Citing an ongoing “housing emergency,” the City Council intends to renew for another three years the city’s soon-to-expire rent control and rent stabilization laws.

A bill extending the laws until 2009 was introduced by several sponsors yesterday and is likely to win approval before the existing statutes expire on April 1. In passing the measure, the council would be exerting its limited power over the city’s rent laws. The limitations are a source of increasing frustration for many members, including the new speaker, Christine Quinn.

“We do not have full power over our housing laws, but we do play a very important and central role as it relates to renewing rent protection laws,” Ms. Quinn said yesterday on the steps of City Hall. Surrounding the speaker were several council colleagues and hundreds of tenants pushing for continued rent control.

The introduction of the bill comes less than a week after an official survey found that the city’s rental housing stock was crowded enough to qualify as a “housing emergency,” allowing the city to extend rent laws determined by the state. Ms. Quinn said that despite the council’s limited authority, she wanted to “send a clear message” that rent laws would not be weakened under her watch.

Earlier this month, Ms. Quinn signaled that the council would try to step up pressure on Albany to give the city “home rule” by repealing the 1971 law handing the state jurisdiction over the city’s rent laws. The council will likely send an official legislative request to Albany after passing resolutions on the issue in recent years. A bill repealing the “home rule” law has passed the state Assembly, where Democrats have the majority, each year since 1997 before stalling in the GOP-controlled Senate.

“It’s a scandal, and it’s high time it changed,” the treasurer of the Tenants Political Action Committee, Michael McKee, said.

According to state and city laws, the percentage of vacancies in the city’s rental housing stock determines whether the city can justify continued rent control and rent stabilization. A Housing and Vacancy Survey released by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development last week said that nearly 97% of the rental housing stock was occupied. According to state and city laws, rent control and rent stabilization can continue if the occupancy is at 95% or above. The survey is conducted every three years, and showed 1,043,677 rent-stabilized units in the city in 2005, a slight increase from 2002.

Tenants advocacy groups have long pushed for stronger rent laws they say would protect tenants in rent-stabilized apartments from being forced out by owners and landlords looking to capitalize on New York’s booming housing market. Opponents of rent control, however, say that any “affordable housing” crisis in the city is due to the laws themselves, which they contend constrict the free market by decreasing the housing supply and forcing prices through the roof.

The Republican leader of the council, James Oddo of Staten Island, said yesterday that rent control was “a stranglehold on the free market economy.” He said he was compiling a report on how many times his colleagues on the council used the term “affordable housing,” a term many council members and tenants advocates use to advance the argument for rent control. Yet to Mr. Oddo, rent control is what depletes the affordable housing stock. “The fact that they don’t see a connection amazes me,” he said. As for the issue of “home rule,” Mr. Oddo is not joining the push. “It’s like giving control of the candy jar to a 5-year-old,” he said, referring to a heavily Democratic council that would likely use the power to enact stronger rent control laws.