The Reset Act

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THE REST ACT

A bill that would dramatically expand rent control across New York State was introduced in the 2025 Legislative session as S4659/A4877.

Background

The Emergency Tenant Protection Act of 1974 , known as ETPA , requires communities outside of new York City to conduct a vacancy study prior to declaring an emergency and imposing rent control within its borders. The vacancy study must show that a shortage of housing exists and the vacancy survey needs to show a threshold vacancy rate of 5% or lower before a municipality can enter into ETPA regulation of rents.

In a recent court case in Poughkeepsie, NY , the court observed that the vacancy study requirements and its 5% threshold provides an important measure with which to ensure that government actions are based on objective and rational considerations.
In 2019, the State Legislature expanded the geographical reach of ETPA from its previous confines of New York City and Nassau, Westchester & Rockland Counties to the entirety of New York State. Any municipality can now enter ETPA upon the occurrence of a vacancy study showing a vacancy rate of 5% or lower.
Since 2109, several communities across the State have attempted to enter ETPA regulation of rents. The following municipalities have tried and failed to enter ETPA, having found that they did not have the qualifying vacancy rate: City of Rochester, City of Newburgh, City of Poughkeepsie, Village of Nyack, Village of New Paltz and the City of Albany.
The City of Kingston tried in 2020 and failed with a vacancy rate of 6.7% and then repeated the vacancy study in 2022 and succeeded. The Kingston’s 2022 vacancy study is being challenged in the courts as it is maintained by the property owners affected that the vacancy study was manipulated, and the vacancy rate the City reported as 1.57% was incorrect and the owners own study showed that the true vacancy rate was 6.22%.
The predilection of municipalities to manipulate the vacancy result was evident in the cases of the Cities of Newburgh and Poughkeepsie, where courts found that the Cities had manipulated the data, and each had their entry into ETPA halted by the Supreme Court in their counties upon discovery of vacancy rate manipulation.

So too in the City of Kingston where the methods of manipulation differed in from those in Poughkeepsie and Newburgh, nevertheless Kingston manipulated the results just the same.

Having lost in their efforts to impose ETPA by virtue of contested and failed vacancy studies, tenant activists and State legislators who support them have introduced the REST Act , Rent Emergency Stabilization for Tenants Act, which proposes alternate subjective measures to the objective vacancy study as a prerequisite, using generally publicly available data. While these alternate methods are just that, while a municipality can still rely on the vacancy study method, it is clear that all will skip the objective vacancy study and go the express route of subjective public data.

Beyond this prerequisite change, the REST Act would also dramatically enlarge the number of buildings ensnared by ETPA; currently the ETPA regulation is limited to buildings built before 1974 and which contain 6 units or more. The REST Act changes built before 1974 to built before 2010 and it becomes a rolling 15 year standard meaning any new building immediately has a 15 year doomsday clock. Why do I say doomsday clock, that is because after 15 years the building’s value gets cut in half, actually loses value each year the closer to the 15 year mark.
Also as importantly, the REST Act would allow the municipality to lower the 6 unit or more threshold to whatever it decides. When given that same latitude in the recent Good Cause Eviction legislation, all municipalities outside NYC adopted a standard of more than one, they would be certain to follow suit.
These changes would dramatically expand ETPA rent regulation thrusting even the smallest of owners into the byzantine bureaucratic hell of NYS Division of Housing & Community Renewal’s Office of Rent Administration. Property values would plummet, shifting a community’s tax burden away from multifamily onto single family households.
Buildings will be immediately put on a path to certain deterioration and bankruptcy as is being experienced right now in New York City in whose buildings that have a high percentage of regulated apartments. Any new municipality that would enact ETPA today would have all of its buildings with 100% regulated apartments. These buildings would be redlined by banks and will not have access to the capital needed to maintain safe and sound living conditions. The meager reimbursement rates allowed under ETPA for any capital improvements mean capital investment in the buildings is immediately halted.