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A lawsuit alleges New York City's Rent Guidelines Board broke the law by arbitrarily predetermining the outcome.
Perhaps more than anything else, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been associated with his now-famous "freeze the rent" pledge for rent-stabilized units in the Big Apple. Throughout his campaign, Mamdani made bold promises, such as claiming: "As mayor, I'll freeze the rent every year I'm in office. That's a guarantee."
In June of this year, some six months after Mamdani took office, the mayor's promised rent freeze finally came to fruition. But while Mamdani has already taken a victory lap for his accomplishment, the celebration may have been premature. In July, a group of landlords launched a lawsuit challenging the rent freeze, arguing it was a prejudged and arbitrary outcome from the independent regulatory body—the Rent Guidelines Board—which is legally required to consider a set of factors when deciding NYC rent increases.
To understand the lawsuit, one first has to understand the backdrop of how NYC's rent-stabilized market works. Despite Mamdani's campaign bluster, the ultimate decision over whether to freeze—or increase—rents on stabilized units in NYC belongs to the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB). This nine-member panel traditionally includes two members representing landlord interests, two members representing tenant interests, and five "public members" who are ostensibly supposed to be neutral.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Reason
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Jarrett Dieterle is a legal policy fellow at Manhattan Institute, where his work focuses on labor law, administrative law, and urban policy.