By Jonathan Allen
NEW YORK, May 8 (Reuters) – New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s best-known campaign promise was tentatively advanced in a cacophonous college auditorium as a city housing board agreed in a provisional vote to consider freezing the rent for about a million regulated apartments.
In a weeks-long annual ritual culminating in a final vote in June, the city’s Rent Guidelines Board fixes how much landlords can raise the rent for tenants of rent-stabilized apartments, home to about a quarter of all New Yorkers. The board weighs tenants’ wages and landlords’ incomes from their buildings, inflation, taxes, shifts in housing supply and myriad other factors in closely scrutinized public calculations.
In the provisional vote late on Thursday, barely audible over the chanting and cheering of hundreds of tenants filling the audience, the board set a range ahead of the next month’s final vote: rent adjustments of zero to 2% for 1-year lease renewals, and zero to 4% for 2-year renewals. In short, a rent freeze remains a possibility, but an increase has not been ruled out.
“Freeze the rent!” tenants shouted, applauding every mention of the word ‘zero’ from the nine board members who sat behind a table onstage, and booing every number they heard larger than that. “Fight! Fight! Fight! Housing is a human right!” they chanted.
The board’s members, six appointed by Mamdani, pressed on as if they could not see or hear the hundreds of yelling New Yorkers arrayed before them, and the zero to 2% proposal was passed by a vote of 7-1, with one member abstaining.
Mamdani ran for mayor of America’s financial capital last year as a democratic socialist, promising to freeze rents and tackle soaring costs of groceries, childcare and other necessities in a city where the median rent for a newly leased apartment is $3,950, according to listings agency StreetEasy.
His success with voters has been admired and studied by fellow Democrats as they seek to regain power at the state and national level. It even impressed Republican U.S. President Donald Trump, a billionaire building developer.
ROACHES, MICE AND MOLD
Since Mamdani took office in January, moving from a roughly $2,300-per-month 1-bedroom Queens apartment to Manhattan’s 5-bedroom Gracie Mansion, New Yorkers have watched to see whether the simple declarative promises of the campaign trail will come to fruition.
“We have a new mayor, and he also lived in a stabilized apartment, he worked in the past with the people who had housing issues,” said Moreom Perven, before showing Reuters around her rent-stabilized studio apartment in Jamaica, Queens, ahead of Thursday’s vote. “He understands the situation of New York City, how we are suffering, and I expect this time, we’ll have the good news.”
Perven, 49, has lived in her apartment since 2000, now paying just under $1,300 a month in rent to a real-estate management company that owns more than 2,000 apartments in the city. Across her building’s 187 apartments, there are 270 active complaints, according to city building records, and 66 open housing code violations. Perven and her neighbors find themselves repeatedly waging battles with their landlord over basic maintenance.
“Roaches, mice, broken tiles, then water leakage, mold, bed bugs,” Perven recounted, sitting by a second refrigerator-freezer she bought and installed near the landlord-supplied one that hasn’t been cold in a long time. “They don’t want to invest money to fix the issue.”
Perven, a part-time tenants counselor for a housing-rights advocacy group, traveled with some of her neighbors to Thursday’s meeting.
Hundreds of tenants, waving signs in English, Spanish, Chinese and Bengali, filled the sidewalk outside, beating drums and blowing whistles that security would not let them take inside.
The tenants have divided broadly into two camps. There’s the Tenants Bloc, calling for a rent freeze, which has happened only three times in more than 50 years of rent-stabilization laws. And the Rent Justice Coalition, including Pervem and others, calling for an unheard-of negative adjustment, a “rent rollback,” to offset the cumulative 12% rent increase that came under Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, over his four-year term.
PROPERTY OWNERS CITE FINANCIAL DISTRESS
Property owners have also given testimony through the Real Estate Board of New York and similar advocacy groups, who argue that operating costs are rising, particularly in older buildings.
Mamdani, despite appointing a majority of board members, has no power to influence its decision beyond saying what he would like to see. Instead, he has used city resources to make sure New Yorkers know their rights and to goose turnout at the four remaining public hearings before the June 25 vote.
In a statement on Thursday night, Mamdani encouraged both tenants and landlords “to make their voices heard and speak directly to what this housing crisis looks like in their lives.”
Speaking for property owners, REBNY executive Basha Gerhards argued that the board’s preliminary ranges “ignore the clear financial distress shown in the data” and that “a freeze or near-freeze is unjustifiable.”
Perven left the vote downcast as a rent rollback seemed out of the question at least this year. She and other tenants were glad the range included zero, but worried that past final votes tended to fall somewhere in the middle.
“We need to organize. We need to fight back,” she said. “Hopefully we’ll see the same energy until June, for the final vote.”
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Additional reporting by Aleksandra Michalska; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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