On November 20, 2025, the New York City Council's Committee on Housing and Buildings held its first hearing on this legislation — seventeen months after Intro 948 was originally introduced. What happened in that room did more to shape the next stage of this fight than almost anything else in this record.

The hearing's own procedural record shows a clear imbalance. NYHOA's testimony — representing the bill's own author — was cut off at ninety seconds, mid-sentence. An opposing witness, by contrast, was given eight minutes and thirty seconds of uninterrupted testimony. Murray Cox, a researcher whose data has been used to argue against short-term rentals generally, was called to testify twice in the same hearing; Tom Cayler, another frequent opponent voice, was invited to speak twice as well. Neither faced meaningful challenge to their claims from the committee.

The most consequential moment came during direct questioning from Council Member Kevin Riley — one of the bill's own co-sponsors, not an outside skeptic — of Christian Klossner, the director of the Office of Special Enforcement. Under that questioning, Klossner acknowledged that Local Law 18 was never actually projected to lower rents, and that OSE had never conducted any study of the law's demographic impact on the homeowners it was enforcing against. Those are significant admissions from the city's own enforcement agency: the law's stated justification — protecting affordability — was never something the city had measured, and its impact on the specific population most affected by enforcement had never been studied at all.

A separate question, posed by Council Members Narcisse and Riley to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development about more than 7,300 vacant NYCHA units, went unanswered in the hearing. The full written and oral record of this hearing — including the official transcript filed with the City Council — is available in the Research Library for anyone who wants to review the exchange directly rather than take this summary's word for it.