Tenant organizations across New York City are pressing Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers to keep a landmark tenant harassment bill alive in budget negotiations, warning that the existing law fails to address how the worst landlords actually operate.
The push, delivered through a formal letter to the governor and legislature, comes as Albany enters its second week past the April 1 budget deadline with no final deal in place. The groups, including the Met Council on Housing and the Cooper Square Committee, are fighting to preserve a bill that Hochul originally included in her executive budget, a sign of momentum that tenant advocates don’t want to see disappear in the horse-trading that defines the final stretch of budget talks.
The legislation grew out of a collaboration between Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and two Manhattan Democrats, state Sen. Brian Kavanagh and Assembly Member Micah Lasher. Its core idea is deceptively simple: the law should be able to see what landlords are doing across their entire portfolio, not just building by building.
Under current law, criminal penalties apply when landlords systematically subject tenants in a single building to conditions designed to push them out. Think heat and hot water cutoffs in winter, endless disruptive construction, leaking roofs left unaddressed. All of it is illegal. But prosecutors currently have no tool to link that behavior across multiple buildings owned by the same landlord.
That gap is exactly what the new bill targets. Tenant groups argue the current framework doesn’t match reality on the ground.
“Unscrupulous landlords don’t typically confine their illegal behavior to one unit or building,” the organizations wrote in their letter. “Harassment is usually spread out across several buildings, sometimes throughout multiple boroughs.”
The proposed legislation would create a Class D felony for landlords found to be running a harassment campaign across two or more residential buildings. A conviction would carry up to seven years in state prison. It would also expand penalties for repeat offenders who get convicted of harassment and then continue the behavior in other properties they own.
The bill fits squarely within a broader effort Bragg has built since taking office. His Housing and Tenant Protection Unit was created specifically to pursue criminal cases involving harassment, deed fraud and housing subsidy fraud. That unit has already produced results: Bragg indicted two Chelsea landlords in September on charges of waging a sustained harassment campaign against rent-regulated tenants across multiple buildings.
That case illustrated exactly the enforcement gap the new legislation aims to close. Prosecutors were able to move on those defendants, but the current law forced them to construct the case around individual buildings rather than treating the campaign as a unified criminal enterprise.
A spokesperson for the governor signaled the administration remains engaged. “The governor will continue to negotiate in good faith with the legislature to deliver a budget that makes New York safer and more affordable,” the spokesperson said.
For New York City tenants, particularly those in rent-regulated apartments in neighborhoods where pressure to push out long-term residents remains intense, the stakes are concrete. The city’s housing court dockets are full of cases involving tenants fighting conditions that any reasonable person would recognize as deliberate harassment. The missing piece has been the ability to show that what looks like a pattern of negligence is in fact a coordinated strategy deployed across a landlord’s holdings.
Tenant advocates say the bill gives prosecutors the tools to make that case criminally, not just civilly, and to hold bad actors accountable with consequences serious enough to change the calculus for landlords who currently treat harassment as a cost of doing business.
“This legislation will help address power imbalances in our housing crisis by creating additional measures of accountability and leave a lasting impact on our state,” the tenant groups wrote. “Please pass this bill. Our safety depends on it.”
With the budget clock running and negotiations continuing behind closed doors in Albany, advocates are lobbying hard to make sure a provision that already had the governor’s backing doesn’t quietly disappear before a final deal is struck.
