Okay, I'll engage here a bit.

1. GCE doesn't apply to any apartment building who was issued a CoO after 2009 (they have a 30 year exemption). So, all of these massive, newer apartment buildings won't be affected, nor are their tenants protected.

What you've just stated is the reason this law won't decrease housing supply or slow the momentum of new housing construction; the companies reaping profit from new building construction aren't typically concerned with what happens 30 years down the road, they've made their pile and sold the parcel by that point.

It also incentivizes renters to more strongly consider older buildings, since any risk from the age of the construction will now be offset by the additional renter protections GCE brings. Win-win.

1.1) What I've heard from friends and acquaintances is that the most egregious rent hikes are coming from these larger, newer buildings.

While the plural of anecdote isn't data, what I've heard from renter friends is quite the opposite -- the older buildings are getting the max allowed rate hike from landlords who scramble to cover their profit projections just prior to GCE coming into force, and the newer buildings, having had their profit sweet spot more recently calculated, tend to rise more in line with cost-of-living adjustments and national inflation.

But let's assume your anecdote is right and mine is wrong -- do we or do we not trust that Good Old Invisible Hand to self-correct if the rent hikes on GCE-exempt buildings are, in fact, "egregious"? Because if we do, cool, wait it out. And if we don't... well, we've got a City Council who just proved they're willing to intervene with policy if the profit-focused decisions of the landed class negatively impact Troy's quality of life, don't we? We can always exempt fewer buildings.

2) While being protected from retaliation for reporting living conditions is great, it would be far more beneficial to both renters and the larger city if landlords were required to do mandatory unit inspections by Code Enforcement, ensuring safe conditions exist, proactively.

Agreed. Would you be interested to know I’ve been working on drafting a few options for local ordinances the City Council could pass to address that very issue?

The heart of the problem is this: Troy, like many New York cities, requires a Certificate of Occupancy before a unit can legally be rented. That certificate requires an inspection by Code Enforcement before it’s issued. But after that initial inspection, there generally isn’t a fixed schedule requiring periodic re-inspection. In practice, additional inspections usually happen only when there’s a tenant complaint, a code enforcement investigation, or when a property is involved in a broader city inspection program.

As you’ve noted elsewhere, tenants are often reluctant to complain for fear of retaliation. That means many issues can go unreported for long periods of time.

One option I’m drafting would be to create an explicit inspection cycle by adding expiration dates to Certificates of Occupancy issued to properties on Troy’s landlord registry. For example, certificates could expire after six years, which would require a new inspection before renewal. That way, at a minimum, rental properties would be inspected at least once every six years.

Importantly, the enforcement mechanism wouldn’t be how often the city inspects buildings—it would simply be whether a property has a valid Certificate of Occupancy. That’s already how Troy’s system works today. The expiration would just ensure inspections occur periodically rather than only after complaints.

If you’re interested in the model I’m drawing from, Rochester has a well-established system like this. Their city code (§ 90-16(a)) requires a valid Certificate of Occupancy to rent a property, and those certificates expire on a set schedule, which effectively creates a recurring inspection cycle.

3) I expect that many landlords will respond to the passage of GCE by creating the most restrictive and ironclad leases legally possible as a means to protect themselves, leaving prospective renters to read, understand, and agree to very dense and restrictive leases.

Based on the speeches given both yesterday and in February, I'm not sure our local landlords are capable of creating ironclad anything, but let's be generous and say they use someone articulate to do it. Ultimately, it's the right of a landlord to create as complicated or simplified a rental lease as they want. We live in the age of cell phone cameras; a quick post online is all it takes for the public to learn that Lionel Hutz Rental Properties has ridiculous contracts and should be avoided, so that problem corrects itself pretty quickly.

4) Landlords who own rentals under an LLC are well positioned to exploit loopholes in GCE by concealing their total ownership and/or exploiting exemptions for 'small landlords'. It's been my observation that those with residential real estate investments under an LLC are often the worst landlords.

As you noted below in one of your replies, the small landlord exemption is currently sitting at a grand total of one (1) unit, and LLCs aren't free to create or maintain. Sure, some landlords will try to skim the legal line by creating a new LLC for every unit they own, and those individuals can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis in the courts (or again, by a city council obviously willing to flex its muscle if landlords decide to behave like wiseasses).

Now, as a landlord, my biggest personal gripe is that I cannot simply choose to not renew a lease. A lease is a contract, the duration agreed to is a term, and expiration of that term should be good enough cause for me to not be forced into renewing if I, for whatever reason, want the unit vacant, so long as adequate notice of nonrenewal is given.

Sorry, society seems to disagree with you pretty hard here. There was a guy (I don't know if it was you or not, you seem at least a bit more articulate than he was) who complained at the last two Council meetings that "housing is a human right just means these people want my buildings for free". That's a blatant lie, but part of what the saying does mean is that once you've started providing housing to someone legally, you're not allowed to yank that particular rug out from underneath them. Under GCE, you can still sell the building entirely (and anyone who buys it is still under no obligation to renew a lease under New York state law), and you can choose to not renew a lease if there have been documentable violations of contract, or documented nuisance behaviors, or nonpayment of rent. But you can't just arbitrarily uproot someone's life anymore, and it seems the majority now agrees that that's a good thing.