Mayor Zohran Mamdani won City Hall promising one thing to a million rent-stabilized households: freeze the rent. He then appointed six of the nine people on the Rent Guidelines Board, the obscure panel that actually sets the number every year. On June 4, at the board’s first public hearing in Queens, rent-stabilized tenants outnumbered landlords and testified for that freeze, while landlords warned that holding rents flat would strain their operating budgets, according to WABC. A freeze is technically still on the table. So is a rent hike, and the board Mamdani built has not committed to either.
The Rent Guidelines Board is the city panel that decides, once a year, how much landlords can raise the rent on roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments. On May 7, at a rowdy session at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, the board cast its preliminary vote and set the range it will choose inside of: zero to two percent for one-year leases and zero to four percent for two-year leases, City and State New York reported. Zero is in the range. So is a hike. The board’s final, binding vote is scheduled for June 25 at El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan.
That preliminary range was a compromise. The board’s two tenant representatives moved for negative numbers, a rollback of three to zero percent on one-year leases and four and a half to zero percent on two-year leases. The board’s owner representatives moved the other way, for three to five and a half percent on one-year leases and six to eight percent on two-year leases. Both motions failed, and the zero-to-something range is what survived. A freeze sits at the very bottom of it.
The board Mamdani assembled is not a rubber stamp. He named six of its nine members in February, according to 6sqft: Chantella Mitchell, a program director at the New York Community Trust, as chair; Sina Sinai of the Jain Family Institute, Lauren Melodia of the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, and United Auto Workers regional director Brandon Mancilla as public members; Maksim Wynn of Procida Development Group as an owner representative; and Adan Soltren, a supervising attorney in the Legal Aid Society’s Housing Justice Unit, reappointed as a tenant representative. Mamdani said at the time he was confident the board would take “a clear-eyed look” at the realities facing rent-stabilized tenants, per 6sqft. A clear-eyed look is not the same as a guaranteed zero, and the preliminary vote proved it.
Tenant advocate Jacklyn Tomlin framed the June 4 hearing as a fight over who gets to stay. “We’re talking about losing the majority of my community. And where I live is predominantly black and brown folks. And it’s disheartening to know that like, a vote can make a difference in where we are,” she told WABC. Another tenant, not named in the broadcast, added up the years out loud: “Two and a half every year. So that’s like 15- 16%. So it’s it’s ridiculous,” the tenant said. “Meanwhile, my slumlord is collecting our rent and not repairing our building.”
That cumulative number is not an exaggeration. Over the four years of the Adams administration, the board approved a combined 12 percent in allowable hikes for one-year leases, per City and State. An outright freeze is rare: the board has voted to freeze one-year rents only three times in its history, all under Mayor Bill de Blasio, in 2015, 2016 and 2020, according to WABC’s coverage of the May vote. A two-year freeze, which the preliminary range leaves open, has never happened.
The landlords are not bluffing about their costs, and the city’s own numbers back part of their case. The board’s 2026 Price Index of Operating Costs, the market-basket measure of what it costs to run a building, rose 5.3 percent over the year, amNewYork reported, driven by fuel costs up about 11 percent and insurance up roughly 10.5 percent. Landlord Ann Korchak, who is president of the advocacy group Small Property Owners of New York, testified against a freeze. “It’s just unrealistic. Everything rises,” Korchak told WABC, adding that it is “really important for owners to be able to have an opportunity to tell the board the struggles, especially with the operating expenses rising.”
Tenants point to a different set of the same reports. The board’s income-and-expense study found landlord net operating income, the profit left after expenses, rose 6.2 percent in the most recent year measured, per amNewYork. Costs are up, and so is the cushion, and the board has to decide whose number it weights more heavily.
Outside the June 4 hearing, the pressure was louder than the testimony inside. More than 100 tenants rallied at the Jamaica Performing Arts Center, organized by NYS Tenants Bloc and CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, The Indypendent reported, and many of them treated a freeze as the floor and called for a rollback instead. A rollback would be unprecedented: the board has never reduced stabilized rents in its history.
Queens was the opening round. The board’s calendar lists hearings in the Bronx on June 8, Brooklyn on June 11, and Manhattan on June 16 before the final vote on June 25, according to the board’s 2026 schedule. The decision lands inside the zero-to-four window, and the time between now and June 25 is the public trying to push it toward one end or the other.
If you rent a stabilized apartment in Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, or anywhere in the five boroughs, June 25 sets your rent for the lease you sign next. The board takes written, audio, and video testimony and on-site sign-ups at its hearings, with the details and deadlines posted on its public hearing registration page, and you can confirm the time and location of the final vote on the board’s official 2026 meetings calendar. The board hears all of it before it votes, so the number is not locked yet.
Featured image: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
