Assemblyman Thiele Outlines Eviction Protections And Housing Initiatives In 2021

When COVID-19 became the chief concern in New York State in March 2020, all legislative initiatives unrelated to the pandemic were put on the back burner. When it came to housing, a series of executive orders and emergency legislation emerged to ensure the crisis would not be compounded by countless evictions and foreclosures.

Now, nearly a year later, legislation on both the state and federal level has passed to assist renters and property owners, and the South Fork’s own New York State assemblyman, Fred W. Thiele Jr. of Sag Harbor, is reintroducing bills to achieve long-term goals of protecting the Hamptons seasonal rental market and to create affordable housing opportunities.

Mr. Thiele recently spoke to the Express News Group about the housing concerns that arose due to the pandemic and the ongoing affordable housing concerns on the South Fork, among other issues.

Not only did Governor Andrew Cuomo issue a series of executive orders prohibiting evictions due to nonpayment of rent, the State Legislature passed bills that did the same. Later orders included updated language to make clear that the moratorium only applied to people affected by COVID with no means to pay rent and no place else to go, but the updates did nothing to help landlords while courts were closed for a long period, and then extremely backlogged.

At the end of December 2020, the Legislature adopted a bill that Mr. Thiele said outlines a clear-cut process for avoiding eviction based on COVID. The legislation stays all evictions and foreclosure proceedings through May 1, 2021, for those who have experienced a “COVID-related hardship.”

Tenants must file a hardship declaration to stop an eviction, Mr. Thiele said.

“You file this declaration that you either have economic hardship due to COVID, or that you have a medical reason why you can’t leave,” he explained. “You basically swear to that and file it, and that’s going to protect you from eviction. It doesn’t protect you from money damages and recovery of rent, ultimately, but certainly it does protect people from evictions.”

Protecting landlords from both mortgage foreclosures and tax liens during the same period balances the interests of landlord and tenant, he added.

“We had experiences here with housing laws where they try to apply the same rules to seasonal rentals as they do to primary residences,” Mr. Thiele said.

In the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, seasonal rentals were seemingly subject to the same rules that were designed to protect tenants renting permanent housing. Under COVID executive orders, eviction prohibitions designed to keep people in their homes during the pandemic were exploited by a few to stay in short-term rentals indefinitely — even when they had other residences to go back to.

Mr. Thiele noted that the December legislation does not stay evictions for people renting a vacation property. “They’re expressly excluded from this law,” he said. “So you don’t have any protection if you are there for a seasonal rental — less than a year — and you have another place to go back to.”

He added that he specifically requested that exemption be written into the legislation.

“Seasonal rentals are different, and it’s not the intent to protect somebody who’s on vacation,” he said. “The intent is to protect somebody from being evicted from their permanent residence.”

“The idea here is to get that money from the federal government to the state out into the community so that federal aid is provided to pay these rents and to remove that legal exposure from tenants and provide funding for the landlords,” he said. “To me, that’s probably the most important part of this.”

Earlier federal legislation, the CARES Act of March 2020, provided just $100 million in rental assistance to New York State. That program had some issues getting money out the door, and the criteria was later loosened, Mr. Thiele said.

He stressed the significance of the latest aid: “That’s what’s going to help landlords and tenants, because ultimately everybody has to pay their bills. Tenants have to pay their rent, and landlords have mortgages and taxes, and they need the income, too.”

Mr. Thiele introduced clarifying legislation in February 2020 that would cut out seasonal and vacation rentals of periods of 120 days or less.

“We did put the bill in last year that would have excluded seasonal rentals — and COVID happened, everything went sideways, and a lot of legislative proposals went by the wayside because all of the focus was on COVID, and then it was on police reform,” he said.

Now, he has reintroduced that legislation. He noted that the Assembly agreed in the eviction legislation that seasonal rentals should be treated differently than primary homes, and that the same principle applied to evictions should be applied to advance rent payments.

“My goal actually in getting an exclusion to the eviction moratorium for seasonal rentals was actually two-fold,” he said. “One was, on its face, to exempt seasonal rentals from the eviction moratorium, but also, it creates the template for the legislation this year to exclude seasonal rentals from the provisions with regards to security and upfront payment of rent.”

Mr. Thiele said he has friends who “get the big bucks” by renting their house out for the summer while they go live with a family member. “That’s how they make their nut on the mortgage for the rest of the year. That’s how they were able to keep the house — that’s why it was affordable.”

There clearly were cases of people who had leases for winter rentals or early summer rentals and never left once COVID hit, he said.

“Have there been cases that where, because of these eviction executive orders and because of the legislation, people have been able to try to game the system, and there’s been some unfair results? I don’t think there’s any question that that has happened — we’ve seen it,” he said. “It hasn’t been a perfect system, but for the most part, the intent of the law, which was to protect people during the pandemic … it’s been beneficial.”

The bill is modeled after the Community Preservation Fund’s 2 percent real estate transfer tax that funds open space and water quality preservation. The proposal aims to permit the five East End towns — Southampton, East Hampton, Shelter Island, Riverhead and Southold — to create a new 0.5 percent tax on the sale of homes, and to use the proceeds on affordable housing initiatives.

The Community Preservation Fund tax excludes the first $250,000 of the purchase price of all home purchases in Southampton, East Hampton and Shelter Island, and the first $150,000 in Riverhead and Southold.

Mr. Thiele’s new legislation would increase the exempt amount to $400,000 for houses of less than $2 million on the South Fork and Shelter Island, and to $280,000 in Riverhead and Southold.

At the time of the veto, Mr. Thiele said the governor opposed a new tax, but due to the increase in CPF tax exemptions, “it doesn’t actually bring in much additional money.”

He had anticipated the governor, given additional details, would come around to support the bill.

“Before the pandemic hit, we met with the governor’s office and the governor’s counsel,” he said. “They just wanted more information as to the towns’ existing affordable housing programs, what’s the demand for affordable housing, and how would this money help meet the demand.”