Ellen Peterson owns two rental units in Erie County.
When New York state lawmakers adopted the Good Cause Eviction Law last year, small Upstate owners like myself were reassured that we would not be subjected to the provisions of the law, which only applied to owners with 10 units or more. The statewide law was largely the work of Downstate New York City Legislators, who tend to measure problems based on what is going on in the five boroughs and don’t always understand what life is like in the rest of the state.
Good Cause includes rent controls that make it difficult to evict disruptive or dangerous tenants and it forces property owners to renew leases. The New York City members of the Assembly and Senate sold this bill to their Upstate colleagues as a measure to protect renters from large, wealthy property owners, with big buildings and huge portfolios of rental apartments. These regulations — which larger property owners are able to absorb more easily — included specific measures meant to exempt smaller property owners and ensure their property investments and small margins didn’t suffer under Good Cause…