Mayor Adams voiced concern Tuesday about a City Council bill that would prohibit landlords from forcing tenants to pay broker fees, arguing the measure could result in “long-term” affordability concerns for everyone involved.
“I think the bill has the right intention, but sometimes good intentions do not get the results you’re looking for,” Adams told reporters about the bill, known as the FARE Act. The City Council is expected to pass the measure in a vote Wednesday.
The bill, which has locked in support from a majority of Council members, proposes to ensure that whoever hires a real estate broker to facilitate an apartment rental would be responsible for paying the broker’s fees. Under current laws, landlords can — and often do — hire brokers and then make their tenants pay their fees, a practice that adds thousands of dollars onto New Yorkers’ move-in tabs that would become illegal under the bill.
In his weekly press conference Tuesday, Adams offered a different perspective.
Adams, who often mentions that he previously worked as a real estate broker, lamented there’s no mechanism in the bill that would prevent landlords from rolling the cost of the broker fee into a tenant’s monthly base rent.
“We need to find ways of ensuring that we get that affordability, but we can’t do it with just a knee-jerk reaction … Think for a moment: If you pass the cost onto the small property owners, nothing in that law stops them from building it into their rent, so it goes from a one-time fee to a permanent fee,” Adams said.
Adams didn’t say one way or the other whether he might veto the bill.
His arguments echo those of the Real Estate Board of New York, a powerful industry group that has aggressively lobbied against the bill.
Brooklyn Councilman Chi Osse, a progressive Democrat who introduced the legislation, dismissed Adams’ argument as “REBNY talking points.”
Councilman Chi Osse at City Hall on April 2022. (Shawn Inglima for New York Daily News)
He noted that pass-along rent costs won’t be an issue for the roughly 1 million New Yorkers who live in stabilized units, as increases on their apartments are limited by law. For those who live in non-stabilized units, Osse said he’s not concerned about pass-along costs because he believes broader “market forces,” not a ban on some broker fees, dictate rent levels.
“It’s really hypocritical for the mayor to talk about how he’s skeptical about a bill that would save New Yorkers thousands of dollars and then criticize the left for not focusing on pocketbook issues,” Osse told the Daily News, referring to an unrelated comment the mayor made at Tuesday’s press conference. “This is the definition of a pocketbook issue.”
As of late Tuesday, Osse’s bill had 33 co-sponsors, two votes shy of the super-majority threshold required to override a veto should the mayor issue one. Council Speaker Adrienne Adams is also expected to vote for Osse’s bill on Wednesday, though, as are several other members who aren’t signed up as co-sponsors, he said.
Since taking office in January 2022, Adams has used his veto pen three times in an attempt to block housing and public safety-related bills — and each time, a super-majority of Council members have voted to override him to force the measures into law.
Osse said he doesn’t believe Adams would attempt to veto his bill given the level of support. “But I’m not the mayor, so we’ll see what happens,” he added.