The board also authorized tenants whose rents have risen by more than 16% since the beginning of 2019 to file fair-market-rent appeals with the state Office of Rent Administration, says Michael Tierney, the other tenant representative.Landlords have been flipping buildings, raising rents by as much as 70% during the pandemic, and displacing longtime residents The rent rollback, however, was stalled on Nov. 18 when Ulster County Supreme Court Justice David Gandin, hearing a lawsuit by a landlord organization, said he would issue a temporary restraining order preventing it from going into effect.More than half of Kingston’s rent-stabilized apartments are in four large complexes, the biggest being Stony Run, a 266-unit garden-apartment development on the city’s outskirts, west of the New York State Thruway.On Aug. 6, five days after the rent-stabilization law went into effect, Stony Run residents received what Soto, who lives there, calls “the blackmail letter” from the landlord: If they signed a new lease within two weeks, their rent would go up by 18%.The group, whose website declares “rent control is a cancer that kills cities,” argues that the city Office of Housing Initiatives survey that found the vacancy rate was below 5% — required to find a “housing emergency” under the ETPA — was invalid because it counted buildings where the landlord had not responded as having no vacancies, and illegal because the city Common Council hadn’t authorized it."