Rent Guidelines Board member resigns hours before vote on possible rent freeze
Credit: Sebastian Jacobsen on Unsplash
A member of the city’s Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) resigned just hours before the board was set to vote on a possible rent freeze for the roughly two million New Yorkers who live in rent-stabilized apartments. Christina Smyth, a landlord representative on the board who was appointed by former Mayor Eric Adams last year, submitted her resignation Thursday morning ahead of the board’s scheduled 7 p.m. vote, as first reported by Crain’s. Smyth said the RGB has stopped being a “fact-finding body” and instead “starts with an answer” and works backward to justify it, adding that most of the board’s nine members have been appointed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
It is unclear whether Smyth will be replaced. The board will still have a quorum to proceed with Thursday night’s vote, as Crain’s reported.
Freezing rents for the city’s rent-stabilized tenants was a central component of Mamdani’s campaign platform. The board includes two members representing tenants, two representing owners, and five representing the general public. Each year, it bases rent adjustments on several metrics that reveal the current economic conditions for both landlords and tenants.
During Adams’ tenure, rents for rent-stabilized units increased a cumulative 12 percent. Under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, the RGB approved several rent freezes, and rents rose a total of just 6 percent over his eight years in office.
Last December, just two weeks left in his term, Adams appointed and reappointed four members to the RGB in an effort to block then-Mayor-elect Mamdani’s push for a rent freeze. The moves gave Adams’ allies a majority on the board.
However, after three RGB members resigned earlier this year, Mamdani in February appointed six new members to the board, significantly increasing the likelihood of a rent freeze.
In May, that likelihood increased further when the RGB, in a preliminary vote, backed rent adjustments that included no increases on some leases. The board approved adjustments ranging from 0 to 2 percent for one-year leases and 0 to 4 percent for two-year leases.
Smyth said the decision to pursue a rent freeze had already been made through Mamdani’s appointments. She also claimed that questions she raised about methodology, as well as rising costs and falling net income, “went unanswered.”
“This rebuilt board was required to deliver a rent freeze,” she wrote, according to a post on X from NY Daily News reporter Josie Stratman. “Everything since has been theater. The hearings, the reports, the public comment, the data. None of it was ever going to change the result.”
“I know this because I watched it happen from the inside,” Smyth added. “I asked the staff to explain their methodology. I asked how the figures in the operating cost reports were reached. I asked why data showing rising costs and falling net income was not reflected in the board’s direction to its members. Those questions went unanswered.”
She continued, asking Gov. Kathy Hochul to help restore the vacancy bonus, a provision eliminated in 2019 state rent laws that allowed landlords to raise rents on stabilized units when they became vacant. Tenant advocates said it incentivized landlords to harass tenants out of units in hopes of increasing rents, according to The Real Deal.
Smyth’s resignation also raised the possibility of a legal challenge to the board’s decision, arguing that the RGB has gone beyond the limits of the law.
“A board that votes to freeze rents while knowingly disregarding its own evidence of rising costs and falling income is not acting within those limits,” Smyth wrote. “I am not going to lay out the legal argument in a public statement. But the limits are real, and a record built this way will not hold up the way its authors expect.”
Smyth is the founder and owner of Smyth Law PC, a real estate law firm representing multifamily residential building owners, operators, and management companies across Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, as 6sqft previously reported.
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