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On Thursday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani's Rent Guidelines Board convened for the first time, and unveiled some stats that arrived at a not-very-surprising conclusion: Landlords have been doing pretty well! But will it lead to a rent freeze for the city's 2 million tenants who live in rent-stabilized housing?
If you haven't had the pleasure of participating, the rent adjustment process consists of a series of meetings every spring, wherein data relating to landlords and tenants is presented, along with expert testimony from housing policy analysts, public officials, real estate industry flacks, and landlord and tenant representatives. Then, the board holds at least one hearing—at which members of the public can speak their minds—before the members hold two votes, the preliminary and the final, to arrive at the official rent adjustment for rent-stabilized tenants for the next year. The whole thing is both very wonky and very intense.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani does a decent job of explaining the process in a video he just released, though there are three words he notably shies away from: "Freeze the rent."
While reviving the de Blasio-era rent freeze was one of his campaign's main rallying cries—and since taking office he has appointed six members of the RGB who will, in theory, embrace his policy proposals—he is still the mayor, and has to at least appear neutral. ("You probably know how I feel about what should happen to the rent," Mamdani says in the video.)
At Thursday's meeting, the RGB released its 2026 Income and Expense Study, which is the primary indicator that the board uses for landlord financial health. The report shows that net operating income (NOI) for landlords who own buildings with 11 or more units, including some rent-stabilized ones, increased 6.2 percent citywide in 2024—the third year in a row that it did so.