‘Good Cause Eviction’ leaves tenants and property owners concerned

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — With the $237 billion state budget passing through the legislature, people are taking a closer look at its contents.

One part coming to the forefront is a change to eviction rules. These are designed to make it harder to evict some tenants, but the change has people on both sides upset.

“What we’ve seen in this session of the legislature is that Governor Hochul and the real estate industry worked very hard and were very successful in completely gutting the bill,” said Ritti Singh, the communications director of Housing Justice for All.

Singh said Good Cause Eviction was supposed to mean if a tenant pays their rent and follows the terms of their lease, they wouldn’t have to worry about being forced out of their home by an unfair eviction or rent hike. Instead, she says this excludes people.

“It excludes at minimum 3.4 million people, especially in Upstate New York,” said Singh. “And for the people who do have the protection, it’s going to be really, really hard for them to be able to use it.”

Real estate experts say in their eyes, Good Cause Eviction is a “lease for life.” Matt Drouin, the president of Freedom First Real Estate Investor’s Association, says it would add a judge into the equation before being able to evict a tenant.

“I’ve been to eviction proceedings before, where we were evicting for anything other than non payment of rent, such as smoking an apartment that was bothersome to neighbors that had children with asthma,” Druin said. “And it was impossible to remove that tenant because the judge was never satisfied with whatever evidence that we could, that we could procure to do that right.”

He adds that sometimes rent is so low that the housing provider cannot finance repairs, unless they get rent increases above a certain amount, and explains potential, long-term effects.

“We’re going to end up with more boarded up vacant housing in our city, which is the city of Rochester, because we have a lot of vacant housing in the City of Rochester that needs significant amount of repair.”

Singh is encouraging tenants with concerns to contact the Rochester Tenants Union.

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