In the final days of the 2019 legislative session this June, State lawmakers passed sweeping rent reform. The legislation, which has since been signed into law, redistributed the balance of power between landlords and renters in favor of tenants.
But, housing advocates say, in the rush to get it done, some issues were overlooked and need technical fixes.
"I think these are more loopholes that as we passed a stronger bill, like we did. Landlords are taking a fine-tooth comb to it and trying to find where there are weaknesses and unintended things we overlooked, so we are going to go back and try and close those loopholes as well," said housing advocate Cea Weaver.
The changes being sought by housing advocates include eliminating rent increases for major capital improvements or MCI's in stabilized apartments, and allowing landlords to combine apartments and list them as new.
But the Chair of the Senate's Housing Committee says those aren't necessarily fixes that are technical in nature.
"So far the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act has held up pretty well. So, I am not aware of any major change to that that I would call a fix. But obviously we will be legislating in this area on an ongoing basis as we do with any other area of law," said Brian Kavanagh, chair of the housing committee.
One area that seems to be inconsistent is a new law requiring security deposits be paid back within 30 days, which somehow missed being applied to stabilized units.
"The new regulations on security deposits only applies to unregulated units for some reason. Rent stabilized units are left out of that. So that seems pretty strange," said Weaver.
After the legislation passed in June, Lawmakers had to do what's known as a cleanup bill a few days later. That made a number of technical changes, and that often happens with omnibus pieces of legislation, although this session seemed to have many more technical fixes than previous years.