It’s a routine, if divisive, feature of the city’s civic calendar every spring: a nine-member board that sets the rent for about 1 million regulated apartments gathers to decide on a range of potential rent increases. A few months later, they’ll hold a final, binding vote.
The Rent Guidelines Board’s preliminary vote will take place Thursday night in Long Island City, but its decision this year is anything but routine. The hearing will instead showcase the seismic changes in New York City’s political landscape and reveal whether the board's new members are willing to fulfill Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s now-famous campaign pledge to “freeze the rent” throughout his first term in office.
Prominent tenant and landlord advocates are calling for two dramatically different, but unprecedented outcomes.
Mamdani has himself stopped publicly touting his former pledge since taking office in the face of legal questions over intervention and undue influence. Although the board is appointed by the mayor, it is supposed to act independently, free from political maneuvering.
But when he was still just a candidate, Mamdani made clear how he felt at the last preliminary vote in April 2025, when he turned a post-hearing press conference into an impromptu campaign rally for his then long-shot bid for the Democratic nomination for mayor.
“When they increase the rent, they push New Yorkers out of their homes,” Mamdani told the crowd outside LaGuardia College that night last year. “We need to be clear that if we are serious about tackling homelessness, if we are serious about tackling the housing crisis then there is only one answer we have to lead with and that is freezing the rent.”
Two months later, the board approved a 3% increase on one-year leases, marking a combined 12% rent hike in four years under Mayor Eric Adams.
The mayor knows the data from his own RGB does not warrant a rent freeze.
Now, most of the members who approved the increase are gone. Mamdani has reshaped the Rent Guidelines Board by naming five new tenant-friendly members and reappointing a sixth.
He has also empowered a new “Office of Mass Engagement” to knock on doors and urge New Yorkers — tenants and landlords alike — to speak at a series of upcoming Rent Guidelines Board hearings before the final vote in June. Mamdani has said the goal is civic engagement and that canvassers will not encourage people to testify for anything in particular.
But the leading landlord lobbying group is skeptical and says Mamdani is masking an illegal attempt to strongarm the board under the guise of participation.
“The Mayor knows the data from his own RGB does not warrant a rent freeze in any way,” New York Apartment Association CEO Kenny Burgos said in a social media post responding to Mamdani’s new effort. “So instead he’s going to use millions of dollars in taxpayer money, while the city is in a budget deficit, to hire scripted doorknockers and pressure campaign his own Rent Guidelines Board.”
The New York Apartment Association represents owners of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments across the city and has urged the board to take a unique approach this year by approving an increase for apartments in buildings constructed before 1974. Those buildings typically have lower rents and higher rates of financial distress than newer buildings subject to rent-stabilization because of government regulatory agreements.
The board has on two previous occasions under Mayor Michael Bloomberg voted for different increases based on how long a tenant has held a lease. The board has never voted for a split increase based on the age of the building itself. The board voted for a freeze on three occasions, all under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Supporters of a rent increase, including many economists, point to rising insurance, fuel and maintenance costs for property owners described in recent board expense data.
“The RGB needs to protect the long-term health of these buildings because the government doesn’t have the cash, capacity or capability to meet the current scale of distress,” Burgos said in a written statement.
Net operating income — the amount of money left over for landlords after expenses, but before mortgage payments — rose by more than 6% in buildings with rent-stabilized units citywide, according to a report prepared by Rent Guidelines Board staff. But landlord groups say that was mostly driven by a spike in “Core Manhattan” below West 110th and East 96th streets and belies serious financial problems in places like the Bronx, where income actually ticked down slightly.
A rent freeze is the common-sense first step to overcoming NYC’s housing crisis.
Tenant groups counter that people in rent-stabilized buildings are also lower-income than the city as a whole, and that people living in the buildings that have the lowest margins also tend to be the New Yorkers who are least able to shoulder a rent increase.
Rent Guidelines Board data shows more than half of New York City renters spend at least 30% of their income on housing — a threshold deemed “rent-burdened” by the federal government. Unemployment and cash assistance cases for extremely low-income New Yorkers also rose last year, according to the board’s reporting.
Organizations like NYS Tenant Bloc have also urged the board to think differently, by approving a first-of-its-kind rent freeze for two-year leases.
“Rent is the highest bill we pay every month and every time it goes up, more New Yorkers risk losing their homes,” said NYS Tenant Bloc Director Sumathy Kumar in a statement. “A rent freeze is the common-sense first step to overcoming NYC’s housing crisis.”
