A bill barring New York City landlords from forcing tenants to pay broker fees cleared a final hurdle Tuesday as Mayor Adams confirmed he won’t veto the measure despite holding reservations about it.
“The broker bill is going to be law because they have a veto-proof majority, and so I’m not vetoing the bill,” Adams told reporters at City Hall on Tuesday afternoon, referring to the margin by which the City Council passed the legislation last month.
Still, Adams reiterated he believes the bill could have unintended consequences. Specifically, Adams has raised alarm about the possibility that landlords will simply bake the cost of broker fees into the rent once they can’t saddle tenants with the levies up front anymore.
The mayor — who has had three vetoes overridden by the City Council since taking office in 2022 — said he opted against vetoing the broker fee bill because he doesn’t want to “put New Yorkers through distress and strife.”
“I’m just not in that space of just these headlines of dispute … We need to be in a better, calm place, and so I won’t veto the bill,” he said. “I shared what my concerns are, and life will determine if I was accurate in my concerns.”
With the veto issue out of the way, the broker fee bill’s set to become law 180 days after its enactment. The bill will automatically be enacted on Dec. 13 unless Adams signs it before then, which he declined to say Tuesday whether he will.
“I’m not going to veto the bill. The question is if I’m going to sign it or not,” he said.
Currently, landlords can — and often do — require tenants to pay the fee real estate brokers charge to facilitate an apartment rental. Such fees can range in the thousands of dollars, exacerbating move-in costs for tenants in a city where surging rents are already a widespread problem.
Under the Council bill, which was introduced by Brooklyn Councilman Chi Osse, the party who hires a broker would be responsible for paying their fees. Since landlords are almost always the hiring party in such contexts, they would become responsible for covering broker fees under the new regime.
Osse, a progressive Democrat, and other supporters of his bill have hailed it as a common sense measure that will help alleviate some financial burden on working class New Yorkers in an increasingly expensive city. Bill supporters have also disputed the mayor’s arguments against it, noting that rent hikes are capped by law on hundreds of thousands of apartments in the city due to stabilization laws.
Asked for a reaction to the mayor’s decision against vetoing his bill, Osse told the Daily News: “I’m happy about it.”
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