Our 2024 Strategy

Narrative

Homes are for rest, family, and community. Home is where we watch our kids take their first steps. It’s where our loved ones gather around the kitchen table to celebrate and share a meal. It’s where we unwind every day after a long, hard day of work.

But to the real estate industry, our homes are just ATMs. They’re trying to squeeze as much money out of us as possible – raising our rents, refusing to make basic repairs, and tearing our neighborhoods apart. We work hard to keep a roof over our heads, but landlords and developers are making it harder and harder to afford rent. Skyrocketing rents, slum conditions, and evictions are driving us out of our homes with nowhere to go, forcing many of us into homelessness.

The real estate industry is using its wealth to buy our elected officials and keep this unfair system in place. As a result, our state leaders have refused to take action on the housing crisis. Some leaders like Governor Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams are even making the housing crisis worse – working hand-in-hand with their real estate donors to raise our rents and unravel our social safety net, while giving millionaire developers tax breaks to build empty glass towers most New Yorkers cannot afford.

Tenants and homeless New Yorkers make up half our state. And we’ve had enough. Our housing system needs basic measures in place to make sure everyone has a safe, stable home – no matter where you live, when you arrived here, or where you’re from. That’s why we’re joining up with our neighbors and building a movement for universal rent control, rental assistance, and social housing for all: creating homes and neighborhoods where we have the freedom to stay and the freedom to thrive by putting people over profits. These are our homes. This is our power.

Strategy

Expand Our Platform

We have to meet the moment and fight for demands that will bring more people into the base of organized tenants and homeless New Yorkers contesting for power in Albany. Lawmakers, key allies like labor, and more rightly perceive that our 2023 banner demands (Good Cause and HAVP) will not effectively solve the crisis alone. In order to win these key pieces of legislation and to continue to chart towards our North Star, we need to fight for new universal rent control policies and bills that would expand the supply of social housing. An expanded platform will also help electoralize our agenda by giving new candidates a broad set of bold housing policies to run on.

Organize Regionally

In 2023, big mobilizations that targeted the whole legislative body did not lead to individual Assemblymembers and Senators feeling enough pressure from their own constituents – large mobilizations have come to be an expected tactic in Albany. We are also, as a coalition, not able to move as many people into large mobilization as we could between 2020 and 2022. On the other hand, when we have executed a sustained, regional, and multi-pronged effort against one legislator it was extremely successful. Next year is an election year, which means electeds are particularly thinking about voters in their districts. We need to recommit to being an active presence in cities, towns, and in neighborhoods – not just Albany. Focusing regionally will also allow us to substantially build up our base and connect more tenants and homeless New Yorkers to political organizations.

Propogandize

Last session, HJ4A won the battle for legacy media: we were regularly on the front page of the NY Daily News and secured editorial board endorsements from the Buffalo News, the Times Union, and the New York Times. It did not sufficiently sway lawmakers towards our positions – especially where the real estate industry was spending millions on paid advertisements and mailers. In 2024, we must invest in communications tactics that build power – not just target Albany insiders. This means messaging for social media, door-knocking, tenant meetings, mailers, and TV ads: not just messaging for plugged-in reporters and editorial boards. Through an outward-facing narrative, we can reach the general public and build our movement.

Platform

Good Cause Eviction (Salazar/Hunter): Good Cause Eviction gives all unregulated renters protections against unreasonable rent hikes and retaliatory or discriminatory evictions. It gives 1.5 million tenants who live in small apartment buildings in New York City and non-stabilized apartments across the state basic protections against non-renewal of leases and price gouging.

Democratize the Rent Guidelines Board (TBD): Rent Guidelines Boards set annual rent adjustments for rent-stabilized tenants in counties where rent stabilization exists. This bill reforms the RGB to give power to local legislatures to approve RGB members, expands eligibility to allow for more tenant voices on the board, reduces the number of members from 9 to 7, and ensures language access and in-person hearings at RGB meetings.

Expand the Emergency Tenant Protection Act (TBD): Tenants are organizing to opt-in to the Emergency Tenant Protection Act (rent control) across the State. But the truth is that this critical policy is riddled with loopholes and millions of people are left out. In 2024, HJ4A will campaign to expand eligibility for ETPA with goals of making the following changes:

- Reduce the bureaucracy required for municipalities to opt in
- Reduce the building-size threshold from the current 6 units
- Modernize the year cut-off from buildings built before 1974 to buildings built in the last 15 years with rolling eligibility
- Reregulate an estimated 300,000 units lost to vacancy decontrol between 1994 and 2019

Housing Access Voucher Program (Kavanagh/Rosenthal): $250 Million. Housing Access Voucher Program is a state-wide Section 8-like program that provides low-income New Yorkers who are homeless or at risk of homelessness (behind on rent) with money to pay their rent. HAVP fills crucial gaps in New York’s social safety net programs: households who are locked out of most rental assistance programs – undocumented New Yorkers, people with past convictions – are eligible for HAVP.

Tenant Opportunity to Purchase (Myrie/Mitaynes): $250 Million. TOPA, or Tenant Opportunity to Purchase, gives tenants the right to make the first offer on their building if the landlord decides to sell it. Working together, tenant associations could access public money and financing to convert their homes into permanently affordable social housing – like limited-equity cooperatives, community land trusts, or even public rentals.

Social Housing Development Authority (TBD/Gallagher): $5 Billion. Social Housing Development Authority is a new, well-capitalized public authority charged with constructing new, permanently affordable mixed-income housing and acquiring and rehabilitating existing housing to maintain permanent affordability. NYS-SHDA would have broad authority to build, acquire, and renovate deeply and permanently affordable housing for public and community ownership. The SHDA would create publicly owned housing governed by its residents and their allies in the labor movement as well as technical assistance providers. Tenants who live in buildings produced and financed by the SHDA would pay 25% of their income in rent – revolutionizing a rental affordability system that has left many low-income New Yorkers living in poverty (even when they live in “affordable” housing.)

Preserve Public Housing (TBD): $5 Billion. New York State must commit $4.5 billion for public housing capital repairs to preserve 40,000 public housing units over the next five years. $3.55 billion of this overall amount should go to NYCHA to preserve 15,000 units of affordable housing for NYC; $950 million for public housing in the rest of the State to preserve 25,000 units of affordable housing and would fix all of the backlogged repairs. Additionally, New York State must prevent evictions of thousands of families with $500 million in rent arrears for public housing residents across New York State. ($335 million for NYCHA families struggling to make ends meet as the cost of everyday goods continues to rise; $165 million for public housing in the rest of New York State.)

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