Homes should be for rest, family, and community. But too many landlords are raising our rents just to fatten their wallets.

The Rent Emergency Stabilization (REST) Act would make rents affordable by bringing rent stabilization to communities across the state. Rent stabilization is a proven policy to address the cost of living crisis by making rents permanently affordable.set fair limits on rent increases and ensure families can stay in their homes for years to come.

Rent stabilization would:

• Set fair limits on rent increases every year
• Keep tenants in our homes long-term
• Make housing permanently affordable

What is Rent Stabilization?

Rent stabilization is a policy that limits skyrocketing rents and helps tenants stay in our homes and communities long-term. It works by creating a local board to set fair limits on rent increases each year, using data on things like costs, wages, and inflation, and it requires landlords of rent-stabilized apartments to respect these limits. In practice, most rent adjustments in New York have been between 1% and 3% each year. Rent stabilization also gives tenants protections against evictions without a good cause, guarantees lease renewals, and empowers renters to secure repairs and maintenance. Municipalities outside New York City are already supposed to have the power to adopt rent stabilization locally, but the law is broken — so while many have tried, all have gotten stuck.

What does the REST Act do?

The REST Act unlocks and expands local Rent Stabilization, empowering local elected officials to secure permanently affordable housing by making it easier to opt-in to rent stabilization. The REST Act could stabilize hundreds of thousands of tenants across Upstate NY, Westchester County, and Long Island. The REST Act would modernize the Emergency Tenant Protection Act (ETPA; 1974, 2019) outside NYC in three ways:

• It would allow municipalities to declare a housing emergency and opt in to ETPA by reviewing relevant public data without requiring a vacancy study. The bill would allow localities to declare a housing emergency after considering publicly available measures of housing affordability, such as overall housing supply, availability of affordable and habitable housing, rent burden, local or regional homeless rate, and holding a public hearing.
• Where municipalities opt-in, it would bring buildings constructed 15 years ago into rent stabilization on a rolling basis. When the ETPA was passed in 1974, the law included all the eligible buildings that had been constructed at that point—built on or before January 1, 1974. 
• It would give municipalities local control to adjust the size of buildings that are covered. ETPA currently extends rent stabilization to buildings with 6 or more units, common for buildings in high-density New York City, but an unsuitable threshold for housing in other parts of the state that tends to be smaller. Similar to what has already been enacted through Good Cause Eviction, this would provide localities the option to cover buildings as small as 4 units, to account for local housing needs.

Why don’t more municipalities have rent stabilization?

New York’s existing rent stabilization law, the Emergency Tenant Protection Act (ETPA), makes it extremely difficult for municipalities to enact rent stabilization—because the real estate industry wants it that way. Greedy landlords and corporate real estate developers have fought back against expanding rent stabilization and other tenant protections that would interfere with their profits. Nearly a dozen cities have begun the process of opting in, but all of them have hit roadblocks and Kingston is the only city outside of NYC and the suburban counties that has done so successfully. Currently, the requirements for establishing rent stabilization are expensive for local governments and easy for landlords to exploit, which prevents towns and cities from adopting the measure. And, because ETPA was written in 1974 with New York City in mind, its requirements don’t apply as easily to municipalities upstate, where buildings are usually smaller or were built more recently. 

How will the REST Act help?

Right now it is extremely difficult for upstate municipalities to adopt rent stabilization, and it only covers very old buildings. The REST Act would make it easier for upstate towns and cities to adopt the policy by relying on public data on the local housing conditions, like cost of living and homelessness rate, and give municipalities the ability to cover smaller and newer buildings. It would mean more New Yorkers would be able to stay in our homes for years to come.

News Articles

Democratic lawmakers seek changes to rent regulation, Albany Times Union, February 11, 2025

Albany’s next big housing fight might be over upstate rent stabilization, City and State New York, February 13, 2025

New survey finds almost everyone supports rent stabilization, City and State New York, February 26, 2025