The Legal Aid Society, working with Legal Services of the Hudson Valley, filed this amicus brief on behalf of Community Voices Heard and For the Many, in support of New York localities’ adoption of rent stabilization under the Emergency Tenant Protection Act. In the underlying case, a group of landlords sought to prevent the expansion of Rent Stabilization outside New York City by arguing that the “vacancy surveys” localities must conduct prior to opting into the rent stabilization system constitute unconstitutional “searches” in violation of the Fourth Amendment. They also argued that the presumption that landlords who do not respond to a vacancy survey have zero vacancies violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

In our brief, Legal Aid argued that the lower court properly dismissed the landlords’ claims because landlords have no expectation of privacy with respect to rental data, and that the statutory presumption that landlords who fail to respond to a vacancy survey have zero vacancies formalizes a decades-long practice and prevents landlords from obstructing the survey process. The Second Circuit affirmed the dismissal of the landlords’ complaint in June 2025.