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.