“Our elected leaders have come out strong in support of our efforts to fight for fair compensation and decent working conditions for our members on the streets and at the bargaining table. But the gains that we have won are steadily being eroded by the skyrocketing cost of housing.”

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The housing affordability crisis has impacted all of New York State. No matter how hard New Yorkers are working, it is becoming nearly impossible for them to make ends meet, stay in their homes or find an affordable place to live. The skyrocketing cost of living is forcing families to make hard choices about whether they can even afford to stay in our state.

Albany cannot let another legislative session go by without addressing this crisis head on by passing Good Cause Eviction, which will provide necessary tenant protections while challenging the unjust practices of landlords who continue to drive out tenants with rent hikes and intimidation tactics.

As the leader of one of New York’s largest labor unions, I have seen how hard the housing crisis has hit and the impact it has on our members. Our members—working class New Yorkers who do the essential work that keeps our state running—are increasingly struggling to make ends meet.

Our elected leaders have come out strong in support of our efforts to fight for fair compensation and decent working conditions for our members on the streets and at the bargaining table. But the gains that we have won are steadily being eroded by the skyrocketing cost of housing.

Over 40 percent of New Yorkers are renters, including many of our RWDSU members. Rental prices in New York are reaching new peaks—and the costs are pushing more and more people out of their homes. To make matters even worse, New York City’s vacancy rate is the lowest it has been in 50 years, making it nearly impossible for New Yorkers to find decent, affordable housing. 

But this is not just a New York City problem. Unaffordable housing costs are sadly hitting the rest of New York just as hard. Syracuse is now the most competitive rental market in the U.S., while 45 percent of renters in Western New York are paying over over a third of their income to rent. In Rensselaer County, holdover eviction filings—where landlords do not have to provide a good cause to evict—increased by 68 percent from 2022 to 2023.

This data is a stunning indictment on our broken tenant protection laws, which simply aren’t working for working class New Yorkers. Today, if you’re one of the 4 million New Yorkers living in unregulated housing, your landlord can raise your rent as much as they want at the end of a lease without giving any reason—or kick you out of your home altogether.

New Yorkers are rightfully demanding that our leaders address this crisis head-on. In order to truly stand up for workers and our communities, we must stand up for their right to an affordable roof over their heads.

Good Cause would help workers stay in their homes and afford the rent by limiting annual rent hikes to 3 percent or 1.5 times the inflation rate (whichever is higher) and requiring landlords to have a valid reason for evicting tenants. Tenants who face rent increases above that cap or believe their eviction to be unlawful could take their landlord to court.

Tenants across New York, including RWDSU members, have been working tirelessly for years to build support for Good Cause—and their organizing has had a powerful effect. Good Cause Eviction already has the backing of many Senate and Assembly members in Albany. Senate Democrats have made clear they will not make a deal on the budget without “protections similar to those in the Good Cause Eviction legislation,” and the Assembly majority has committed to “enacting statewide policies that protect tenants from arbitrary and capricious rent increases and unreasonable evictions of paying tenants.”

Nonetheless, there are still some calling for a “Swiss cheese” version of a Good Cause Eviction bill that would require localities outside of the five boroughs to opt-in, as well as provisions that would deny tenants’ protections based on the size of their buildings or the size of their landlords’ real estate portfolios.

This would devastate thousands of tenants across our state and severely weaken the impact of any bill in the housing package. These carve-outs could leave at least 67 percent of non-New York City renters (872,000 households) vulnerable to predatory rent hikes and retaliatory evictions, leaving many of our members and working New Yorkers unprotected. 

Working people are the backbone of New York. It does not matter if it is a pandemic or a blizzard, we show up to do the essential work that keeps our state running. It’s time for our elected leaders to show up for us by passing Good Cause this session because we cannot wait another year. We are at a breaking point and need relief to remain in our homes. 

Stuart Appelbaum is President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU).

By TARA COPP and LOLITA C. BALDOR (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. CQ Brown Jr. testified on Capitol Hill on Tuesday about the Pentagon’s $850 billion budget for 2025 as questions remained as to whether lawmakers will support current spending needs for Israel or Ukraine.

The Senate hearing was the first time lawmakers on both sides were able to question the Pentagon’s top civilian and military leadership on the administration’s Israel strategy following Tel Aviv’s deadly strike on World Central Kitchen humanitarian aid workers in Gaza. It also follows continued desperate pleas by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy that if the U.S. does not help soon, Kyiv will lose the war to Russia.

In their opening statements, both Austin and Brown emphasized that their 2025 budget is still shaped with the military’s long-term strategic goal in mind — to ready forces and weapons for a potential future conflict with China. About $100 billion of this year’s request is set aside for new space, nuclear weapons and cyber warfare systems the military says it must invest in now before Beijing’s capabilities surpass it.

But the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel are challenging a deeply-divided Congress and have resulted in months of delays in getting last year’s defense budget through, which was only passed by lawmakers a few weeks ago.

Austin’s opening remarks were temporarily interrupted by protesters lifting a Palestinian flag and shouting at him to stop sending weapons to Israel. “Stop the genocide,” they said, as they lifted their hands, stained in red, in the air.

The Pentagon scraped together about $300 million in ammunition to send to Kyiv in March but cannot send more without Congress’ support, and a separate $60 billion supplemental bill that would fund those efforts has been stalled for months.

“The price of U.S. leadership is real. But it is far lower than the price of U.S. abdication,” Austin told the senators.

If Kyiv falls, it could imperil Ukraine’s Baltic NATO member neighbors and potentially drag U.S. troops into a prolonged European war. If millions die in Gaza due to starvation, it could enrage Israel’s Arab neighbors and lead to a much wider, deadlier Middle East conflict — one that could also bring harm to U.S. troops and to U.S. relations in the region for decades.

The Pentagon has urged Congress to support new assistance for Ukraine for months, to no avail, and has tried to walk a perilous line between defending its ally Israel and maintaining ties with key regional Arab partners. Israel’s actions in Gaza have been used as a rallying cry by factions of Iranian-backed militant groups, including the Houthis in Yemen and Islamic Resistance groups across Iraq and Syria, to strike at U.S. interests. Three U.S. service members have already been killed as drone and missile attacks increased against U.S. bases in the region.

Six U.S. military ships with personnel and components to build a humanitarian aid pier are also still enroute to Gaza but questions remain as to how food that arrives at the pier will be safely distributed inside the devastated territory.

Lawmakers are also seeing demands at home. For months, a handful of its far-right members have kept Congress from approving additional money or weapons for Ukraine until domestic needs like curbing the crush of migrants at the southern U.S. border are addressed. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is already facing a call to oust him as speaker by Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene because Johnson is trying to work out a compromise that would move the Ukraine aid forward.

On Israel, the World Central Kitchen strike led to a shift in tone from President Joe Biden on how Israel must protect civilian life in Gaza and drove dozens of House Democrats, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to call on Biden to halt weapons transfers to Israel.

Half the population of Gaza is starving and on the brink of famine due to Israel’s tight restrictions on allowing aid trucks through.

By COLLEEN BARRY (Associated Press)

MILAN (AP) — Amanda Knox faces another trial for slander this week in Italy in a case that could remove the last legal stain against her eight years after Italy’s highest court threw out her conviction for the murder of her 21-year-old British roommate.

Knox, who was a 20-year-old student when she was accused along with her then-boyfriend of murdering Meredith Kercher in 2007, has built a life back in the United States as an advocate, writer, podcaster and producer — with much of her work drawing on her experience.

Now 36 and the mother of two small children, Knox campaigns for criminal justice reform and to raise awareness about forced confessions. She has recorded a series on resilience for a meditation app and has a podcast with her husband, Christopher Robinson, and an upcoming mini-series on her struggles within the Italian legal system for Hulu that has Monica Lewinsky as an executive producer.

Despite a definitive ruling by Italy’s Cassation Court in 2015 that Knox and then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito did not commit the crime, and the conviction of another man whose DNA was at the scene, doubts persist about Knox’s role, especially in Italy.

That is largely due to the slander conviction for wrongly accusing a Congolese bar owner in the murder, which was confirmed by the highest court in 2015. That conviction was only thrown out last November based on a European Court of Human Rights ruling that found Knox’s rights had been violated in a long night of questioning without a lawyer and official translator.

Even now, Knox isn’t sure that a not guilty verdict in the new trial, which opens Wednesday in Florence, will persuade her detractors.

“On the one hand, I am glad I have this chance to clear my name, and hopefully that will take away the stigma that I have been living with,’’ Knox, who did not respond to an interview request, said on her podcast Labyrinths in December.

“On the other hand, I don’t know if it ever will, in the way I am still traumatized by it. I am sure people will still hold it against me because they don’t want to understand what happened, and they don’t want to accept that an innocent person can be gaslit and coerced into what I went through.”

Knox said on her podcast that she expects to testify, but her lawyer said she is not expected in court for opening day.

The Kercher family lawyer, Francesco Maresca, said the high court’s exoneration did little in his mind to dispel doubts following Knox’s conviction by a trial court and two appeals courts, the first confirming her sentence of 26 years and the second raising it to 28 ½ years.

“This trial never ends,’’ Maresca told The Associated Press, obscuring “the memory of poor Meredith, who is always remembered for these procedural aspects and not as a student and young woman.”

Among his doubts, Maresca cited Knox’s confused retraction of her accusation against the Congolese bar owner, Patrick Lumumba, and the verdict in Rudy Guede’s conviction for killing Kercher that maintains that the Ivorian man did not act alone.

Now 36, Guede was released from prison in 2021 after serving 13 years of a 16-year term handed down in a fast-track trial. Guede was recently ordered to wear a monitoring bracelet and not leave his home at night after an ex-girlfriend accused him of physical and sexual abuse. An investigation is ongoing.

Knox’s new trial will admit just one piece of evidence: her four-page handwritten statement that the court will examine to see if it contains elements to support slander against Lumumba. He was held in jail for two weeks before police released him. Lumumba has since left Italy.

Two earlier statements typed up by police that Knox signed in the wee hours of Nov. 7, 2007 that contained the accusation, and were considered the most incriminating, have been ruled inadmissible by Italy’s highest court.

The four-page letter, which she wrote in the same 53-hour span of questioning over four days starting Nov. 6, reflects someone in a state of confusion trying to reconcile what police have told her with her own recollections.

“In regards to this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion,’’ Knox wrote.

She referred to police statements that she would be arrested and jailed for 30 years and that Sollecito was turning against her.

Lauria Baldassare, an Italian lawyer who founded the Innocents Project, said the topic of wrongful convictions in Italy is starting to “create social alarm as it assumes important dimensions.” He cited 10 cases of defendants being paid damages for wrongful convictions over the last decade, but said they faced difficulty in escaping the stigma of their initial guilty verdict.

“There is still part of the public opinion that does not accept the Court of Cassation’s decision, and these debates become a sport,” said Baldassare, whose organization is independent from the Innocence Project that Knox works with. ”Italy does not have the maturity to accept an exoneration, because social prejudices are stronger than the finding.”