A half dozen candidates running for mayor are calling for a rent freeze for over a million rent-stabilized apartments — but Mayor Eric Adams could make that goal difficult to fulfill, not just this year but into any successor’s term.
That’s because the mayor appoints members of the Rent Guidelines Board to terms as long as four years, and under Adams the board has voted to raise rents every year since he took office in 2022.
The board is on course to do it again this year. On Wednesday the city rent board took a preliminary vote to increase rents for leases starting in October, voting 5 to 4 to approve proposed increases between 1.75% and 4.75% for one-year leases and 4.75% and 7.75% for two-year leases.
The board will take a final vote on the rent hikes in late June, sometime after the last public hearing on June 17. The mayoral primary election takes place a week later, on June 24, and early voting begins on June 14.
Adams said the board tried to balance “protecting the quality of rent stabilized homes as costs continue to rise without overburdening tenants with infeasible rent increases,” while also calling the upper range “far too unreasonable of a burden for tenants.”
On one hand, landlords and some housing analysts say a rent increase is necessary to help keep up with the rising costs of maintaining buildings. On the other, tenants and advocacy groups oppose rent hikes and point to how economically squeezed New Yorkers living in rent-stabilized apartments already are.
The perennial debate played out Wednesday night in the split of the board’s vote: the two members representing tenants and the two representing landlords all voted against the hikes, for very different reasons. Neither tenant groups nor landlord groups were happy with the outcome and slammed the proposed increases from opposite directions.
Landlords are adamant that hikes are consistently not high enough.
“This RGB panel is on the same course as its predecessors of under-indexing rent increases,” said Ann Korchak, board president of Small Property Owners of New York, a landlord advocacy group. “The RGB must now take bold action, departing from its preliminary range and setting higher rent increases.”
Meanwhile Cea Weaver, director of the New York State Tenant Bloc, called freezing rent “the single most powerful thing the mayor can do to make New York affordable.”
“If Adams won’t freeze the rent, we have the power to elect a mayor who will,” she said.
Future Freeze Forecast
Only under Mayor Bill de Blasio did the board approve a rent freeze, records show. This happened three times in his term.
But can another mayor pull that off?
The nine members of the board are all appointed by the mayor and serve terms between two and four years. Adams appointed seven of those members, and the two others were appointed by de Blasio.
Among the nine members, one of them serves at the mayor’s discretion and six others have terms that technically already expired. But they continue sitting on the board until the mayor decides to replace them, or if they decide to step down.
“If your term has not expired, the mayor can’t remove you from the board without cause,” said Andrew McLaughlin, the executive director of the RGB. “Otherwise, they can remove the member if the term is up.”
Adams has the rest of the year — while he is still mayor — to further influence the makeup of the board into the next mayor’s term. He could do this by replacing four of those six sitting members whose terms have expired. That’s because the terms of those four new appointees would stretch to the end of 2026.
But if Adams takes no action on appointees for the rest of the year and loses his reelection bid, a new mayor would have the opportunity to almost completely shake up the makeup of the board by appointing eight new members.
As it stands, the next mayor will inherit one member who cannot be replaced until at least 2027, a year into their mayorality: Alex Armlovich, a senior housing policy analyst at the Niskanen Center who formerly lived in a rent-stabilized building. His four-year term as a public member runs through 2026.
As with some other Adams appointees, he offers a market-oriented outlook.
“As a policy person, I would advise to aim for predictability and stability and not promising anyone you can generate a free lunch,” he told THE CITY. “There’s no free lunch to be had by holding rents deeply below inflation over time, but we can provide tenants stability and predictability over time and balance landlord and tenant power.”
Armlovich pointed out that the freezes under de Blasio amounted to rent reductions given the rate of inflation — as did an increase in 2022 under Adams that did not keep up with inflation.
Taking the Plunge
Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani (D-Queens) has made freezing rents a centerpiece of his mayoral campaign.
“When they increase the rent, they push New Yorkers out of their homes,” Mamdani said Wednesday in remarks criticizing the board’s vote.
In a video shot on New Year’s Day in Coney Island, Mamdani plunged into the cold ocean and made his pledge.
“I’m freezing … your rent as the next mayor of New York City,” Mamdani said to the camera. “Let’s plunge into the details.”
Soon, other candidates had to answer for where they stood and, if elected, whether they’d push their appointees of the RGB to back a 0% increase.
Both state Sen. Jessica Ramos (D-Queens) and former Assemblymember Michael Blake got on board, with Ramos touting her role as “part of the administration that delivered on rent freezes for many years.”
Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, state Sen. Zellnor Myrie (D-Brooklyn), Comptroller Brad Lander, former Comptroller Scott Stringer, Jim Walden (a lawyer who is running as an independent) and Republican candidate Curtis Silwa took a more measured approach, indicating they would support rent freezes only if data showed it would make sense given landlord and tenant costs. Myrie, Speaker Adams and Lander have said they would support a freeze this year.
In a statement released after the board vote, Lander said, “Where does Adams expect people to get a whole extra month’s rent when wages are stagnant and cost of living keeps rising?”
On the other end of the mayoral candidate spectrum, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo dismissed the idea of a rent freeze, describing those calling for one as taking a “politically convenient posture.” Cuomo’s campaign enjoys hefty support from the real estate industry, which has pushed for rent increases to meet landlords’ costs of operating their properties.
Esther Jensen, a spokesperson for Cuomo, in a statement said the RGB vote was “not a political decision,” but urged the members to “do everything it can to keep rent as low as possible.”
Former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson also rejected a rent freeze wholesale.
Additional reporting by Mia Hollie.
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