A1621A is Assembly Housing Chair Linda Rosenthal’s bill.
She is the prime Assembly sponsor. She chairs the Assembly Housing Committee that decides it. It was amended and recommitted in this session, March 26, 2026, with 21 Assembly co-sponsors.
Today she is on the Million Dollar Staircase headlining a press conference to pass it.
Last week she told reporters my criticism was “rambling about legislation introduced in 2009.”
Pick one: trivial enough to mock, or urgent enough that the Housing Chair carries it, gatekeeps it, and headlines today’s Capitol presser to pass it?
What A1621A actually does: it bars any rent-stabilized owner from collecting unpaid rent if a single CO battery is dead in any building, in any unit they touch anywhere in the state.
Or a tenant pulls the battery out of their own fire detector because it goes off when they cook. Or a tenant brought home bedbugs from a thrift-store couch. Or an elderly hoarder triggers a roach citation. Or the inspector wrote up a slow drip in a kitchen faucet, or a loose hinge on a fire exit door, or a leaking radiator valve is called in the morning of the first court appearance.
Any one of these, in any building anywhere in the portfolio, kills the case. Many of these are conditions tenants themselves cause, and under A1621A, a tenant can disable their own smoke detector and then defeat their own nonpayment proceeding in perpetuity with that disabled detector.
That hits every operator of pre-1974 stabilized stock, and “operator” here does not split cleanly between for-profit and nonprofit. Phipps Houses, RiseBoro, Settlement Housing, and the small LLC owner down the street pay the same insurance premiums, the same mandates, the same water and sewer rates, the same heating fuel costs. They operate under the same RGB rent orders. They live under the same HSTPA repair caps. They collect the same regulated rent.
The cost stack does not care who holds the deed. Neither does this bill.
Tenants who pay rent deserve good housing. Tenants who need help deserve real help. Neither is achieved by a portfolio-wide rent collection ban triggered by a single inoperable smoke detector — least of all by aiming that ban at the “good” operators preserving the affordable stock New York is supposed to be trying to save.
Calling 21 Assembly sponsors and her own Capitol press conference “2009 legislation” is not a rebuttal. It is an admission of obfuscation.