New York City is freezing the rents of rent-stabilized apartments.
The city’s Rent Guidelines Board voted seven to one in favor of a freeze Thursday night, at El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan. The board approved rent increases of 0 percent on one-year leases and 0 percent on two-year leases
The result delivers on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promise and is a show of strength for the tenant advocates who helped elect him. For landlord groups the vote was a difficult, if expected, blow. A freeze on two-year leases has never before been approved.
Thursday’s vote was colored by the resignation of landlord member Christina Smyth earlier in the day. Smyth, the board’s only member to vote in May against a preliminary range that included a freeze, decried the process as political theater and alluded to a possible legal challenge.
“I am resigning because the process I was appointed to take part in is not administered the way the law requires,” she wrote in a statement following her resignation. “The Rent Guidelines Board has stopped being a fact-finding body. It has become a body that starts with an answer and vibe codes its way backward to justify it.”
Landlord groups are likely to sue over the result.
“It’s going to be very likely that there will be a challenge,” said Massimo D’Angelo, co-chair of the real estate industry team at law firm Blank Rome. “It could be as quick as Monday, but generally it will take a couple weeks to assess and to file a carefully tailored pleading.”
Those voting in favor were Maksim Wynn, Lauren Melodia, Brandon Mancilla, Sina Sinai, Chantella Mitchell, Adán Soltren and Sagar Sharma. Arpit Gupta voted against a freeze.
Wynn, the remaining landlord member of the board, made a lengthy statement that was largely inaudible to the audience due to the chanting from the crowd.
In it he called for the city and state to invest in expense-side relief for landlords.
“Taking a step back, there is a subset of the rent-stabilized stock that is in real distress, but the underlying causes are systemic ones,” Wynn said. “The city and state must follow up with much more support to ensure the stocks’ long-term viability.”
Landlord groups called out potential impacts on landlords.
The Small Property Owners of New York referenced part of Mamdani’s housing plan that calls for searching for housing violations in distressed buildings and eventually transferring them to nonprofits or other owners.
“Defunding rent-stabilized housing when the RGB’s own data showed a 5.3% increase in operational costs and expenses is setting up already financially distressed small owners for failure, which plays into Mamdani’s sinister plan to illegally take private property and convert it into socialized housing,” Ann Korchak, board president of SPONY, said in a statement.
Outside the vote, tenants and their advocates, who made up a majority of the audience for the vote, were jubilant.
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