Senate Housing Committee Holds First Meeting of 2024, Approves Significant Legislation

Albany, NY – State Senator Brian Kavanagh, Chair of the Senate Committee on Housing, Construction and Community Development, announced that the Senate Housing Committee convened its first meeting of the new legislative session and advanced several significant bills, on January 9th.

In remarks at the meeting, Kavanagh noted that the Committee’s jurisdiction includes legislation and policy related to the State’s efforts to address several intersecting crises that New Yorkers face: an insufficient supply of stable, safe, affordable, and accessible housing; unsafe and substandard conditions in significant portions of the housing stock, including public housing; unacceptable levels of homelessness; high rates of evictions, foreclosures, and displacement that destabilize individual households and communities; and widespread rent poverty, with many New Yorkers paying an excessive portion of their income on rent and utilities. Kavanagh also highlighted the Committee’s role in leading the transition necessary to meet the enormous challenge of mitigating climate change, which will require profound changes in the ways New Yorkers heat, cool, and power both residential and commercial buildings.

Kavanagh committed to working with colleagues to ensure that the State makes significant progress on all of these issues in 2024.

At the initial meeting, the Committee approved the following bills:

• S3141 (Mannion) would establish the Mobile and Manufactured Home Replacement Program.
• S6574 (Cooney) would establish the New York State First Home Savings Program, to authorize first-time home buyers to establish savings accounts to buy their first home.
• S6518 (Hinchey) would establish a New York Main Street Development Center in the State’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal.
• S6525 (Scarcella-Spanton) would provide preferences under the Affordable Home Ownership Development Program for veterans with service-related disabilities.
• S6573 (May) would require the State Fire Prevention and Building Code Council to study and adopt uniform fire prevention and building code standards to promote fire safety and accessibility in buildings in single-exit, single-stairway multi-unit residential buildings, based on standards already applicable New York City and in other cities and jurisdictions, with the goal of reducing construction costs and increasing efficiency.
• S0563 (Kavanagh) and S6900 (Kavanagh) would repeal provisions of New York City’s Administrative Code, relating to rent adjustments in rent controlled housing, which are no longer necessary because of other changes in the law enacted as part of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019
• S1634B (Kavanagh) relates to penalties for failure to comply with maintenance and reporting of vacant and abandoned properties, and reporting and release of information.
• S1685A (Hinchey) would codify the establishment of the Small Rental Housing Development Initiative, to provide funding to eligible applicants to construct small rental housing developments in eligible areas.
• S1736C (Krueger) would requires electric vehicle charging stations and electric vehicle ready parking spaces in certain new construction.

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