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Current Issues in Affordable Housing in New York City

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New York City Bar

I will be moderating a panel on Rent Freezes, the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (HSTPA), and Nonpayment at this in-person New York City Bar program on May 7th. The registration link is here and the full program description is below:

Description:

This program will provide an inside perspective on the future of affordable housing in New York City.  Seasoned practitioners from the private and public sectors will discuss the role of the city, state and federal governments, in conjunction with for-profit developers and not-for-profit organizations, in building and preserving affordable housing. Participants will learn about the statutory, regulatory and business considerations underlying critical topics in affordable housing.

Three expert panels will present on the following:

    • Rent Freezes, the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (HSTPA), and Nonpayment
    • The Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA)
    • Case Study – Office to Residential Conversions

The detailed agenda for the day follows.

9:00 am – 9:05 am        Introduction & Program Overview

Farhana H. Choudhury, Associate Counsel/Chief of Staff for Legal at NYSHCR

Julia A. Solo, Senior Vice President & Counsel at Federated National Land

9:05 am – 10:05 am       Panel 1: Rent Freezes, the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (HSTPA), and Nonpayment

This panel will focus on the impacts of the HSTPA that have limited rent increases for things like apartment and major capital improvements, the Mamdani administration’s proposal for an extended rent freeze, and post-pandemic rent collection challenges.

Organizers:

Farhana Hassan Choudhury, Associate Counsel/Chief of Staff for Legal

Andrew M. Darcy, Pro Bono Counsel at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP

Moderator:

David Reiss, Professor, Cornell Law School

Panelists: 

Doug Apple, CEO, 1811 Consulting

Rafael Cestero, CEO, Community Preservation Corporation (CPC)

Tim Collins, Partner, Collins Dobkin & Miller LLP

Rob Ehrlich, Partner, Lazarus Karp Ehrlich McCourt, LLP

Topics will Include

    • Trends in Court
    • Long-Term Sustainability & Expectations Over the Next 5-10 Years
    • Potential Solutions
    • Public Commission

Question & Answer Session Conclusions

10:05 am – 10:15 am    Break

10:15 am – 11:15 am     Panel 2: The Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA)

This panel will discuss the current status of the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA).  In December 2025, COPA passed the City Council but was vetoed by outgoing Mayor Adams on his last day in office. Mayor Mamdani and new City Council Speaker Menin did not attempt a veto override when the new City Council was seated in January, and the bill which passed City Council in December is effectively dead for the time being, although many advocates and politicians, including Mayor Mamdani, have vowed to continue the fight for COPA. It’s not clear where COPA will stand in May, but this panel will examine the history and advocacy behind COPA, its operation in Washington, DC and San Francisco, and potential constitutional challenges to the law.

Organizers:

Gerrald Ellis, Deputy General Counsel, Paths Development

Alexandra Hohauser, Associate at Nixon Peabody LLP

Moderator:

Gerrald Ellis, Deputy General Counsel, Paths Development

Panelists:

Erica F. Buckley, Partner, Nixon Peabody LLP

Arielle Hersh, Director of Policy and New Projects, UHAB

Topics will Include

    • Overview of COPA, as proposed, in NYC
    • Current status of COPA in NYC
    • Discussion of the main sticking points in even getting COPA passed
    • Discussion of COPA in Washington, DC and San Francisco
    • Potential constitutional challenges

Question & Answer Session  Conclusions

11:15 am – 11:25 am     Break

11:25 am – 12:25 pm     Panel 3: Office to Residential Conversions that include Affordable Housing

This panel will discuss the challenges and benefits to office-to-residential conversions in New York City, including land use considerations, challenges in design, the unique considerations of financing, the 467-m tax incentive and case studies.

Organizers:

Daniel M. Bernstein, Member and Leader of the Tax Incentives and Affordable Housing Department at Rosenberg and Estis, P.C.

Zachary L. Nathanson, Senior Associate Attorney at Adler & Stachenfeld LLP

Moderator:

Daniel M. Bernstein, Member and Leader of the Tax Incentives and Affordable Housing Department at Rosenberg and Estis, P.C.

Panelists: 

John Cetra, FAIA, Co-Founder, CetraRuddy Architecture D.P.C.

Tricia Dietz, Assistant Commissioner for Housing Incentives, NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development

Alexander Tendler, Vice President at Vanbarton Group

Daniel Weisen, Senior Director at Eldridge Capital Management

Topics will Include

    • Land Use Considerations
    • Partial Conversions
    • Design Considerations in the Conversion Process
    • 467-m: Eligibility Considerations
    • 467-m: Applying for Tax Exemption Benefits
    • Lender Considerations
    • Case Studies

Question & Answer Session Conclusions

12:25 pm – 12:30 pm     Closing Remarks

Farhana H. Choudhury, Associate Counsel/Chief of Staff for Legal at NYSHCR

Julia A. Solo, Senior Vice President & Counsel at Federated National Land

Incorporating AI Tools Into Your Legal Practice

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I published Advice for Incorporating AI Tools Into Your Legal Practice along with Celia Bigoness and Robert MacKenzie in the National Law Review. It reads,

We have been speaking with many lawyers and law students about using generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in their legal practice. We are struck by the fact that many of them have not been experimenting much, if at all, with the tools that are available to them – although many acknowledge that their clients are increasingly integrating generative AI into their businesses. We have been integrating a lot of these tools into our own professional lives, and here are some tips to help lawyers and law students get comfortable with AI tools that can help them, in big ways and small, with their job.

Put it on Your Home Screen

Put your preferred AI app (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) onto your phone’s home screen and be sure to allow it to access your phone’s microphone. You will be surprised by how often you get the urge to ask the app slightly complex questions that a basic web search would not answer. (Hat tip to one of our kids for this idea.)

Start with the Familiar

Trusting the output of an AI tool without having the ability to verify its accuracy is okay if you are choosing a movie to stream tonight. It is not okay if you are using it to provide legal advice to a client. To get comfortable with AI tools, start using it for tasks that you have experience executing and reviewing. One simple way to start: explain a familiar task to the AI tool and ask it for guidance on how you can use it to complete the task.

As you use AI tools in newer areas, you want to review the cited sources in the AI output to confirm that you agree with the AI model’s interpretation of them. Sometimes they are plain wrong, sometimes the AI model misinterprets the cited documents, and sometimes those documents are out-of-date.

When the stakes are greater than your personal entertainment, you need to do a lot of due diligence before you adopt an AI tool’s findings.

Use Multiple Tools

Different AI models are built on different training documents and have different algorithms that they apply to those documents. There is nothing more edifying than running the same queries through a few general AI models and a few specialized ones (like those geared to lawyers, in particular). You will see a range of answers, from non-answers to highly specialized and accurate ones. You will start to become a more sophisticated consumer of the different models, understanding each of their strengths and limitations.

Tell It Your Needs

Most AI tools will tailor their responses to your preferences. In some cases, we created a prompt to instruct the AI tool that responses should be of the type that a lawyer would like to receive—providing sources, explaining its analytical steps, and what it did and did not consider. The AI tool responded that it would be precise, answer “above a lay level,” and “be candid about uncertainty.” This has improved its answers and had the side effect of reducing sycophantic language (“That is a very good question!”).

Use it for Your Pain Points

We all have some routine tasks that we find irritating. They are usually the ones we procrastinate on. For some, it is preparing slide decks. For others, it is drafting certain kinds of emails (unpaid bills, anyone?). Just getting a first draft from the AI tool often helps you to finish the work up. But for some tasks, like preparing presentation slide decks, you can save hours and hours of your time.

We have experimented with both general AI tools and those that specialize in slide deck preparation. They have pros and cons, but are generally very helpful. In all these cases, the AI tool’s time savings are in large part due to the fact that the AI tool is optimizing a task that you are capable of doing yourself. You are able to quickly verify and edit the output.

However, if you were asking the tool to analyze a topic with which you are unfamiliar, or perform a task that you’ve never done before—if you’re learning from scratch—you will still need to go through the painstaking process of checking sources and confirming output.

Play in Vaults

One game-changing use of AI tools is to upload documents to a secure location in the cloud (sometimes referred to as a “vault”) and hone the tool’s focus on only those documents. A transactional lawyer can upload hundreds of documents and quickly identify commonly appearing terms for comparison or inconsistencies among them. A litigator can upload thousands of pages of litigation documents and create a draft chronology of events. Again, the output cannot be taken at face value due to the functional limitations of these tools, but it can provide an extraordinary first draft that can then be verified and edited to the form you prefer. This can be a game-changing use of AI for lawyers, as long as you have verified the vault’s security in advance.

Use it as a Second Set of Eyes

This is a great and scalable tip for those who are skeptical of AI tools. After you have completed a written task, ask an AI tool to critique for clarity, coherence, and accuracy. Even an experienced attorney will get at least a couple of suggestions that will ring true. And of course, you can reject all of the suggestions that you disagree with. This is a great way to see if an AI tool can provide you with real value with very little investment of your time.

Along the same lines, for more advanced experimentation, you can use the AI tool to issue spot and offer counterarguments to your work to complement your own analysis. Again, this is very low stakes because you can reject anything you find wrong-headed or irrelevant. Of course, you need to be careful about sharing privileged information (see vault security above).

Preserve Confidentiality

We have spent more time than many of you would like looking at the Terms of Use of the AI tools we have used. Except for certain tools that are developed for legal work in particular, we believe that the attorney-client privilege can be compromised when using many AI tools because of how the tools use your input information.

We have had students and clients who wanted to use AI transcription tools to compile meeting notes. We have advised them that confidential information can be compromised by such tools and that we do not use them in our practice, at least at this time.

If you begin to use a tool with client-identifying information, be sure to confirm that you are complying with your professional responsibilities to preserve client confidences.

Don’t get Lazy!

We all read the headlines about lawyers who use AI to draft legal documents and do not check to confirm that the work product is correct. Those lawyers rightfully face professional discipline and reputational consequences. We can all say that we would never do that, but a new term has arisen to describe an unthinking reliance on AI: “cognitive offloading.” This offloading occurs when we reduce our own deep research and thinking because of an unhealthy reliance on AI tools.

Every time we complete a substantive task with AI, we need to ask if we have thought through the task as fully as we would have if we did it without the tool. If the answer is no, we need to dig into it again. Cognitive offloading is a particular concern for law students and younger generations of lawyers, who have grown up with technology and tend to be more comfortable using AI tools – and therefore more susceptible to this unthinking reliance.

Conclusion

From our discussions with lawyers in private practice, it is clear that AI tools are being used in the ways we have mentioned above. No doubt, more specialized tools are in development. It’s clear that AI will transform the practice of law in the coming years. Those who are new to AI can use these pointers to begin exploring how AI works. We think they can amplify their effectiveness to the benefit of their clients and themselves, so long as the risks that AI tools pose are thoughtfully addressed.

 

Mamdani’s Property Tax Hike Proposal

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ABC News interviewed me in New York Mayor Mamdani’s Property Tax Hike Proposal Puts Pressure on Taxing Millionaires. It reads, in part,

David Reiss, a clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School, told ABC News that it was inevitable that Mamdani’s progressive policies would be met with initial resistance by moderates in a highly contested election year, but the debate over taxation will be one that resonates across the country as affordability takes center stage at the ballot box.

“I have no doubt this will be a flashpoint for national elections and state and local elections as well,” Reiss said.

    *     *     *

A Political Game of Chicken Not Limited to NYC

Reiss, who used to chair New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board, told ABC News that taxation has always been the big factor in elections, with Republicans previously running on a stance of no new taxes on Americans.

This year’s election season will be different, he noted, given Mamdani’s rise to national prominence, as well as that of progressive candidates who have been championing policies to help Americans make ends meet, such as improved child care and rent relief.

“You will see people say, ‘We want to increase revenues to support progressive issues,'” Reiss said.

Reiss said that Mamdani is “planting the flag” in a manner that is important to him and his supporters by making a property tax hike warning a part of his negotiations with the City Council and Albany.

Reiss further said that dangling a worst-case scenario this early puts the conversation on affordability and government fiscal priorities front and center, instead of it being buried under other issues that will surface as election season kicks off.

“You’re seeing a very popular mayor to use the bully pulpit for some change with a politically middle-of-the-road state government,” he said. “It really is a political game of chicken.”

    *     *     *

Reiss noted that the public push for more cost relief has seen leaders become more open to considering progressive policies.

Since Mamdani won the mayoral election, Hochul has been more open to some of his proposals to help New Yorkers, including expanding state funding for child care options for children aged two and older.

On Monday, the governor, whom Mamdani has endorsed, announced that the state would invest $1.5 billion in the city over the next two years for various services and programs, such as public health and youth services.

“It seems from a political perspective a logical strategy for a popular mayor to take, but it’s not without its risks,” Reiss said.

    *     *     *

Lawmakers across the country are facing growing calls from their constituents to address income inequality and the wealth gap, Reiss said, noting a proposed wealth tax in California on billionaires that has prompted some corporations threaten to leave the state.

“It’s the lightning rod, and it sets the terms of the debate,” Reiss said of Mamdani’s budget negotiation proposal. “But we’ll see if it compels other partners in government to go along or to resist it.”

Consumer Law Awardee, alongside Senator Warren

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David J. Reiss (right), clinical professor of law and research director of the Blassberg-Rice Center on Entrepreneurship Law at Cornell Tech and Kara Bruce (left), head of the AALS Section on Commercial and Consumer Law and the Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law.

Via Cornell Law School:

David J. Reiss, clinical professor of law and research director of the Blassberg-Rice Center on Entrepreneurship Law at Cornell Tech, was among the distinguished law professors honored at an awards ceremony held January 9 during the Association of American Law Schools’ (AALS) Annual Meeting in New Orleans.

Reiss was recognized with the Section on Commercial and Consumer Law Juliet Moringiello Mentorship Award, which was also given to Senator Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law School (Emeritus). “I am extremely honored to share this award with Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is a hero to many of us who work on consumer protection issues in the financial sector,” said Reiss.

Kara Bruce, head of the AALS Section on Commercial and Consumer Law and the Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, presented Reiss with the award.

“In his twenty-three-year career in law teaching, David has founded and directed a variety of law clinics, merging discrete areas of law such as real estate, consumer, and small business law into programs that offer broad support to the communities they serve. Along the way, he has guided and supported many clinicians, adjuncts, and fellows as they found their footing in legal academia,” said Bruce.

Praised for his mentorship-focused activities at Cornell, Reiss spent the past semester co-teaching with Robert MacKenzie, the Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP Clinical Teaching Fellow at New York University School of Law, as he entered the academy. “Watching his excitement as he figures out how he wants to approach teaching, scholarship, and service over the decades to come is a joy in its own right. And to the extent I can offer any advice that he might find useful, I am very happy to do so,” said Reiss.

Reiss remains connected with the practicing bar as a fellow of both the American College of Real Estate Lawyers and the American College of Mortgage Attorneys. He also has a forthcoming book, Paying for the American Dream: How to Reform the Market for Mortgages, that will be published by Oxford University Press.

At the award ceremony, Reiss said, “Receiving this award drove home to me how we are a community of scholars who work with each other and rely on each other to make sense of the immense complexity of commercial law and to understand the implications of its structure for consumers and businesses.”

Is It a Homebuyer’s Market?

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Marketplace quoted me in Is It Really a Homebuyer’s Market Now? It reads, in part,

Housing prices are dropping and buyers are scoring steep discounts on their purchases, indicating that the real estate market is becoming more favorable for buyers. But while some homebuyers are getting better deals, housing is still out of reach for many Americans and the 30-year mortgage rate remains above 6% — double what it was in 2021.

The typical homebuyer got a discount of 3.8% or $15,196 in 2025, with 62% of all homebuyers paying less than the list price, according to a new Redfin study.

“Some sellers haven’t adjusted to the fact that demand is much slower than it was during the pandemic homebuying frenzy. They watched their neighbor’s home sell for tens of thousands of dollars over the asking price back then, and are now pricing their homes based on that,” stated the authors of the study.

And for the first time in two years, national home prices have gone negative, declining 1.4% in the last quarter of 2025, according to Parcl Labs, a housing data and analytics firm.

“I think big picture, any decline or slowing of growth is better for buyers than the type of growth that we have been seeing for a few years,” said Nicholas Kacher, an associate professor of economics at Scripps College in California.

But although there are positive signals out there for homebuyers, there are also some “countervailing points” that indicate the market isn’t entirely in their favor, said David Reiss, a law professor at Cornell University who studies housing policy.

Signs that buyers may still struggle on the market

Home sales are at a 30-year-low, which means sellers are either keeping houses off the market or buyers are not willing to purchase them, Reiss said.

“The market is not super liquid right now,” Reiss said.

Plus, nearly a quarter of homes still sold above list price last year, Reiss pointed out.

     *      *      *

The solution: Increase supply

The major issue with the housing market is that the U.S. is simply not building enough housing, Reiss said.

“It’s tough to build housing, and a lot of markets, lots of localities, discourage it. They don’t want new housing. They don’t want the construction. They don’t want to pay for the social services that are attached to it, like new schools and new medical facilities,” Reiss said.

 

Trump & Pulte’s 50-Year Mortgage

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Politico quoted me in ‘Band-Aid,’ ‘Distraction’: Experts Slam Pulte, Trump 50-Year Mortgage Idea. It opens,

The Trump administration is entertaining a potential plan for the government to back 50-year mortgages to address a housing affordability crisis.

But, in a housing market defined by low supply, industry experts warn that changes in financing are likely to be little more than a “band-aid” and a “gimmick,” while posing bigger risks to homebuyers.

“As a country, the mortgage term is not what we should be worried about. We should be focused on building more supply,” said Troy Ludtka, senior U.S. economist at SMBC Nikko Securities America.

Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte posted on X Saturday that the Trump administration is working on directing government-owned housing finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to support 50-year home mortgages, calling the move ”a complete game changer.” President Donald Trump also posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, supporting the idea.

The proposal comes after Trump directed Pulte to leverage Fannie and Freddie to ramp up the country’s stalled housing production to bring down costs and address the estimated shortage of 4.7 million homes. But the new proposal is raising concerns about whether such a major change to the two giant mortgage financiers’ buying rules could destabilize a central strength of homeownership — the opportunity to build wealth over time.

In a series of follow-up posts over the weekend, Pulte wrote that “a 50 Year Mortgage is simply a potential weapon in a WIDE arsenal of solutions that we are developing right now. STAY TUNED!” He sounded off about other possible ideas like supporting portable mortgages, which can transfer to a new property, and assumable mortgages, which can be transferred to a property’s new buyer.

An FHFA spokesperson told POLITICO, “We continue to evaluate all options to address housing affordability, including studying how to make mortgages assumable or portable.”

And a White House spokesperson said in a statement, “President Trump is always exploring new ways to improve housing affordability for everyday Americans. Any official policy changes will be announced by the White House.”

Experts expect that extending the potential length of Fannie- and Freddie-supported home loans would require congressional support.

Fannie and Freddie don’t offer loans directly to potential homebuyers; instead, they purchase mortgages from lenders to package and sell on the secondary market. This frees up resources for lenders to issue new mortgages.

By purchasing 50-year mortgages, Fannie and Freddie could make the longer-term loans more appealing for lenders to offer. With a longer loan, monthly payments could come down, but it also comes at a cost to homebuyers.

“It would lead to buyers building equity in their homes more slowly. At the beginning of the mortgage, more of those payments tend to be interest… This is more of a stopgap band-aid to address affordability,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, head of US rates strategy at TD Securities.

Sharon Cornelissen, director of housing at the Consumer Federation of America, called the proposal “a distraction” and warned that although expanding the accessibility of 50-year mortgages could lower monthly payments, “the cost of that is that people won’t be able to build wealth through homeownership.”

And as first-time homebuyers get older, the 50-year mortgage appears less manageable, Cornelissen said. Last week, the National Association of Realtors shared findings that the median age of first-time homebuyers had risen to an all-time high of 40.

“So you’ll be 90,” Cornelissen said, adding that finishing payment on a 30-year mortgage is a “stabilizing force” for people going into retirement.

David Reiss, a Cornell Law School professor and real estate finance researcher, said a move toward 50-year mortgages would require homebuyers to rethink how they save for retirement.

“We often hear financial advice that you want to try to pay off your mortgage before the time that you retire,” Reiss said. “So that’s a problem.”