When Good Cause Eviction passed as part of New York’s FY2025 budget, advocates celebrated and landlord groups objected loudly. I understood both reactions. What I’d say to both sides is this: the protection is real, and the problem is real, and anyone spending time in NYC Housing Court can see exactly where this is headed.
The Gap This Law Was Filling
For years, market-rate tenants in New York City had essentially no right to a lease renewal. A landlord could simply decline to renew, offer terms the tenant couldn’t meet, or raise the rent by any amount, and the tenant’s legal options were thin. Rent-stabilized tenants had renewal rights. Market-rate tenants did not. That asymmetry left a lot of people genuinely exposed, particularly long-term tenants in neighborhoods that gentrified around them.
Good Cause Eviction addresses that directly. It gives market-rate tenants in covered buildings the right to a lease renewal. It also lets tenants challenge rent increases above 10 percent (or five percent plus the Consumer Price Index, whichever is lower) as unreasonable in court. A landlord who wants to remove a tenant now needs a qualifying reason. That’s a meaningful shift.
Why I’m Skeptical of the Implementation
Here’s where I put on the attorney hat rather than the policy analyst hat. I’m in Housing Court regularly. I see the docket. I watch how cases move, or don’t move. When I read through Good Cause Eviction and think about how the “unreasonable rent increase” standard is going to play out in practice, I have real concerns.
The law creates a litigation pathway. A tenant receives a renewal offer with a 14 percent rent increase. Under Good Cause, they can challenge that as unreasonable. Fine. But who decides? A Housing Court judge. The same Housing Court judges who are already managing crushing caseloads, where cases routinely take over a year to resolve, where many tenants appear without counsel and many landlords are small operators without legal representation either.
Adding Cases Without Adding Capacity
The law added a new category of dispute without adding a single judge, clerk, or courtroom. That’s the part that concerns me most. Rent-increase challenges are going to require fact-finding. Landlords will assert that their costs justify the increase: insurance, taxes, maintenance, debt service. Tenants will dispute those claims. Someone has to resolve that. In a well-resourced court system, you could imagine a relatively efficient process. In NYC Housing Court as it currently exists, I don’t see how this doesn’t become a backlog on top of a backlog.
What I Think Should Happen
The protection this law creates is necessary. I’ve seen what happens to long-term tenants when market-rate landlords have unchecked leverage at renewal time, and it isn’t pretty. But the legislature passed a substantive reform without grappling with the procedural infrastructure required to enforce it fairly.
If Good Cause Eviction is going to work the way it’s supposed to, protecting tenants who deserve protection without becoming a tool for indefinite delay, it needs a faster resolution track for rent-increase disputes. Mediation, administrative hearings, something that doesn’t dump every contested renewal into a court system that’s already at capacity.
Right now, the law is on the books and the courts haven’t caught up to it. That gap is where disputes go to get expensive and slow.
This article reflects my personal opinion as a practicing NYC attorney and is not legal advice. Every situation is different. If you have a specific legal question, contact my office.