Full Name
Hally Chu
Company
NYS Senator
Speaker Bio
Senator Brian Kavanagh represents more than 330,000 residents in New York’s Senate District 27, covering neighborhoods across lower Manhattan from the Battery to 14th Street, including Tribeca, Chinatown, Little Italy, the Lower East Side, SoHo, NoHo, Greenwich Village and the East Village.
Brian was first elected to the Senate in 2017 after representing the 74th District on Manhattan’s East Side in the State Assembly, where he was elected to six terms, beginning in 2006. His work has focused on affordable housing, gun violence prevention, environmental sustainability, democracy and open government, and economic and social justice. As Chair of the Senate Committee on Housing, Construction, and Community Development, Brian has built on his decades of advocating for access to high quality, safe, affordable housing for all New Yorkers. In 2019, he led the Senate effort to enact the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), which gave New York the strongest tenant protections in the nation.
He has worked to secure huge public investments in housing and related services, including $5.5 billion in capital and $2.5 billion in other expenditures in the 2022-2023 State budget to renovate and maintain existing affordable housing, create new homes for homeless, low-income, and middle class New Yorkers, and provide financial assistance for renters and homeowners.
In 2022, Brian passed a law to facilitate conversion of under-used hotels to permanent affordable housing, and advanced his proposal in both the Senate and the Assembly for a new large-scale Housing Access Voucher Program, modeled on the federal Section 8 program, to provide rental assistance for New Yorkers experiencing homelessness or facing eviction.
From the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brian advocated to stop evictions and foreclosures and to provide funding to keep renters and homeowners from losing their homes. He authored the statewide eviction and foreclosure moratorium, extending it three times, for a total of 22 months. He also succeeded in enacting New York’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program and Homeowner Assistance Fund, and allocating $3.5 billion for these programs to date, including the largest investment of state funds for this purpose in the country. Brian continues to advocate for additional federal and state funds to fully cover the need.
In 2023, Brian sponsored The All Electric Buildings Act, which was signed into law as part of the Adopted Budget. This makes New York the first state in the nation to mandate All-Electric Buildings by statute, leading the way in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and meeting the goals set forth by the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. This law will reduce the negative impact on the health of New Yorkers that are generated by the combustion of fossil-fuels in buildings.
Before he was elected to the legislature, Brian served on the staff of City Councilmember Gale Brewer, in the administrations of Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins, as an attorney at the New York City law firms of Kaye Scholer and Schulte Roth & Zabel, and as a researcher and voting rights advocate at Dēmos.
Brian was first elected to the Senate in 2017 after representing the 74th District on Manhattan’s East Side in the State Assembly, where he was elected to six terms, beginning in 2006. His work has focused on affordable housing, gun violence prevention, environmental sustainability, democracy and open government, and economic and social justice. As Chair of the Senate Committee on Housing, Construction, and Community Development, Brian has built on his decades of advocating for access to high quality, safe, affordable housing for all New Yorkers. In 2019, he led the Senate effort to enact the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), which gave New York the strongest tenant protections in the nation.
He has worked to secure huge public investments in housing and related services, including $5.5 billion in capital and $2.5 billion in other expenditures in the 2022-2023 State budget to renovate and maintain existing affordable housing, create new homes for homeless, low-income, and middle class New Yorkers, and provide financial assistance for renters and homeowners.
In 2022, Brian passed a law to facilitate conversion of under-used hotels to permanent affordable housing, and advanced his proposal in both the Senate and the Assembly for a new large-scale Housing Access Voucher Program, modeled on the federal Section 8 program, to provide rental assistance for New Yorkers experiencing homelessness or facing eviction.
From the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brian advocated to stop evictions and foreclosures and to provide funding to keep renters and homeowners from losing their homes. He authored the statewide eviction and foreclosure moratorium, extending it three times, for a total of 22 months. He also succeeded in enacting New York’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program and Homeowner Assistance Fund, and allocating $3.5 billion for these programs to date, including the largest investment of state funds for this purpose in the country. Brian continues to advocate for additional federal and state funds to fully cover the need.
In 2023, Brian sponsored The All Electric Buildings Act, which was signed into law as part of the Adopted Budget. This makes New York the first state in the nation to mandate All-Electric Buildings by statute, leading the way in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and meeting the goals set forth by the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. This law will reduce the negative impact on the health of New Yorkers that are generated by the combustion of fossil-fuels in buildings.
Before he was elected to the legislature, Brian served on the staff of City Councilmember Gale Brewer, in the administrations of Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins, as an attorney at the New York City law firms of Kaye Scholer and Schulte Roth & Zabel, and as a researcher and voting rights advocate at Dēmos.
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