Guest Opinion: Against Good Cause Eviction (Ithaca NY)

I have been a landlord for ten years and I manage 41 residential and commercial office units in Tompkins County. About 2/3 of these are low or moderate income residential. I currently employ three full time staff. I became a landlord because I wanted to work on converting existing buildings to not use fossil fuels - I made the capital in the first place in the tech industry not by real estate investing. I also have significant bank financing. When I started, I greatly under-estimated the challenges of being a landlord and have been in an intense learning process. I only work on the rental business part time myself as I still do some technology consulting to support myself.

It’s important to understand that rental housing is a market. As such prices (rents) are closely governed by supply and demand. For any given property/location, what we can charge is heavily constrained by market forces. If we try to charge $100/month too much for a given unit, we’ll be doing showing after showing without renting it because tenants can find something they like better for the same price, or something cheaper that they like equally well. Only when we have priced a given unit correctly can we rent it with a reasonable level of effort.

By the same token, we also cannot charge substantially under the current market. We have to pay current market wages for competent staff, pay property taxes, service our debt, and pay current market rates for specialized contractors, repair and maintenance materials, etc. If we don’t charge enough, we won’t be able to keep up on all these obligations. I found this out the hard way when we failed to raise rents sufficiently in the recent inflation boom and fell behind on property taxes as a result.

The writer of the article should be selling everything—now.

Ithica is filled with crazy people—even if he dodges the bullet this time Ithica will eventually get him.

Over the long term he will get a better rate of return with certificates of deposit with zero hassles.

I forgot—he might have to make the supreme sacrifice of no more virtue signaling.

Good article. This is astonishing (to this non-landlord)...

Our properties are inspected by SIX different entities (City and Town of Ithaca, Fire dept, TCA, IHA, IURA). We have EIGHT different kinds of insurance from ELEVEN different insurance companies, each with their own requirements. We have to follow codes and regulations for THREE different localities, and then state landlord tenant law, and federal law governing fair housing, ADA, etc. Our bank is also a very complex regulated entity that places many information requirements on us. To keep track of everything we maintain rental management software and, separately, accounting software where we identify every transaction and which building or unit it concerned so that our accountants can accurately prepare our tax returns. We are essentially drowning in admin work all the time.

That's the big problem with out-of-control government at every level.

The author sounds like a good, sensible capitalist...until you read "because I wanted to work on converting existing buildings to not use fossil fuels." So he is a rabid greenish leftist in Ithaca. Must be hard for him to square the circle of being a capitalist railing against government while being an extreme climate kook in upstate New York where the sun hardly ever shines. (I lived in Ithaca for five years and sunshine was a RARE treat).

I can’t say at this point *how much* I would have to put up rents to accommodate the additional complexity of the Good Cause Eviction law, since it’s an open question how many non-renewals would actually end up in court. I don’t think I would attempt fewer non-renewals, since most of the past ones seemed pretty non-optional to me. I am already increasing rents to catch up from the pandemic/war inflation boom that I failed to manage correctly, and will likely just keep doing so until the full effect of Good Cause on my operations and on the market generally becomes clear.
However, I think we can predict that a rental market dominated by fewer larger landlords and management companies will have more overhead, and also more market power to set rents. Thus I would expect rents to rise by an unknowable but material amount over and above what they would already have done. This will not happen all at once but will play out over a decade or so.
I would also expect that the impact of bad tenants on good tenants will increase. Antisocial individuals typically place a high burden on their neighbors, and the harder the City makes it to manage their behavior, the worse the quality of life in rental complexes and neighborhoods will be.

This man is an innocent who knows his stuff - learned the hard way. He's also up against people in the city who are idiots and his best course of action is to sell his units and invest the money.

The people behind this movement want to create a situation where the rental situation keeps getting more expensive, more violent and less profitable.

The goal is to demand the federal government take it over... at a higher cost. Think 'Cabrini Green' in Chicago. More power to DIE bureaucrats, excessive losses, lower quality of life and more commie/dependency backlashes for the renters. Just in case you thought the black commuity could break free of forced dependency - think again... this act will put them back on the democrat plantation.

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