The Rent Guidelines Board voted to freeze the rent for the city’s more than 2 million rent-stabilized tenants Thursday night. But the organizers behind the historic vote say their work is far from over.
BY COLE SINANIAN
HARLEM — Cheers, chants, and song broke out in the auditorium of East Harlem’s EL Museo del Barrio Thursday night after the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) voted to approve a rent freeze on the city’s 1 million rent-stabilized apartments in a raucous display of tenant power.
Stabilized renters across the five boroughs — many of whom have faced year-on-year rent hikes despite repairs going unaddressed — lauded the unprecedented 7-1 vote to freeze rent on both two-year and one-year leases starting October 1, which fulfilled one of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s core campaign promises.
Landlords, meanwhile, derided it as rigged in tenants’ favor, with owners’ representative Christina Smyth resigning abruptly just hours before the vote. Though mayors are barred from actively influencing the RGB’s verdict, Mamdani appointees make up six of the board’s nine seats.
The vote — held just days after New York City socialists largely swept the Democratic primaries in a staggering leftward turn — further solidified Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s political sway. It also represented the culmination of years of organizing by a coalition of the city’s most influential left-wing organizations — including groups Mamdani organized with before becoming mayor, like the the NYC Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) and the statewide NYS Tenants Bloc — who seek to shift the balance of power from landlords to tenants.
“Many of the day-one endorsers of the Mayor’s campaign have been the engine of this organizing and this drive,” said NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo in an interview after Thursday’s vote. “This would not have been possible without that broad Left coalition.”
At a preliminary vote in Long Island City in May, the board rejected proposals for a rent reduction — which many of the organizations in attendance Thursday had called for in response to the 12% rent increase over the course of Mayor Eric Adams’ four-year term — but voted 7-1 to consider a rent freeze, with Smyth voting no and Mamdani-appointed owners’ rep Maksim Wynn abstaining.
As board members took their seats onstage Thursday, audience members could be heard shouting “Where’s Christina?” referring to Smyth’s absence. In her resignation statement, Smyth criticized the board — which is supposed to act according to independent research and analysis — as politically biased and set on a rent-freeze regardless of economic findings.
“The Rent Guidelines Board has stopped being a fact-finding body,” Smyth wrote in her statement. “It has become a body that starts with an answer and vibe codes its way backward to justify it,” the statement says.
While board members voted, the organizers and tenants who packed the auditorium Thursday quickly rose to their feet to unfurl banners and break out into chants, shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight! Housing is a human right!” and “Up up with tenant power, down down with real estate!”
Public board member Arpit Gupta voted against the rent freeze, to loud boos from the audience. Wynn, meanwhile, read a lengthy statement that lasted several minutes, before eventually voting in favor of a rent freeze. Although few could hear his comments; the audience broke into a roar of chants and catcalls as soon as he began speaking, drowning him out entirely.
Citing a study by the New York Apartment Association (NYAA) — an advocacy organization that represents landlords — and the NYU Furman Center on older rent-stabilized buildings, Wynn argued that rent hikes on highly distressed buildings would actually increase cost burdens for owners, as renters would be more likely to move or withhold rent. Wynn’s position broke with most landlord organizations, which have argued the opposite: that rent freezes would cause owners to stop paying for repairs and would therefore be worse for tenants.
“Past boards have reasonably assumed that the best way to ensure sustainable operations is to increase legal rents,” Wynn said. “However, the data this board has reviewed suggests that for buildings with income to expense issues, increasing legal rents may, counterintuitively, decrease income.”
“Economic occupancy, or the percentages of owed rent that is actually collected, decreases when tenants are unable or unwilling to pay their rent,” he continued.
The NYAA’s CEO Kenny Burgos, however, seemed to disagree.
“Our message is clear: this freeze will destroy the living conditions for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers,” he wrote in a statement. “This was supported with study after study, including RGB data finding rent needed to increase just to run a building. NYCHA, a shelter, a co-op, or a rent stabilized building cannot exist without funding yet here we are, left to watch housing stability and quality malaise, with no plan to save it.”
Vultures, Zombies, and Socialists
Since the RGB began its annual data-gathering process earlier this year, public hearings at venues across the five boroughs have become battlegrounds, with owners pushing back on what they see as an assault on their livelihoods, while a rising local tenants movement that broadly seeks to de-commodify the housing market has quickly grown into a powerful political force.
Though it’s been largely tenants who have packed the hearings, both small and large landlords have made their presence known as well.
“The preliminary ranges of raises you’re considering are falling far below what we’re seeing our expenses increase at,” said Ann Korchak, whose family has operated a small portfolio of properties since the 1940s, at a Queens hearing last month. “ConEd earlier this year had an 11% increase for electric and 9% for gas, so I just wanted to hammer those expenses down and just ask you to consider that.”
Earlier this month, a landlord advocacy group called Gotham Housing Alliance paid some 50 actors to dress up as zombies and counter-protest outside a RGB hearing in Downtown Brooklyn. And just a few weeks prior, organizers from the immigrant rights/tenant group CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities wore inflatable vulture suits at an RGB hearing in Jamaica, Queens and held signs reading “Please don’t feed the vultures,” in reference to the many rent-stabilized portfolios backed by private equity firms— often referred to as “vulture funds.”
Among tenant groups, meanwhile, differing goals emerged. Some called for a rent freeze, united under the slogan “No increases on all leases,” while others went a step further, calling for total tenant control of the RGB and the installation of a rent rollback — or rent reduction — which has never happened in RGB history. Rent freezes were previously approved in 2015, 2016 and 2020, under Mayor Bill DeBlasio.
Outside the hearing Thursday, a rent-stabilized tenant named Ana who’s lived in her Brooklyn apartment since emigrating from Mexico 19 years ago, explained that her rent’s gone up year after year, nearly doubling since she first moved in. Yet the conditions continue to deteriorate, with lead paint falling from the ceiling in her kitchen while her landlord continues to delay repairs.
“We’re the ones who pay, so we’re the ones who should benefit,” she said in Spanish, “because we don’t earn much money.”
Testifying at the Jamaica hearing earlier this month, a rent-stabilized Queens tenant named Sam wondered why landlords had equal representation to tenants on the board when the city’s tenant population outnumbers that of landlords.
”We need a rent rollback, we need a rent freeze, but more importantly, tenants need to take over the RGB and have a system that works and represents working class New Yorkers,”
Thursday’s vote was set for 7:00pm, but by 5:30 a large crowd of organizers, tenants, and press had already gathered outside El Museo del Barrio, chanting in multiple languages and moving to the music of the Rude Mechanical Orchestra brass band. Some organizers passed out water and half-melted Otter Pops to the people in line to enter the building, which stretched down the block and around E 105th St.
Many of organizations from which the rent freeze campaign emerged were present Thursday, including tenant advocacy groups like NYS Tenant Bloc, the Metropolitan Council on Housing, CASA: Community Action for Safe Apartments, Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) and Churches United for Fair Housing (CUFFH); immigrant-rights organizations CAAAV and Make the Road NY: and political organizations like the NYC-Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the Working Families Party, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), among others.
Met Council on Housing Executive Director Darius Gordon said his organization was taking things step by step and focused on a rent freeze first, but did not rule out the possibility of rent rollback in the future.
“The fact is that we have a mayor that’s listening to us, that’s coming out of the grassroots movement,” Gordon said. “There may be a time when we need to change and pivot, but for right now I think we’re good. If the clock’s not broke, don’t fix it.”
Sumathy Kumar, executive director of NYS Tenant Bloc, characterized Mamdani’s election and rent freeze pledge as an outgrowth of the broader tenants movement, which aims to eventually seize power from landlords.
“We decided to look towards a longer horizon two years ago and say, ‘let’s elect a mayor who we know is going to center tenants,’” Kumar said.
“The point is for tenants, who are the ones who pay rent every month — we should be able to control the housing market,” Kumar continued. “Right now, it’s controlled by real estate for profit, and our job is to wrest control of the housing market and put it into the hands of the tenant.
Andre Easton, a teacher and organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation who’s seeking to unseat US Representative Ritchie Torres in the November general election, cast the rent freeze vote and the tenant movement behind it as part of an even broader struggle for total working-class control of the economy.
“We believe that the rent guidelines board should be under the full control of the tenants and the workers in the city,” Easton said. “We should be able to determine and control what our rents are.”
“With the recent election that we saw in the primaries, where socialist candidates had a resurgence of energy and popularity, those policies that put the power in the hands of the working class— that’s what we need,” Easton continued. “We need to expand that and build it to the point where we have total control of the political and economic forces in our society.”
The vote concluded at around 7:30, after which elated crowds spilled from the auditorium into the sidewalk and street out front. Triumphant tenants shouted the phrase “The tenants, united, will never be defeated!” in both Spanish and English and gathered in a circle around a series of speakers.
Among them was New York State Assemblymember, longtime Brooklyn tenant organizer, and Democratic Socialist Marcela Mitaynes, who addressed the crowd while standing next to fellow DSA tenant organizer and State Assemblymember-elect Samantha Kattan.
“Us tenants have power,” Mitaynes said in Spanish. “Today, the rent was frozen, but tomorrow it’s important that you know this power is just the start. We are here together, and we have a lot of work to do.”
