Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs Last winter, Eileen Kelley received a notice that her landlord was not going to renew her lease when it expired in a few months. After eight years in the East Village, a neighborhood in Manhattan she had come to love for its street markets and parks, Ms. Kelley, 29, confronted the sudden possibility that she might have to leave.But scrolling through TikTok just before her lease ended, she found a video that introduced her to a new, renter-friendly law called “good cause eviction.” Passed by New York State last spring, the legislation prohibits landlords from forcing renters out of their homes just because their lease term is over.The law felt like it could be a lifeline. Ms. Kelley, who works in financial services, told her landlord that she wasn’t going to leave. After months of back and forth over email, she finally received a new lease, securing her apartment until at least this coming September.“I was like, ‘Wow, the system does work for us,’” she said.The exchange is one example of how the law is quietly reshaping parts of New York City’s housing market. Renters are challenging landlords, both in informal lease negotiations and in court, to secure breaks on rent and new leases. Property owners say they are growing cautious about trying to get even troublesome renters out, and they worry about other consequences of what they see as government overreach.“It gives tenants a little more confidence in their rights,” Ms. Kelley said, adding that she has shared her experience with friends. “A lot of people didn’t realize that the lease renewal is even negotiable.”The law’s rollout comes as public anger over the city’s housing crisis is increasingly pushing politicians to tackle the high cost of living. Many proposals have focused on making it easier to build more homes to address a housing shortage that is at its worst point in half a century.The hardships are also pushing left-leaning lawmakers to crack down on evictions and rent increases. The New York law, modeled in part on bills recently passed in other cities and states, is based on the idea that property owners should be allowed to remove renters only if they have a valid reason — or, “good cause” — to do so.In New York, such causes can include tenants who break the terms of their lease, use an apartment to conduct illegal activity or damage the rental property. Unpaid rent might also be a good cause, but only if it has not been increased “unreasonably.”According to the law, an unreasonable increase is one that is greater than the inflation rate, which in the New York City area was 3.82 percent last year, plus 5 percent. So renters might be protected if a rent increase was bigger than 8.82 percent.Many renters already had similar protections under the city’s rent-stabilization system, which covers roughly half of its rental housing stock. But the good cause law provides new protections for hundreds of thousands of additional households living in so-called unregulated homes.Jeremiah Schlotman, the director of housing litigation for Legal Services NYC, a nonprofit group, called the legislation a “huge expansion” that was a “great step forward in expanding tenant protections.”Sherwin Belkin, a lawyer who represents property owners in housing court, said the law was an additional burden on owners already struggling to maintain their apartment buildings. He said it encouraged people not to move, which paralyzes the housing market and reduces rental options.“I don’t think it’s good for New York City because I don’t think it’s good for New York City real estate,” he said.Still, Mr. Schlotman said the law’s effects remained unsettled. He said the legislation was “poorly worded in many aspects,” and that the lack of clarity was leading to conflicting decisions from housing court judges.Mr. Belkin agreed.“The standards are not really set forth in the statute,” he said. “It’s all buzzwords.”For example, even though there is a threshold for an “unreasonable” rent increase, a housing court judge might still find a bigger increase to be reasonable if the landlord needed it to cover repairs or renovations.The law also exempts “small landlords,” defined as those with fewer than 10 units in New York. But landlords can obscure the size of their portfolios by using different limited liability companies for each property.“Somebody can fib,” Mr. Schlotman said.For people like Ms. Kelley, though, the law removes at least one bump in what is otherwise a turbulent rental journey in the city. She and her roommate had already watched their rent grow from $3,200 to $4,550 over four years. Even when they thought they might have to leave, they couldn’t find any affordable apartments in the East Village.Ms. Kelley said a private equity firm purchased her building and she thought the company wanted to tear it down. But she’s happy that despite the challenges, there are ways she can protect herself.“I think it has actually made me more excited about living in New York,” she said.
