Any way you slice it, 2022 has so far been the worst year for Kingston landlords since 1777. And it may get worse still before it’s over.

Earlier this year, Kingston joined several other Mid-Hudson cities in passing a Good Cause Eviction law, which radically redefined the landlord-tenant relationship by, depending on how you feel about it, making it difficult for landlords to dump otherwise-fine tenants to pursue richer ones, or making it difficult for landlords to get rid of problem tenants.

And now, rent control? In upstate New York? Yes, and the vote wasn’t even close. Like Good Cause Eviction, it passed the Common Council with ease. A laissez-faire real estate market in Kingston may be advocated by many in town, but it has virtually zero support where it really counts — city government. Both the mayor and 89 percent of the council embraces this new era of government involvement in housing. Landlords are not entirely friendless in Council Chambers, but the odds are stacked very heavily against them.

Good Cause Eviction is a new concept in New York, at least, and its fate far from certain. If a ruling against it made by an Albany state Supreme Court judge is upheld on appeal, it will apply to the entire Third Judicial District, of which Kingston is a part. For it to stick for good, GCE will need to be passed on a statewide level; while landlords may have few friends in Kingston these days, they still have plenty in Albany …

Less unfamiliar is rent control, though most upstate people only know it from stories we hear about people in New York City paying peanuts for posh apartments passed down from generation to generation, like family heirlooms. It was first enacted in Gotham back in 1920, but taken away after a few years. It wasn’t until 1943 that it stuck, first in the form of federal wartime price-control measures and then as a state program in 1950. Since then, there’s been a great deal of push and pull between tenant advocates and real estate interests about specifics but as of 2019, a little over 57 percent of New York City’s apartments are controlled, stabilized or otherwise regulated. When state law began to allow it in 1974, some other cities in the immediate suburbs of The City joined in on the concept. Kingston’s the first to do it this far north, but probably won’t be the last.

The next headache for landlords is coming from For the Many, the left-wing activist group which helped send Kevin Cahill into early retirement from politics back in June. Its new campaign, dubbed "Homes Not Hotels," is against one of the most lucrative income streams for some landlords. They convert housing units — apartments and, in some cases, entire houses — into short-term rentals, post ’em up on Airbnb or Vrbo, and proceed to make bank off of hotel-averse tourists while taking those units away from regular people looking for a stable place to live. We’ll see how this goes; two of the three candidates for county executive support the concept. More locally, the city’s new zoning code would, as it’s currently drafted, restrict non-owner-occupied short-term rentals, but critics point out they still would be allowed in the city’s busiest, and most attractive to visitors, neighborhoods.

How we got here is no secret; Kingston’s been a hot tamale for downstaters seeking a less-citified city experience for well over a decade before the pandemic, when the real estate market countywide got so hot it made Chornobyl seem downright Arctic in comparison. Many were, and still are, stunned by the prices of the past two years and are still in a state of culture shock from the “Brooklynization” process. (Come to think about it, this whole thing we now call Kingston got started by a bunch of out-of-towners coming in, deciding they liked the place and displacing the people already living here.)

But are we going too far? Certainly many landowners and landlords would say so — even with the tax levy cap, property taxes are no joke and the cost of maintaining rental properties is going the same way as everything else. That is to say up, up and away from their ability to pay them in a Kingston where their income growth has been throttled. It’s plausible that what happens is smaller landlords, the ones more likely to be local people and easier to get a hold of than non-locals, give up and sell out, possibly resulting in more of the bad stuff we’ve seen happen to several local complexes sold over the last several years.

Maybe the central questions are these — when does private property cross the line into becoming a public good and, in the largest sense, why do we bother having civilization, government, a healthcare system, etc. in the first place?

With apologies to both Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, the free market regulates some things just fine but in our case it’s fallen short in meeting the housing needs of many now-former Kingstonians. Americans are a more mobile people than others, with many of us willing to pull up stakes in pursuit of a better job in another state, and no one wants to live in a Xenophobiaville that’s totally closed itself off to new people, like in that M. Night Shyamalan movie where any and all outsiders are referred to as "Those of Whom We Do Not Speak." But when we lose folks who would otherwise stay, it's an unacceptable loss and one the body politic of Kingston is no longer willing to sustain.

So maybe a better way to think of the Emergency Tenant Protection Act is as an Emergency Community Preservation Act. It’s a mechanism to help some Kingstonians, both those with deep roots in town and those who came here back when it was one of the cheapest places to live in the entire Hudson Valley, stay in the city they love. We can’t help but think if more of the landlord class of Kingston had kept community preservation in mind over the past two years, laws to preserve the community would not have been forced upon them.