State lawmakers proposed raising taxes on high earners and enacting a version of the controversial tenant protection known as “good cause” eviction in their budget proposals released this week, staking out positions to the left of Gov. Kathy Hochul as the two sides begin negotiations on the coming year’s state budget.
The so-called one-house budget plans, released Monday night by the state Senate and Tuesday morning by the state Assembly, include some overlaps with Hochul’s own $233 billion budget proposal for the 2025 fiscal year. The Senate’s proposal backs up Hochul’s calls to create a tax incentive for office-to-housing conversions in New York City and lift a density cap on housing. It also expresses openness to a new tax incentive for affordable housing construction akin to the lapsed 421-a program, whose replacement is a key priority for the real estate industry, as well as extending the old program’s deadline to cover projects already in the pipeline.
But the Senate also called for enacting “tenant protections that align with the core principles of Good Cause Eviction,” a policy which, in its currently proposed form, would cap annual rent increases and bar landlords from evicting tenants without pointing to a specific, permissible reason. The governor opposed the policy last year, but the Senate is now tying its support for “good cause” to a potential 421-a replacement as part of a “comprehensive housing package” — explicitly endorsing a much-discussed trade that has long been rumored but never materialized.
Both sides must reach a budget agreement by April 1, although last year’s deal was settled nearly a month late.
The Assembly, which has tended in recent years to be more cautious than the Senate, did not include “good cause” in its plan. Both houses renewed their long-running efforts to enact a housing-access voucher program, which would give aid to people who are homeless or at risk of losing their homes.
Meanwhile, the Senate and Assembly plans both propose increasing income taxes through 2027 on people who earn more than $5 million, and raising the corporate tax rate from 7.25% to 9% for businesses earning at least $5 million annually; the additional revenue would fund unemployment insurance. Hochul has called tax increases a nonstarter, and the governor tends to hold the upper hand in budget negotiations.
On transportation, both houses called for $90 million in funding that would increase city bus service and add 15 new fare-free routes on top of the five launched last year. The proposals were floated by two Queens lawmakers last month with the goal of boosting bus service as congestion pricing implementation nears.
Lawmakers took an ax to some of Hochul’s own policy priorities. The Senate would undo the governor’s controversial proposal reducing aid to rural schools to account for population loss, and the Senate wants to soften Hochul’s anti-shoplifting plan by removing her proposal to increase criminal penalties for assaults on retail workers.
Rather than a simple spending plan, New York treats its budget process as a chance to enact a slew of complicated policy priorities, and myriad other policy items were thrown into the Legislature’s proposals.
For example, lawmakers also want to try again on some bills that Hochul vetoed last year, such as the Grieving Families Act, which would expand damages people can obtain from wrongful death lawsuits; and the Challenging Wrongful Convictions Act, which would allow people who have pleaded guilty to crimes to more easily challenge their convictions by showing new evidence.
More ambitiously, the Senate also hinted at plans to create a new program that would finance the construction of affordable and mixed-income housing on state-owned land. The idea has yet to be detailed, but lawmakers have said the program could resemble the Mitchell-Lama program that built more than 100,000 housing units starting in the 1950s.
The housing components of the one-house bills closely resemble the last-minute housing deal that Senate and Assembly Democratic leaders claimed they had reached at the end of last year’s legislative session. Lawmakers blamed Hochul for not accepting that package, which would have included “good cause” eviction and an extension of 421-a, but Hochul contended that lawmakers never even had the votes to pass the supposed deal.
Eddie Small contributed reporting.
Nick Garber , 2024-03-12 18:03:30
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