(The Center Square) \u2014\u00a0\u00a0A group of New York City landlords filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the city’s rent control board, claiming its decision to freeze rents was a “sham” because the board was packed with Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s appointees.<\/p>\n
In the lawsuit, filed in state Supreme Court on Staten Island, lawyers for the landlords claim that Mamdani “went to extraordinary lengths” to pack the nine-member New York City Rent Guidelines Board “with loyalists and then spent millions in City funds to fill the board\u2019s hearings with tenant advocates.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mamdani also had City Hall representatives give the board a special briefing on the \u201ctrue cost of living\u201d in New York City, the suit alleges, “compromising its independence and leaving no doubt what he expected of his hand-picked board supermajority.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
“To do the mayor\u2019s bidding, this Board then made a mockery of its statutory mandate, resorting to multiple manipulations of its own data to try to justify this irrational result,” they wrote in the 122-page complaint. “And this all comes amid unchecked inflation and rising costs that struggling landlords will have to bear to survive.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Among the lawyers representing the landlords is Randy Mastro, former mayor Eric Adams’ chief of staff, who has continued criticism of the new mayor since he took office.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“As thousands of property owners continue to struggle with skyrocketing costs, this irrational and illegal decision by the Rent Guidelines Board cannot stand,” Mastro said in a statement.<\/p>\n
In June, the rent board voted 7-1 to set a two-year rent freeze for one-year and two-year leases or subsidized housing. The move, which goes into effect Oct. 1, affects more than 1 million tenants in taxpayer-subsidized apartments across the city. One board member resigned in protest over the rent freeze.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But freezing rents was a key campaign pledge for Mamdani, a democratic socialist who made New York City’s high housing costs and deteriorating conditions in rent-subsidized apartments a key plank of his mayoral bid.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shortly after taking office in January, Mamdani appointed five new members to the rent control board in a sweep aimed at packing it with supporters of his rent freeze plan.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat Mayor Mamdani preordained this outcome and then took affirmative steps to stack the deck is now undeniable,\u201d landlords wrote in Wednesday’s lawsuit.<\/p>\n
The city’s half-century-old rent stabilization law restricts annual rent increases for specific apartments, with any increases set annually by the rent board. It affects roughly 1 million apartments in the city and has survived dozens of legal challenges over the past several decades.<\/p>\n
Critics have described the city’s rent control system as “welfare for the rich” but supporters say it’s a crucial safety net in a city with some of the highest rents in the nation and a lack of affordable housing.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(The Center Square) \u2014\u00a0\u00a0A group of New York City landlords filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the city’s rent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224488,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[3365,9,24,1411,63,134,136,135],"class_list":["post-303486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-economy","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new_york","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303486\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}