Changes Are Needed

It’s to be expected that an omnibus bill, encompassing years’ worth of proposals into one piece of sweeping legislation, would require some tweaking even after it’s passed and been signed into law.

The Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 is certainly no exception. Before the State Legislature adopted the act in June, at the end of the legislative session, and Governor Andrew Cuomo hurriedly signed it, seemingly no one considered how its well-intentioned protections for tenants would affect the vacation rental industry.

Across the state, nowhere are seasonal rentals more vital to the economy than the East End of Long Island. But now that industry is jeopardized. The same rules meant to protect renters from being wrongfully or hastily removed from their permanent housing are being applied to vacation rentals. These rentals must have hard, enforceable vacate dates to be viable.

But of more concern to the industry is that the law no longer allows landlords to collect more than one month’s worth of rent as a security deposit or an advance. The days of having to pay for the first and last month’s rent plus a month’s security on top of that before moving into a year-round rental are over. Now, tenants need to provide only one month’s rent as security.

While this is a laudable idea that is needed to help full-time residents of Long Island, where excessive advances become a barrier to finding housing, the vagaries of the law have resulted in the rule being applied to seasonal rentals as well. In the past, summer-long renters were accustomed to paying upfront for the whole season and putting down a sizable security deposit. Now, if a tenant who signed a lease through Labor Day decides to spend August in Paris instead of the Hamptons, the landlord is left with no income for August — and no time to rent the house to someone else. Considering the rates for a summer rental on the South Fork, the losses can be staggering.

Again, the housing reform was needed, and the new tenant protections to prevent landlords from booting renters with inadequate notice or from retaliating for legitimate complaints should be valued. Tenants deserve the new recourse they have when landlords behave badly. But when the State Legislature convenes again in January, the law should be clarified to protect the people it is meant to protect — and to remove onerous, counterintuitive regulations from the seasonal rental industry.