Kingston, NY – The City of Kingston’s new vacancy study disqualifies the city from continuing its rent-stabilization laws that have been effective at protecting tenants. Shrestha’s REST (Rent Emergency Stabilization for Tenants) Act would change that.

”What the City of Kingston’s new vacancy study shows is that the current process for upstate localities to opt-in to rent-stabilization is completely arbitrary and broken,” said Assemblymember Shrestha, “It does not reflect the needs of the people who live here. For example, the study itself notes that more than 50% of renters in Kingston are rent burdened, 30% are extremely rent burdened, meaning they’re paying over 50% of income to rent, that rents have increased by more than 80% over the last decade, and vacancy rates in other regulated housing and even market rate housing are well below the 5% threshold – and yet, because the final vacancy rate among units that qualify to be rent-stabilization has come back at 7%, it’s supposed to mean that the city no longer has a housing crisis that is severe enough to qualify for rent stabilization. This is absolute nonsense. It shows how an arbitrary requirement for a vacancy rate of 5% does not in fact capture a locality’s housing emergency at all. And it’s precisely why I introduced the REST Act earlier this year. Under this act, not only would it give localities the option to use publicly available data to declare a housing emergency, it would also give them the control in deciding how big the buildings need to be in order to be covered by rent-stabilization, and extend coverage to buildings built before the last 15 years on a rolling basis instead of being stuck in 1974. These provisions would reflect each locality’s unique housing stock instead of a blanket one that doesn’t work in every city or town. In my Assembly district, there are very few buildings that were built before 1974, with at least six units in them, which means the law leaves out the vast majority of the housing stock from rent stabilization protections, leaving a large number of tenants to themselves. Hudson Valley tenants deserve better, and the outcome of Kingston’s new vacancy study is exactly why we need to pass the REST Act when we’re back in Albany.”