New York tenants will receive another recovery in the new year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday, with an extension of an executive order preventing landlords from evicting tenants who have suffered financial hardship during and before the COVID-19 pandemic .
The extension, however, may be debatable: Democrats in the state legislature are considering a special session next week to codify and extend a moratorium on residential evictions.
Details on what the legislature can approve have not been released and legislation had not been introduced as of Wednesday afternoon. But Democrats who control both the Senate and the State Assembly have for weeks been hinting at a year-end return to Albany.
Some of the state’s current protections for tenants expire on Jan. 1, but others will exist until Cuomo declares that the COVID-19 crisis is no longer an emergency in the state.
Under the Tenant Safe Harbor Act, tenants who have been unable to pay rent due to financial hardship caused by the COVID-19 crisis are at risk of eviction. But they must prove, judicially, that their difficulties were the result of the pandemic.
Cuomo issued an executive order in September extending the law, allowing for the protection of tenants who were facing eviction before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Melissa DeRosa, Cuomo’s chief aide, said Wednesday that the order will be expanded and that no tenants who are in financial difficulty will be evicted early next year. Neither Cuomo nor DeRosa said how far these protections would extend.
“We will not let anyone be evicted because of these circumstances,” DeRosa said.
Cuomo had already extended the moratorium on evictions of commercial tenants in Cuomo earlier this month.
Housing advocates and some state legislatures have called for an extension of the eviction moratorium to include more or all tenants in New York State, saying current regulations do not go far enough.
Assemblyman Demond Meeks, a Democrat from Rochester, was arrested over the weekend for protesting the eviction of a city resident. That resident, Clianda Florence-Yarde, was not protected from eviction by Cuomo’s order or state law, according to activists.
Members of the state legislature are now considering returning to Albany next week to pass legislation to protect more tenants, though details were unclear on Wednesday.
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, D-Bronx, said Monday that Democrats in both houses of the state legislature were close to an agreement on the issue and that it had narrowed it down to language differences. He then said that a special session was still possible next week.
“Once the Senate and the Assembly, if we can come to a common ground, I think we are,” Heastie said. “I think it’s just a language that’s being worked on among the staff.”
Heastie also indicated, at the time, that the legislation could remove the requirement for tenants to demonstrate financial hardship, and indicated that more individuals would be protected from eviction than under current state regulations.
Lawmakers had also considered approving tax hikes on the state’s wealthiest residents in a special session this month, but it seems less likely because of Cuomo’s resistance, which wants to wait for federal government action.
It is also possible that lawmakers will approve more relief for tenants during next year’s legislative session, which is scheduled to begin in early January.
Dan Clark is the host / producer of New York Now.