Testimony: On the Good Cause Eviction Proposal

“To Discuss the Good Cause Eviction Proposal (S3082/Salazar)” Joint Public Hearing, January 7, 2022, New York State Senate Standing Committee on the Judiciary and Senate Standing Committee on Housing, Construction, and Community Development

Thank you, members of the committee.

I am Howard Husock, a senior fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where I focus on municipal government, urban housing policy, civil society, and philanthropy. I am also the author of two housing policy books—The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It (Encounter Books, 2021) and America’s Trillion-Dollar Housing Mistake: The Failure of American Housing Policy (Ivan R. Dee, 2003)—and numerous studies of American public policy. I’ve recently testified in front of the New York Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights on eviction-related policy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, I testified in front of three United States congressional committees on housing policy and related legislation. I previously served as director of case studies at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. I am a resident of New York state and do not own nor operate rental property.

No one should disagree that eviction from one’s home can be a painful and costly experience. The legislation (The Good Cause Eviction Proposal/S.3082) we are considering understandably seeks to limit such situations. But in the goal of helping some, one must be careful not to unduly harm others.

It is too easy to view our housing market as one in which predatory owners exercise undue economic power. The reality is different: The housing market is a sensitive ecosystem in which property owners, many of them of relatively modest means themselves, balance what they feel the rental market can bear with their own cost of continuing to provide well-maintained housing. Housing markets should be understood as urban ecosystems, in which owner and tenant are interdependent, the former providing a vital good and the latter making possible upkeep and ongoing provision. The idea that the profit motive is antithetical to good housing conditions does not withstand scrutiny by the endemic maintenance problems of public housing, in which rental payments are limited by statute. Federal and state evictions that have been promulgated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have had undue and devastating effects on rental property owners throughout New York and around the country. The proposed bill (The Good Cause Eviction Proposal/S.3082) interferes in ways that can unbalance this delicate ecosystem. Central to its language is the idea that eviction for nonpayment should not be permitted when “a rent increase is unreasonable.” That is defined as follows: “rent increase is presumed to be unreasonable and, therefore, not a basis for eviction, if it exceeds either 3% of the previous rental amount or 1.5% of the Consumer Price Index whichever is higher.”

Read the full testimony here.