HONORABLE

KAREN MAY BACDAYAN ’86

HONORABLE

In February 2018, Karen (Kriss) May Bacdayan ’86 was appointed to the Civil Court of the City of New York, Housing Part. Nearly 30 years of experience with Brooklyn Legal Services, where she was a senior attorney defending low-income tenants as well as advocating for tenants’ rights and the preservation of affordable housing, gave Bacdayan the necessary experience and gravitas to adjudicate landlord-tenant disputes. Those disputes can be complicated, and they are increasingly common. New York City is facing its worst housing crunch in half a century, and for those who can find an apartment, the financial burden can be crushing: more than a third of renters now spend more than half their income on rent.

Bacdayan was born far from the five boroughs, in Quezon City, Philippines. Her father is an indigenous Filipino originally from the northern Cordilliera, a mountainous area full of rice terraces and stunning views. After graduating from the University of the Philippines, Bacdayan’s father accepted a teaching position at a high school near his hometown. There he met Bacdayan’s mother, a New Haven, Connecticut, native who was also just arriving to teach at the school. Before Bacdayan turned two, the family moved to

Hartford, Connecticut, so that her father could get his master’s degree. He went on to earn his PhD, and joined the anthropology department at University of Kentucky. Most of Bacdayan’s primary and secondary schooling took place in the Lexington, Kentucky, public school system, though the family did return to the Cordilliera and she spent a year at Bangaan Elementary School. She describes that time as one of the happiest of her life, “running barefoot and freely through the village and between family homes, and mastering the language quickly, a skill I regret having lost.”

Back in the States, Bacdayan attended the George School, a private Quaker boarding school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and applied to Bard after learning about the College from her high school guidance counselor. She remembers being attracted to the small size and “the location—rural and northeastern—with breathtaking views of the Catskill Mountains, especially in fall, and especially from Manor House.”

Bacdayan calls her experience at Bard “formative” and credits the three-week Language and Thinking Program with honing her ability to write; she continues to employ the free-writing technique she was introduced to in L&T when writing court decisions. Bacdayan was a psychology major, but loved her 17th-century poetry class as well as an art history class her last semester, which she says might “have changed her life trajectory had she discovered it sooner.” Art history’s loss was jurisprudence’s gain. Bacdayan went on to earn her law degree from University of Kentucky and, always interested in the underdog, sought a career in legal services. She calls it “dumb luck” that she ended up as a unionized housing lawyer, a job she describes as the most fulfilling she has had. Her work at Brooklyn Legal Services gave her intimate knowledge of the laws that govern, for example, landlords’ claims of nonpayment, rent-control disputes, public housing, and tenants’ claims of fraudulent overcharge and improper service—not to mention that New York City oddity the loft law. These regulations are surprisingly fluid, and Bacdayan has shown a willingness in her decisions to question the controlling law and to engage with the implications of possible future changes to the statutes. Her decisions, even on matters that might otherwise seem mind numbing, make for fascinating reading.

One of the most fascinating decisions authored by Bacdayan, West 49th St., LLC v. O’Neill, attracted considerable coverage when it was handed down in 2022. The case is about whether or not Markyus O’Neill is entitled to renew the lease on the rentstabilized apartment where he lived with Scott Anderson, the tenant of record, for 10 years. Anderson died in October 2021. The law grants someone who is either family or can demonstrate a “family-like relationship” the right to renew a lease in such a circumstance. The wrinkle in this case is that Anderson was also in a long-term relationship with another man, Robert Romano, but Romano leased his own apartment. Regardless, the throuple knew of each other, and both Romano and O’Neill shared with Anderson the characteristics of a nontraditional, family-like relationship.

Though polyamory is having a moment in the mainstream—see “Polyamory: A Practical Guide for the Curious Couple” in New York magazine, several recent stories in The New York Times, the new book More: A Memoir of Open Marriage, and the less mainstream but utterly brilliant “Scenes from an Open Marriage,” by Jean Garnett ’07 in the Paris Review, to name a few—the laws have lagged behind. In 2020, Somerville, Massachusetts, northwest of Boston, became the first city in the United States to extend legal protections against discrimination to people in polyamorous relationships and other nontraditional family structures, allowing residents to legally recognize more than one committed relationship. Nearby Cambridge and Arlington soon followed suit, and in April 2024 the Oakland, California, city council passed legislation formally recognizing polyamorous families; the following month Berkeley prohibited discrimination “on the basis of family and relationship structure.”

In her O’Neill decision, Bacdayan found that O’Neill was entitled to have his claim heard. The ruling did not grant O’Neill the right to renew Anderson’s lease, it simply said that he should be given the opportunity to “prove his relationship” with Anderson in court in pursuit of his claim. (The decision did not, as some handwringers declaimed, legalize polygamy in New York State.)

Bacdayan wrote that cases such as Braschi v. Stahl Assocs. Co., in which the New York State Court of Appeals held, in 1989, that same-sex partners were considered family, thus granting a same-sex-partner the right to continue to live in a rent-stabilized apartment after their lease-holding partner died, and Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the Supreme Court affirmed the right to same-sex marriage in 2015: . . . while revolutionary, still adhered to the majoritarian, societal view that only two people can have a family-like relationship; that only people who are “committed” in a way defined by certain traditional factors qualify for protection from “one of the harshest decrees known to the law—eviction from one’s home.” (Braschi).

She also quoted Chief Justice John Roberts (of all people), who wrote in his Obergefell dissent:

It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage. . . . If not having the opportunity to marry serves to disrespect and subordinate gay and lesbian couples, why wouldn’t the same imposition of this disability . . . serve to disrespect and subordinate people who find fulfillment in polyamorous relationships?

Bacdayan took the next logical step, asking, “Why then, except for the very real possibility of implicit majoritarian animus, is the limitation of two persons inserted into the definition of a family-like relationship for the purposes of receiving the same protections from eviction accorded to legally formalized or blood relationships?” She went on to make the point that “. . . what was ‘normal’ or ‘nontraditiona’ in 1989 is not a barometer for what is normal or nontraditional now.”

Finally, she concluded, “Those decisions . . . open the door for consideration of other relational constructs; and, perhaps, the time has arrived.”

If indeed the time has arrived, it is in part because of the curiosity, critical thinking, and open-mindedness of people like Bacdayan.

alums.bard.edu