What is the Right to Renew Leases?

At any time, your landlord can decide not to renew your lease for next year, then evict you without giving a reason. That’s not right, and we can change it!

Two of the most common types of cases we see on our Organizing Help Line are Landlord Harassment and Eviction Threats. In almost every single case, tenants have been denied a lease renewal, but either want to stay or can’t find alternative housing. Landlords have the unilateral power to create this situation, and they’re using it to discriminate against and displace tenants, with no oversight or consequence.

The solution is for Common Council to Pass the Right to Renew (a.k.a. Good Cause Eviction) — this right should belong to tenants, and since we make up over 70% of Ithaca’s population, we CAN win it if we work together.

Right to Renew will not stop eviction entirely. But it will massively protect us from landlord retaliation in response to demanding repairs, organizing with other tenants, and asserting our rights under the law.

The Right to Renew law would do two things:

  1. Give tenants the right to renew our leases if we want to

  2. Require landlords to prove they have Good Cause before evicting us (see below)

Who Will Right to Renew Help?

The Right to Renew Leases will help anyone who has been arbitrarily denied a lease renewal. Displacement from nonrenewal especially affects Ithaca’s Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ communities, particularly those with disabilities.

The majority of people who contact ITU while facing eviction & displacement threats have been denied lease renewals. Housing displacement breaks up communities, families, and careers by forcing people away from their neighbors, jobs, and access to resources like grocery stores and public transportation. This is an especially urgent crisis in Ithaca — over the past couple of decades, non-renewal, high rent increases, and eviction (among other forces) have especially displaced Ithaca’s historically Black communities, forcing many people to move into substandard housing, or out of town entirely. The City of Ithaca must fight this pattern by passing anti-displacement laws like Right to Renew.

According to a 2018 study by Carl Feuer, 57% of evictions in Ithaca are filed against People of Color. Nationwide, the Eviction Lab found that Black Americans experience the most disproportionately high rate of eviction, by a significant margin. Many of these are lease non-renewal evictions — a.k.a holdovers — and many, many more happen completely outside of court as landlords raise rent and refuse renewals.

In a 2020 study by the UCLA Williams Institute, LGBTQ+ Americans experienced houselessness at around twice the rate of their non-LGBTQ counterparts — and as high as eight times for transgender people, specifically. Another study shows LGBTQ+ people are also more likely to experience poverty, and more likely to be tenants.

These inequalities grow even larger when intersecting with physical and mental disabilities, which render Americans more than twice as likely to experience the effects of poverty, according to a Center for American Progress analysis of US Census data. If you have a disability, a nonrenewal is especially devastating, as finding new low-cost housing that meets your accessibility needs is close to impossible in Ithaca. Plus, our transportation infrastructure is not strong enough to make living on the city’s hilly outskirts a viable option for those with difficulty walking.

The complete lack of oversight on non-renewals means that it is the ideal eviction method for landlords seeking to legally discriminate against tenants.

Right to Renew would stop discriminatory non-renewals, and even protect us from eviction if we’re unable to pay increases in our rent.

What's a Tenant Assembly?

Assemblies are an opportunity for us all not only to voice our thoughts and share our experiences, but also to decide together on a course of action we want to pursue in addressing Ithaca’s housing crisis.

Popular assemblies are a type of community forum designed around democratically sourcing decisions from large groups, inspired by the innovative organizers in Latin America and the Tompkins County Antiracist Coalition. We have considerable power and leverage when we stand together as tenants, and have seen collective action in Ithaca and other areas win rent reductions, stop evictions, and force repairs from landlords who are reluctant to make them. None of these are achieved by representatives or experts discussing housing as a commodity or investment, but rather by neighbors who live in rental housing standing united around a common cause.

We had our first Tenant Assembly outside City Hall on July 31st. After getting press coverage and bringing the notes from the Assembly to Common Council, three legislators publicly expressed support for the bill — a fantastic start. As tenants, we make up over 70% of Ithaca’s population. That means that if we work together, we control our democratic system — because our Common Council politicians can’t win elections without us.

What's the Timeline for Passing This Law?

Ideally, these are the legislative steps Right to Renew has to go through in order to become a law:

  • August 13th: Right to Renew appears on the agenda of Ithaca’s Planning and Economic Committee (PEDC)

  • August 18th: The PEDC meets and can approve Right to Renew for Circulation (1 month of public comment)

  • Sep 15th: The PEDC meets again and votes on whether to pass Right to Renew on to Common Council for final voting.

  • October 6th: Common Council meets to vote on whether to enact Right to Renew as law in Ithaca.

Delays can appear at any point in this process if real estate interests make sufficient efforts to slow us down. That’s why we need organized power!

What Counts as Good Cause for Eviction?

Right now, landlords can evict without giving a reason. Right to Renew would mean that to evict, landlords would have to prove a tenant has broken one of these laws 👇

We don’t believe there is ever a good reason to make somebody houseless. Unfortunately, cities don’t have the power to override the NY State laws giving landlords power to evict tenants. What we can do is use Right to Renew to force landlords to prove those State laws have been broken before evicting — known as proving Good Cause. More specifically, that means that a landlord would have to show at least one of the following in court, instead of just denying a renewal:

  1. A tenant has an unpaid rent balance, assuming the apartment meets the Warranty of Habitability and the unpaid balance is not due to a rent increase

  2. A tenant has intentionally or neglectfully caused significant damage to the unit

  3. A tenant has assaulted or harassed their neighbors

  4. The City of Ithaca has issued an order making it illegal to have people in the building, such as condemning it over safety concerns.

  5. A tenant has used (or allowed use of) the unit for an illegal purpose, excluding nonviolent drug crimes.

Read the full text of the bill here.