The Rent Stabilization Association (RSA) has filed a lawsuit
to block enforcement of the state’s newly-passed eviction moratorium extension.
The group – whose 25,000 members make up the largest coalition
of landlords in the country – filed a motion with the Second Circuit Court of
Appeals one week after New York Gov. Hochul signed into law legislation that
extended the state’s eviction moratorium to Jan. 15, 2022.
It also comes four weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court handed
the RSA a victory in its legal challenge to the state’s previous eviction ban.
In a 6-3 decision that reverberated around the country, the Supreme Court had
suspended the state’s enforcement of all elements of Part A of its COVID-19
Emergency Eviction and Foreclosure Protection Act.
The RSA is moving to enforce last month’s SCOTUS order, which blocked enforcement of New York State’s prior moratorium. The RSA argues that the SCOTUS injunction covers this eviction moratorium extension as well. The RSA is represented by Randy M. Mastro and Akiva Shapiro of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP.
RSA President Joseph Strasburg said, “No matter the spin by
state lawmakers and Gov. Hochul, this is a reimplementation of the previous law
– completely disregarding last month’s U.S. Supreme Court decision and ignoring
key elements of our complaint. It continues the vague COVID hardship
declaration, which enables renters who never lost their jobs or skipped a paycheck
to continue using the eviction ban as a moratorium on paying rent.”
“With the exception of superficial changes, state lawmakers
simply replaced a challenged law with a new law whose provisions are virtually
identical to the previous legislation – nothing more than a calculated maneuver
to evade judicial review and circumvent last month’s SCOTUS decision that
agreed with our assertion that CEEFPA is a scheme that violates due process and
property ownership rights of landlords,” said Strasburg, whose organization
represents 25,000 diverse landlords of more than one million apartments that
house over 2.5 million New Yorkers in neighborhoods throughout the five
boroughs.
According to the motion, New York state “has now taken the
position that the marginal tweaks made in the new law take it outside the scope
of [the Supreme Court] injunction. In a vain attempt to elude that bar, the
state appears to be following the ill-fated eviction moratorium playbook tried
by federal authorities – nominally amending a moratorium that the Supreme Court
has already instructed does not pass muster. It didn’t work in the CDC case,
and it shouldn’t be given any credence here either, especially where – unlike
in the CDC case – the defendant [New York State] is already under a direct
injunction from the Supreme Court. Judicial authority and the rule of law are
not so easily sidestepped. The state’s attempt to evade the Supreme Court’s
order must be thwarted.”
The RSA asserts in the motion that the state’s latest extension
of the residential eviction moratorium law continues all of the previous
moratorium’s “deeply problematic” features. “The central structure and
mechanism is still an unsworn hardship declaration in which the tenant merely
checks a box – without specifying what kind or type of hardship he or she
claims, and without providing any documentation of the hardship – thereby
blocking the filing or prosecution of eviction lawsuits and the issuance of
eviction warrants,” the motion says.
More specifically, the RSA asserts in the motion that the
law is unchanged from CEEFPA Part A in “almost all material respects.” The motion says: “It includes a nearly
identical hardship declaration form; continues to permit tenants to claim
financial ‘hardship’ by checking a box without identifying which of the
categories applies; continues not to require tenants to substantiate the
asserted hardship; continues to permit claims of ‘hardship’ by reference to
numerous vague categories; continues to bar the initiation or prosecution of
eviction proceedings upon the tenant’s delivery of a completed hardship
declaration form, with only narrow exceptions; continues to require property
owners to provide tenants with the hardship forms, a government-drafted notice,
and a government-curated list of legal service providers; continues to
establish a ‘rebuttable presumption’ of hardship that continues indefinitely,
even after expiration of the extension; and purports to give effect to hardship
declarations previously completed under the now-enjoined CEEFPA eviction
moratorium, thus reviving hardship declarations already declared invalid by the
Supreme Court.”
