State Senator Opts Not to Seek Reelection
State Senator Brian Kavanagh, who has represented Lower Manhattan in the upper house of the state legislature since 2017, announced Tuesday that he will not seek reelection in November. “This has been a very difficult decision,” he said in a statement, “because I love so many aspects of my job as a legislator and as a representative of so many diverse communities. I am confident that there will be new, exciting, and impactful ways to continue serving the public, and I look forward to exploring what I might do after I have completed my term in eleven months.” Mr. Kavanagh served for a decade in the State Assembly, before moving up to the Senate when his predecessor, Dan Squadron, retired.
In the Senate, Mr. Kavanagh rose to chair that body’s Housing Committee, a perch from which he helped guide to passage laws such as the 2024 “good cause eviction” statute, which created new rights – among them automatic lease renewal, protection against eviction, and limits on rent increases – for roughly a quarter of the 1.1 million market-rate rental households in New York City. He also led the push for the “all-electric buildings” act, which bans natural gas and other fossil fuels in new construction of small buildings starting this year, and in larger structures beginning in 2029.
During the Covid pandemic, Senator Kavanagh helped to enact a temporary eviction and foreclosure moratorium, along with a new Housing Access Voucher Program. He also spearheaded the creation of New York’s Shelter Arrears Eviction Forestallment (SAEF) program, which provides tenants with emergency funds to cover up to six months of rent arrears.
Last year, he shepherded through the legislature a bill that would have allocated grants to communities in which polluted former industrial sites are being repurposed for housing or other uses, but Governor Hochul vetoed the measure.
On issues specific to Lower Manhattan, he secured passage in 2019 of a bill that allowed the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to fund resiliency measures, along with a 2022 law that lengthened the BPCA’s ground lease by 50 years (through 2119) and extended benefits to disabled and elderly residents in Battery Park City long available elsewhere in the five boroughs but from which BPC residents were excluded (based on the technicality that the community is governed by a state agency, rather than the municipal government). In 2022, he persuaded the Senate to pass a proposed law that would have expanded the number of board seats at the BPCA and set aside a majority for residents of the neighborhood, but this was vetoed by the Governor. A 2024 measure would offered a measure of affordability protection to low-, moderate-, and middle-income Battery Park City residents by requiring the BPCA to offer them a partial rebate on the portion of their housing costs equal to the percentage remitted to the Authority as ground rent. Mr. Kavanagh secured passage of this bill in the Senate, but it died in the Assembly.
By stepping aside, the Senator joins the ranks of a growing number of local elected officials who have chosen not to seek reelection, including Congressman Jerry Nadler and State Assembly member Deborah Glick. “In my very first campaign, I sought to persuade voters that it was time for ‘a new generation of leadership,’” he says. “And I believe that all of us in elected office owe it to our constituents to recognize when we have reached a point when we have given it our all and they would be well served by electing someone new. After 20 years in the legislature – and in a window when this decision can allow for an open contest for my seat – for me, that point is now.”