Start with the elevator. In a Manhattan loft building, according to a New York State Assembly bill memo, the owners installed the Latch entry system and declined to give residents mechanical keys. The front door was only half the problem. The building’s only elevator also ran on the smartphone app, which meant that elderly tenants, disabled tenants, and observant tenants whose religious practice keeps them off their phones could not use it. Not because the elevator was broken. Because they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, operate the software standing between them and their own apartments.
It’s tempting to file this under “technology is annoying,” but the interesting part isn’t the inconvenience. It’s the architecture. A metal key describes a relationship between exactly two parties: the person holding it and the lock. A smart lock inserts at least two more — the platform operator whose servers mediate entry, and the landlord who holds the administrator account. Your front door now has an admin panel, and you are not the admin. Every tenancy rests on a quiet assumption: possession is physical. Whoever holds the key holds the home. Connected entry makes that assumption optional, and the law is only beginning to reckon with what replaces it.
Tenancy law is built out of physical gestures. Eviction, the gravest thing a landlord can do, ends with a marshal and a locksmith — the state changes the locks, because changing the locks is what dispossession means. New York City’s administrative code has long required owners to provide “a key lock in the entrance door to each dwelling unit and at least one key,” plus a deadbolt. That language predates the app-based lock industry by decades; it sits there as settled, pre-existing law in the 2022 Council bill that amends it. Nowhere in that architecture is a power called remote disablement. No lease negotiated it, and no statute clearly limits it. An administrative interface that can revoke entry resembles the one power tenancy law reserves for courts — except it arrives bundled with the doorbell-camera aesthetic, marketed as convenience.
What the lock learns
Then there’s what the system collects. The same Assembly memo lists it: names, relationships, email addresses, phone numbers, counts of entries and exits, location data, and photographs — shared among the app company, the landlord, and unspecified third parties. A brass key is anonymous. It generates no log, keeps no schedule, and cannot testify. A connected lock keeps a diary of your comings and goings and hands your landlord the read credentials: when you leave, when you return, whether you were home on a particular night, who arrived with you. Access logs are occupancy records, and occupancy is leverage — the kind of thing that surfaces in disputes over who really lives in an apartment.
The first public fight over this arrived in 2019, when the New York Times documented Manhattan tenants resisting app-based entry — among them Mary Beth McKenzie, an artist in a West 45th Street building who wanted, simply, a key. At the time it read as a quirky story about change-resistant New Yorkers and their gadgets. In retrospect it was an early skirmish in a possession dispute: who controls the credential standing between a tenant and the street.
A small metal instrument, specifically cut
Lawmakers have since been trying to drag the credential back into the physical world. A 2022 New York City Council bill, sponsored by Erik Bottcher, would amend the code to require keys for exterior and apartment doors that operate without keyless technology, and to permit keyless entry only where a tenant requests it in writing. To do this, the bill defines its terms, and the definition is a small masterpiece of legislative exasperation: a key, it explains, is “a small metal instrument specifically cut to fit into a lock and move its bolt.” It took the smart-lock era to force the Council to write down what a key is — an object older than the city itself, suddenly in need of a legal footnote. Whatever the bill’s fate, the instinct is the tell: occupancy should have a form no administrator can withdraw.
A state senate bill introduced in 2025 goes further, and its prohibitions read like a negative-space portrait of current practice. Landlords of class A multiple dwellings could not require keyless entry — smartphone or biometric — as a condition of tenancy, and a non-electronic alternative would have to be available on request. Exterior keyless doors would need backup power. Tenants would receive written notice at lease signing of what entry data is collected, retained, and shared; that data could not be used as the basis of an eviction proceeding or shared with third parties without authorization. New biometric entry systems would face a three-year moratorium, with outright bans on location tracking and on capturing the likenesses of minors. Every clause implies a thing someone decided needed prohibiting: entry logs in housing court, face scans of children, doors that track where you are.
The rules already on the books are hedging, too. As the Times reported in 2024, a city law covering residential buildings with at least three units requires express written consent before biometric data is collected, and the state’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal has ruled that an owner may replace a metal key with a key fob — provided, among other conditions, that metal keys still work in an emergency. Note the shape of that compromise: the fob is allowed to be the future so long as the past still functions underneath it. Even the regulators converting the city’s doors will not sign off on a building with no physical fallback.
Which suggests this fight was never about technology preferences, or tenants too stubborn to download an app. The metal key turns out to be a kind of constitutional technology: it works when the power is out, it keeps no diary, it answers to no terms-of-service update, and nobody can revoke it from an office somewhere. The tenants shut out of that elevator weren’t defeated by a glitch; they were defeated by a decision, made by someone holding an account they didn’t control. The lawmakers defining a key as a small metal instrument are not being sentimental. They are writing down, in the only language a statute has, what possession is supposed to mean: that the way into your home is a thing you hold, not a permission you are granted.