At its recent public hearing, the Tarrytown Board of Trustees voted to adopt the state’s “Good Cause Eviction” law — despite detailed evidence presented by the Tarrytown Housing Advisory Task Force showing it was unnecessary and could worsen, not relieve, the housing crisis. The report was made public only on the day of the public hearing, which was packed with proponents, and the Board voted unanimously to opt into the law that same night.
In theory, “Good Cause” sounds fair. It requires a landlord to prove “good cause” in order to terminate a lease or increase the rent by the lesser of five percent over the inflation rate or 10%l, whichever is less. In practice, it means that every landlord — even one renting a single apartment in Tarrytown — must now go to Housing Court simply to end a lease or raise above ten percent. Housing Court is already the emergency room of the justice system: overcrowded, understaffed, and months behind. Turning every routine lease expiration into a court case doesn’t deliver justice; it delays it — at great cost to all.
Advocates failed to present convincing evidence of hardship due to lease non-renewals because the studies they cite are contradictory; their data, based on a national survey, were found to be wildly inaccurate when cross-referenced with other sources and their own previous research. Their statistics on what they called “informal eviction” lumped together landlord lockouts and utility cutoffs — which are already illegal —when the law only provides protection against excessive rent increases and lease non-renewals. Moreover, there is no study calculating the additional landlord costs (likely passed onto tenants) resulting from the law, or even the impact on displacement of tenants the law is supposed to avoid.
New York City adopted Good Cause Eviction in April 2024. An indication of its effectiveness came In August, when Gothamist reported that since January 2025 monthly evictions reached their highest rate since 2018.
Consider this: when the lease ends on a car, or the lessee stops making payments on a car loan, the lender may lawfully repossess the vehicle without going to court, so long as the repossession is peaceful. That’s how contracts work — when one side fails to meet its obligations, the other can reclaim its property. Under Tarrytown’s Good Cause Eviction law, however, a landlord must first ask a judge for permission to do what every other property owner or lender can do automatically.
Imagine, too, if legislators themselves had to seek a court order every time they voted to raise taxes. Government would grind to a halt. Small landlords are most at risk.
A landlord’s right to recover property at the end of a lease — a right recognized for centuries — must now be justified before a judge. Tenants in real distress could be helped through referrals to existing state or county programs that provide legal and mediation services — without rewriting nearly every lease in Tarrytown. Instead, the Good Cause Eviction Law imposes a sweeping mandate that burdens small property owners and will raise costs for everyone.
The answer to the current housing crisis remains lack of supply, and the unwillingness of the Governor and New York State Legislature — unlike those in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut — to require each municipality with land use powers to ensure that at least ten percent of its housing stock is affordable at a reasonable standard, typically for households with incomes up to 80% of the Area Median Income. That’s $108,000 for a household of two and shouldn’t be so difficult to pass. An indication of how lack of supply has influenced cost is the fact that the cost per unit for the most recent affordable housing projects approved by the county averaged over $700,000 per unit, with government grants and loan subsidies totaling approaching $600,000.
Justice delayed, in this case, is not justice served — it is justice denied.
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Alexander Roberts is chair of the Tarrytown Housing Advisory Task Force
