To the Editorial Team: Last month, the Kingston Wire Editorial Team published a piece supporting the dismantling of rent stabilization in the City of Kingston, arguing that it only impacts a “fraction of Kingston’s harried renters” and that since “it’s designed for New York City, [it] doesn’t work for upstate cities like Kingston.”

To address the latter point first, rent stabilization has been in place in small cities throughout Rockland, Westchester and Nassau counties since the 1980s. It has a long history of being successfully applied to municipalities much smaller than New York City. Furthermore, rent stabilization has kept the rent frozen for roughly 20 percent of Kingston’s renters over the last three years. It has kept hundreds of families in their homes, including many of the people that work in our schools, restaurants, and hospitals. While Kingston’s working class has been hanging on, it has only been by their fingernails — most apartments are not stabilized, and the ones that are saw huge rent increases in the years leading up to stabilization passing in 2022. This is why the Rent Guidelines Board voted for a 15 percent rent reduction. After several years of legal challenges, the highest court in New York ruled in favor of tenants this past June.

In their piece, the Editorial Team admitted to not knowing how to solve the housing crisis, but argued that rent stabilization was not The Answer. No one is claiming it is — tenant protections are just one piece of the solution to a problem much larger than Kingston. Globally, housing has increasingly become the site of speculative investment while American housing production has decreased. The combination of housing scarcity and speculation led to skyrocketing rents and a plague of evictions. Tenant protections are indispensable tools to prevent displacement, but they obviously don’t address the supply problem. The current strategy of tax and zoning incentives has failed to induce the private market to build enough new housing in general, let alone housing that’s truly affordable to the working class people who need it most.

To truly solve the crisis, we need to harness the power of the state to directly finance and build large quantities of permanently affordable and democratically controlled homes, also known as “social housing”. In the last century, New York State provided homes for hundreds of thousands through massive investments in social housing — and we can do it again. The House the Future campaign is fighting to create a Social Housing Development Authority (SHDA) that would fund the construction or rehabilitation of affordable housing in our region and across the state. Earlier this year, Kingston’s Common Council passed a resolution in support of the state legislation (S5674/A6365) that would create the SHDA.

While that campaign builds strength, it’s imperative to keep and expand tenant protections. In Kingston, that starts with the Common Council maintaining rent stabilization. After tenants won the rent reduction in 2022, landlords have been doing everything they can to undermine it. Unfortunately, their most recent opportunity was handed to them by the city itself. While cities have to do vacancy studies to opt into rent stabilization, Kingston is the only small city that decided to do one every three years to confirm the housing emergency. Landlords had years of notice, and intentionally manipulated the results this year to get rid of tenant protections. Any review of the data shows this to be self-evident — some landlords reported units available for almost a year while others showed a dramatic increase during the period of the study. The result is a survey that shows a 7 percent vacancy rate [in rent-controlled units] in contrast with the 2 percent rate citywide. Given that rent-stabilized apartments are more affordable, and more affordable units are in high demand, they should have a vacancy rate lower than average instead of one over three times higher. This experience underlines the problems with vacancy studies in general: they rely on landlord honesty and without verification, the data is often unusable. In the case of the 2025 study, the city did not verify that the reported vacancies were actually available to rent.

While the Common Council should use all the data available to maintain rent stabilization, the state should get rid of these unreliable vacancy studies in general. This would be accomplished by the Rent Emergency Stabilization for Tenants (REST) Act S4659/A4877, a bill sponsored by Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha and unanimously supported by the Common Council through a resolution passed earlier this year.

The campaigns for social housing and rent stabilization reforms have been led by members of Mid-Hudson Valley Democratic Socialists of America. If you are interested in joining the statewide fight for both tenant protections and new, permanently affordable housing, join DSA or reach out to learn more at housing@mhvdsa.org.

Andrew Hiller, MHV DSA Housing Working Group Co-Chair

June Nemon, Hudson Valley tenant organizer