facility or institution.
Also exempted are units with a monthly rent greater than 245 percent of the local fair market rent published by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The law also somewhat limits rent increases by excluding failure to pay rent after an “unreasonable” increase from the Good Cause criteria. The law allows the courts to weigh all relevant factors when determining whether a rent increase is unreasonable, but increases are presumed to be unreasonable if they exceed the lesser of either 10 percent or the annual increase in the urban Consumer Price Index for the Northeast region of the U.S., plus 5 percent.
Justin O’Connor is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. See “Leave a Reply” below to discuss on this post. Comments of a general nature may be submitted to the Letters page by emailing [email protected].
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