The nine-member Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) voted Tuesday to raise rents by 3.25 percent on one-year leases and by 5 percent on two-year leases, the highest increase for rent-stabilized apartments since 2013.
The number of available apartments for low- and middle- income New Yorkers reached a 30-year low in 2021, according to the results of a vacancy survey used to determine whether rent stabilization laws will remain in place in the five boroughs.
The rate increases are lower than property owners have pushed for, citing rising costs. But tenants and housing advocates who’ve called for a rent freeze say the hike will worsen the city’s eviction crisis.
Attorney Christina Smyth will serve as one of the board’s two landlord representatives, while New York University Stern business school professor Arpit Gupta, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, will serve as one of five public members.
“Although HPD and DOB are responding quickly to 311 complaints and sending out inspectors, there is a very troubling lag time and delay in terms of closure of these complaints,” Councilmember Pierina Sanchez said.
Tenants say they fear the property owners are waging a war of attrition, waiting the renters out until they give up, move on and forfeit the rent-regulated apartments.
The board voted to freeze existing rents for six months before increasing rates for the remaining half of the year, what some members described as a compromise between what tenants and landlords had each been pushing for. The new rules will take effect Oct. 1.
A one-word change in a preliminary document could lead to a court fight over what the 2019 rent law really said.
The board voted to authorize a rent freeze on one-year leases and the first year of two-year leases, with the second year on those leases capped at 1 percent.
In 1945, near the end of the WWII, the city instituted commercial rent control as an emergency wartime measure, authorized by the state. Advocates are calling for a similar response to the COVID-19 crisis.