Transcript

Hello, welcome to ‘The Homefront’ by Reclaim Oneonta, where we report on Oneonta’s class divide from the tenant’s point of view. 

On Wednesday, April 22nd a few Oneonta tenants went to Mayor Dan Butterman’s office hours to ask him about the “Good Cause Eviction Law”. As a result of their conversation, now this is going to be discussed by Oneonta’s Legislative Council , on May 11th, headed by Len Carson, Shannon McHugh, and Carolyn Marks. But what is the “Good Cause Eviction Law”, why should we care about it, what are its limitations, and how can we actually get it and more?

The “Good Cause Eviction Law” is a state level policy passed by Kathy Hochul  in 2024. It has two basic features. First, it makes it harder for landlords to get rid of tenants for ridiculous or arbitrary reasons. Basically, any attempt to get rid of a tenant has to be “justified”. This would be things like failing to pay rent, lease violations, the landlord is planning to demolish or permanently repurpose the apartment, or the tenant’s refusal to renew a lease. This applies to both evictions and lease non-renewals. So, landlords can’t just get around eviction regulations by not offering you the chance to renew your lease with this law. 

The second feature of this law allows tenants to legally contest rent increases above 10% or 5% plus inflation, whichever is lower. This is important because it blocks the other way landlords typically remove tenants: arbitrary rent hikes. Really, it’s the two features combined that provide some relief to tenants. 

While this law was passed on the state level, it’s up to the specific localities to actually adopt. So far, several cities already have, like Albany , New York City, Ithaca, Kingston, Rochester, Hudson, Binghamton and a few others. With a reform like this, tenants in Oneonta could finally have slight relief from their landlords. For starters, it would be much harder for landlords to raise rents by ridiculous amounts, or to refuse to renew a tenant’s lease so they can make more space for Airbnb. This would help us to be more secure in our homes and hold onto a little more money from month to month.

While this is great, the law is far from perfect as written. For one, it’s restricted to landlords who own 10 or more units, which would exclude many of Oneonta’s tenants who live in small apartments. It also excludes buildings given a certificate of occupation after 2009, which would mean excluding Westlund apartments, Ford on Main, and Dietz Street lofts, where tenants have been dealing with issues for a while now. The Good news is cities are allowed to modify these exemptions in their local implementation of the law. For example, Binghamton’s implementation of the law changed the definition of “small landlord” from someone who owns less than 10 units to someone who owns one. 

For good cause to really matter here, we would need similar or even more robust changes that, for example, remove the exemption for buildings renovated or constructed after 2009. Between 2022 and 2024, Oneonta saw a 200 person increase in homelessness. That is absolutely a consequence of an exploitative housing market that allows landlords to leverage students and vacationers against working class tenants. If we’re serious about fixing the rent and homelessness crisis in Oneonta, getting this law passed is the absolute bare minimum the city can do.

But of course there is a problem: the real limitation on this law is that it presents a challenge to the completely unchecked power of landlords in Oneonta. When these discussions start, you can bet that they, and their allies in the city government will fight it with everything they’ve got. Expect to be bombarded with propaganda made and paid for by landlords about how “good cause wouldn’t work here” or how it would make it harder for them to protect tenants from bad neighbors. Expect them to keep up their organizing to fearmonger about how the law will force them out of the city. Their main claim will of course be that this will stop them from investing in more housing. In reality, landlords themselves have been one of the main forces holding back new housing developments like the 27 Market street project which would have slightly relieved the problem of insufficient housing supply.

Really, the main thing it would make harder for them is fleecing and replacing tenants with no regard for where they go next. We have heard first hand stories from tenants whose landlords refused to renew their leases, kicked them out and told them “I can make more on Airbnb in three months then I can in a year off you”. They already don’t protect tenants, least of all from rent hikes. They already don’t invest in more housing for working class tenants, as any person who has tried to search for housing in the city can testify. Landlords just want more leverage so they can make more money from tenants, so don’t fall for the self-serving nonsense they’ll come up with to explain why they need to increase the rent by 15% or replace working class renters with baseball families. If they were really concerned with the well being of Oneonta tenants, they would actually turn their many empty properties into occupied rental units. Their refusal to do so is not an accident. It’s a product of the fact that a restricted housing market helps them squeeze the most value out of the units they do have. In other words, as usual, this is a matter of competing class interests. Tenants like you and I on one hand, who want to hold onto our earnings and have stable homes, and landlords who want to make as much profit as possible with as little effort as they can get away with. 

Of course, the landlords will get a lot of help from their friends in government as usual. Despite being mostly made up of democrats, Oneonta’s common council is very conservative when it comes to challenging the rule of landlords. For example, one of the members of the legislative council, Len Carson, has been a consistent voice for the interests of landlords against those of tenants. But he’s not alone. The fact is, Oneonta’s common council is very hesitant to challenge landlords in  any way. While many of them are willing to protest the chief landlord in Washington, they don’t want to ruffle the feathers of the landlords in Oneonta. This is because, at the end of the day, landlords have real power. They own the land that people live on, and so they basically own the city. They use their power to completely dominate local politics, holding the city hostage through their control of the housing supply. That’s the bargaining chip they use to get more and more of what they want from the local government. As long as that’s the case, they’ll use that power to try and block the ‘Good Cause Eviction Law’ or divest it of anything that could inconvenience them.

Fortunately for us, landlords aren’t the only ones with power. We tenants also have power. First, we have power in numbers. There are way more of us than there are landlords or politicians. We can use those numbers to take over physical space, protect each other from forceful evictions, and apply pressure through sustained protests against particularly bad landlords and unresponsive politicians. 

We have another form of power even greater than that. That power is the tens of millions of dollars that flow from us to our landlords every year in the form of rent. Those are tens of millions that we can hold hostage to get what we want from landlords and the government. The way to do that is through rent strikes: the coordinated refusal of tenants to pay rent while staying in our homes, until our demands are met. One tenant refusing to pay their rent alone is easy to replace. Tens of tenants in the same apartment complex or hundreds to over a thousand tenants across the city all simultaneously withholding our rent and refusing to allow each other to be intimidated by landlords is a completely different story. Rent strikes have successfully forced concessions from both individual landlords and local governments. The reason they’re effective is because landlords are the ones who depend on tenants. Our rent provides their income at the end of the day. When we act together to withhold it, we can force them to give in to our demands.

This sort of power is what we’ll need to get the ‘Good Cause Eviction Law’ passed. Regardless of which kinds of power we decide to use for our own sake, the better organized we are, the more effective it will be. That’s where the tenant union comes in. We need something able to unite tenants inside our buildings, neighborhoods, and across the city to fight for ourselves. The more united tenants are, the better off we’ll all be in trying to make the changes we want. The less united we are, the less reason the landlords have to care what we think. It really is that simple. 

We may need the Good Cause Law, but it needs us even more. Without a mass organization made by and for tenants, we’ll almost certainly never get it and protect it. As a group, we need to get over this idea that anyone in the government can or should represent us and fight for us. We have to organize and fight for ourselves. That’s the only way to make and keep real changes. 

So, we have our cause, now we just need rebels willing to fight for it. If you’re willing to fight for yourself as a tenant, come help build a tenant union by attending a public tenant meeting on May 13th on the third floor of the Huntington memorial library from 6 to 7 pm. There we’ll talk about the practical steps we can take to build a union capable of empowering ourselves to get what we need. And, if you want to show your support for the ‘Good Cause Eviction Law’, show up to the legislative council meeting on May 11th from 5 to 6 pm to petition the government on your own behalf.

If you want to stay updated on issues and information relevant to Oneonta tenants, subscribe for more of ‘The Homefront’. If you have your own concerns as a tenant you’d like to hear someone talk about, reach out to Reclaim Oneonta on youtube, instagram, facebook, our website, or by email. More importantly, share and watch this video with other tenants. These are not meant to be typical infotainment, but updates to help tenants organize for ourselves.

We hope to see you again on ‘The Homefront’.