Kingston Approves 15% Rent Cut, New York's First Rollback

The Rent Guidelines Board in Kingston, NY this week approved a 15% rent reduction that applies to renters of 1,200 apartments in 64 rent-stabilized buildings with leases between Aug. 1, 2022 and Sept. 30, 2023.

The board also established a three-year “look-back” period for tenants to challenge their base rent if they believe it exceeded the fair market price. Future adjustments would be applied to the lower rent if the challenge is successful.

The rollback comes about four months after Kingston, a Hudson Valley city about halfway between NYC and Albany, became the only municipality north of NYC’s northern suburbs to embrace rent stabilization, which was permitted by a state rent law in 2019.

Tenants, led by an activist non-profit group calling itself For the Many, have been turning out in force at public meetings since rent stabilization was adopted in July. The tenants demanded rent rollbacks as steep as 30%, half of what they were granted by the rent board this week.

However, a legal challenge to the rent stabilization law and the rent rollback already is underway.

The Hudson Valley Property Owners Association has filed a lawsuit claiming the Kingston City Council incorrectly reported a low vacancy rate in the city, a requirement of rent stabilization.

According to the property owners’ association, the city counted properties that did not respond to its survey as completely occupied, did not count reported vacancies and failed to include some eligible buildings in the survey, among other alleged discrepancies.

The group’s lawsuit aims to nullify the legality of the Kingston Rent Guidelines Board (RGB), which was created by the adoption of rent stabilization in the city. In the meantime, their attorney is asking the court to enact a temporary restraining order that stays the enforcement of rent stabilization in Kingston.

The landlords also are claiming that the Kingston RGB failed to examine building operating expense data before it approved the rent rollback, a requirement of the rent stabilization law, and that the look-back provision is an attempt to “retroactively” grandfather in rent stabilization before it was adopted.

The Kingston RGB issued a statement urging the state housing agency to ask the NY Attorney General to represent the board in its defense against the lawsuit.