New York City’s rent freeze fulfills a key campaign promise from Mayor Zohran Mamdani

New York City has passed a rent freeze for roughly one million regulated apartments, delivering on a signature campaign promise for Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The 7-1 vote was handed down by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board on Thursday. The decision will freeze rent increases on one- and two-year leases on rent-stabilised apartments.

“This is a historic victory for New York City tenants,” Mamdani said in a statement provided to Al Jazeera. “This is the relief that working people across our city deserve.”

Rent-stabilised apartments are in buildings built between 1947 and 1974 with more than six units, or through a tax incentive programme which protects tenants from unpredictable annual rent hikes. It, however, only applies to roughly 41 percent of the city’s rental housing stock.

The vote considered issues including taxes, wages and inflation when making the decision.

Mamdani had campaigned on freezing the rent when he ran for mayor last year, one of the key issues that catapulted his candidacy into City Hall to lead the most populous city in the United States.

The vote itself was a point of contention. Only two days before the vote, Christina Smyth, who was appointed by former Mayor Eric Adams and was one of the two landlord voices on the board, resigned and alleged a lack of independence at the agency.

In a letter, Smyth said that the decision to freeze rents was made on the campaign trail. “The rebuilt board was required to deliver a rent freeze,” Smyth said. “Everything since has been theater.”

“It has become a body that starts with an answer and vibe codes its way backward to justify it.”

The mayor appoints members to the board, but is bound to appoint two pro-tenant and two pro-landlord, as well as members from the general public.

The proposed rent freeze was criticised by previous board members, including Alex Schwartz, who served on the board under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who voted to freeze the rent in 2020.

Financial pressures from the rent freeze would limit landlords, especially smaller so-called mom-and-pop owners, from making needed fixes, Schwartz wrote in a recent op-ed in The New York Daily News, where he pointed out that 9 percent of rental-stabilised units are in need of repairs.

The agency voted to freeze rent increases three times under Mayor Bill de Blasio between 2015 and 2021.

City Hall did not answer Al Jazeera’s request for comment on the allegations posed by Smyth.

Board Chair Chantella Mitchell, who is a Mamdani appointee, pushed back on the allegation in a letter, saying they operated with independence.

Critics have long warned that rent-stabilised apartments would lead to higher prices on unregulated apartments, which make up a majority of the city’s rental housing stock.

To counter that, as Mamdani told Al Jazeera in April, his administration is moving to build more housing across the city to introduce more units into the market and thus drive down prices.

“We are looking at every possible tool we have to address the housing crisis,” Mamdani told Al Jazeera at the time.

“In the medium and the long term, we are looking to build far more housing than we have seen in this city recently. That means building housing that is affordable enough to rent and affordable enough to buy,” Mamdani said.

In March, the Mamdani administration launched a new programme to expedite that process and speed up the construction of affordable housing on city-owned properties by cutting red tape. The city created a pool of pre-approved developers that shortened the process by eight months, as well as faster land-use approvals that could speed up construction projects by as much as two years.