The New York City Rent Guidelines Board approved Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s key campaign promise to “freeze the rent” on Thursday — in a move landlord advocates slammed as “an absolute farce.”
The board passed a rent freeze on both one-year and two-year leases for the Big Apple’s roughly 1 million rent-stabilized units in a 7-1 vote. Arpit Gupta, an appointee of Mamdani’s predecessor Eric Adams, was the one no vote.
It came hours after the public resignation of one of the RGB’s nine members, Christina Smyth, who accused the panel of ignoring its own data during the lengthy process to decide whether to adjust rents — claiming the decision was made “last year on the campaign trail.”
The board “stopped being a fact-finding body” and was rebuilt “to deliver a rent freeze” no matter what, Smyth, one of two landlord advocates on the board, wrote in her scathing resignation letter.
NYC rent freeze vote forges ahead — despite landlord rep’s explosive, last-minute resignation
“Everything else has been theater,” she wrote. “The hearings, the reports, the public comment, the data. None of it was ever going to change the result.”…