For about half of New York City apartments, rent may soon go up again.
During a meeting Wednesday night to hold a preliminary vote, the city’s Rent Guidelines Board backed an increase for rent-stabilized apartments of 1.75% to 4.75% on one-year leases and 4.75% to 7.75% on two-year leases.
The final maximum increase is subject to another vote in the next few months.
The preliminary vote suggests the final number will be in line with the most recent rent increases. Under Mayor Eric Adams, the board has so far set maximum increases at around 3%, compared with increases between 0% and 1.5% under his predecessor, Bill de Blasio.
Any rent increase would affect leases starting on or after Oct. 1.
The proceedings of the meeting, held in Long Island City, Queens, were nearly inaudible over the protests of tenant activist groups, including the Met Council on Housing, the New York State Tenant Bloc and Community Action for Safe Apartments. The groups were advocating for a freeze on rent increases, a policy embraced by some mayoral candidates, including state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, state Sen. Jessica Ramos and former Assemblyman Michael Blake. The board approved three freezes under de Blasio, both before and during the pandemic, but none during the Adams administration. Members of the nine-person board are appointed by the mayor.
Adams has declined to endorse a rent freeze but said the higher end of the board’s proposed range is too high.
“I must be clear that an increase as much as 7.75% is far too unreasonable of a burden for tenants, especially as our entire city is feeling the squeeze of a 1.4% housing vacancy rate and a decades-long affordability crisis,” the mayor said in a statement Wednesday night. “New Yorkers simply cannot bear these costs.”
Landlord groups also weren’t happy, decrying the ranges as too low, however.
“This RGB panel is on the same course as its predecessors of underindexing rent increases,” said Ann Korchak, board president of Small Property Owners of New York, in a statement. The group advocated for 6.3% as a starting point for rent increases of all lease lengths.
Landlords have complained that the costs of maintaining rent-stabilized buildings are going up, citing increasing property taxes, insurance fees and fuel prices as reasons. However, landlords of rent-stabilized housing stock have seen their incomes rise, according to Rent Guidelines Board data. Net revenues for stabilized landlords grew 12% in 2023, according to a board study on the most recent data available.
That varies depending on geography. In Manhattan below 96th Street, landlord incomes grew by 23%, compared with 11% in Upper Manhattan, 10% in Brooklyn, 11% in Queens and 0.08% in the Bronx, according to the study.
The average monthly rent in a building with stabilized units in 2023 was $1,599, while operating costs were $1,160 per unit, according to the board study.
Rent Guidelines Board member Genesis Aquino, who represents tenants on the panel, said she was glad that her colleagues voted down an even higher range proposal, which would have started at 6%. Tenant representatives on the board had suggested a range starting with 0%, a motion that also failed.
Aquino said, “1.75% is better, but it’s still way [higher] than what the tenants deserve right now. Most landlords chose to buy these distressed properties, and a lot of the properties that they bought were overleveraged.” Aquino is a tenant in a rent-stabilized apartment.
In the past two decades, the highest one-year maximum increase the board has approved was 4.5% in 2008, which was only for longer-term tenants.
