The City Council voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to pass a bill banning landlords from forcing tenants to pay broker fees, though Mayor Adams has voiced concerns about the measure and could veto it.
The bill, which has been sharply opposed by the city’s real estate industry, would require whoever hires a broker to pay the fees the broker charges to facilitate an apartment rental. Under current laws, landlords can — and often do — hire brokers and then make their tenants pay the fees, a practice that adds thousands of dollars on to New Yorkers’ move-in tabs that supporters of the bill say is unconscionable.
After failing to make it out of committee in last year’s Council session, the bill, introduced by Brooklyn Councilman Chi Osse, sailed through the chamber in a 42-8 vote on Wednesday afternoon. It was not immediately clear if Adams’ concerns about the bill would prompt him to veto the measure despite its passage by so wide a margin.
“In too many millions of cases across our city and decades of history, tenants have been forced to turn over thousands of dollars in fees to brokers they never hired, nor wanted,” Osse said before the vote.
“The harm of this practice cannot be overstated. Families seeking to grow forego having children because they can’t afford to move into a larger place, children aging out of their parents’ homes are pushed into different neighborhoods or even cities because they can’t afford to rent an apartment in their own community, workers are unable to live near their jobs.”
The Council action puts the ball in the mayor’s court.
On Tuesday, the mayor said he’s concerned the Osse’s legislation could have an inadvertent consequence, as there’s no mechanism in it to prevent a landlord from rolling the cost of the broker fee into a tenant’s monthly base rent. Adams argued 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,” he told reporters Tuesday.
The mayor’s skepticism raises the possibility he could veto the measure. He has 30 days to issue any veto.
The mayor’s office didn’t immediately return a request for comment on what his next step will be. The bill takes effect 180 days after enactment.
Council Speaker Adrienne Adams has already led her Democratic majority in overriding three vetoes the mayor issued in unsuccessful attempts to block public safety and housing-related bills passed by the Council.
Asked before Wednesday’s vote if she’s prepared to override another veto by the mayor should he take that route on the broker fee measure, the speaker said: “This bill is very significant and important to this Council, and the council would be prepared to meet any negative response from the administration.”
The speaker would need support from at least 33 of her members to override a mayoral veto. Given that Osse’s bill passed with support from 42 members, that makes any veto battle an uphill climb for the mayor.
Osse and his bill’s supporters have slammed the mayor’s skepticism of it as an echo of talking points from the Real Estate Board of New York, a powerful industry group that mounted an aggressive lobbying effort against the measure. Supporters have also said they’re not concerned about a ripple effect on rents, arguing rents on non-stabilized apartments are controlled by wider market forces while rents on stabilized units are fixed by law.
Before the vote, the speaker voiced surprise about the mayor’s arguments against the bill.
“We worked together with the administration for this bill, and I can’t interpret what the mayor said, but the administration was a part of the negotiations on this bill,” she said. “They raised no major issues, and I haven’t heard from the mayor personally on it.”
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