This piece is co-published with the New York City Policy Forum, a new research and publishing network dedicated to governance in New York City.
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Tomorrow, the New York City Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) will make its preliminary determination of next year’s rent increase for nearly 2.5 million tenants living in rent-stabilized apartments. Weeks of public hearings across four of the five boroughs will follow. Then, on June 25 the RGB’s nine members—six appointed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani—will hold the final vote on whether to freeze the rent.
Since Mamdani’s election, commentators have scrutinized the legal and economic basis for a zero-percent increase. They have also analyzed the potential impacts of a rent freeze, from decreased maintenance in the rent-stabilized housing stock to the potential ramifications of landlords defaulting on their mortgage debts. What’s missing from this conversation, however, is an appreciation of how important the RGB’s public hearings are for tenant organizing, and how important such organizing is for preparing the tenant movement to defend against the real estate industry’s inevitable backlash.
Each year, for more than five decades, thousands of tenants have testified in favor of a rent freeze and even rent rollbacks. Seen from this perspective, the RGB’s public hearings are not just a forum for tenants to exercise influence or make themselves heard. They provide a predictable, recurring platform for sectoral mobilization: for tenants to unite with tenants from outside their own buildings, develop leadership capacity, and join in broader political fights.
Does Public Testimony Matter?
Does public testimony actually shape the RGB’s final vote? Writing during the DeBlasio administration, K. Sabeel Rahman—who had previously served on the Board and voted in favor of the rent freeze—offered two reasons for skepticism.
First, there is the composition of the Board. The RGB’s nine-member board includes two members representative of tenants, two members representative of owners, and five “public” members, “each of whom shall have had at least five years experience in either finance, economics or housing.” As Rahman observes, the tenants here are significantly outnumbered, and the five “public members,” on their own, constitute a voting majority. Given this, it is unsurprising that “the RGB has voted largely in the spirit of the Mayoral administration.” Moreover, though the Board includes tenant representatives via its tripartite structure, there is no legal requirement that the tenants, who are appointed by the mayor, be chosen by any element of the organized tenant movement. (It is thus better characterized as what César F. Rosado Marzán has dubbed a quasi-tripartite board).
Second, many of the issues raised by tenants in these hearings—for example, landlord harassment, forced evictions, ignored repairs, and overarching concerns about gentrification—are “far outside the RGB’s relatively narrow rate-setting role,” Rahman writes. The RGB lacks any enforcement or co-enforcement power over rent overcharges, conditions, or individualized landlord applications for rent increases based on capital improvements or hardships. As Rahman concludes, “these tenants engage the RGB as a forum to exercise influence and make themselves heard; yet the RGB lacks the authority to address either individualized grievances or systemic policy challenges.”
These limitations, while accurate and important, only tell half the story. This skeptical perspective cannot explain why, year after year—whether under the hostile Bloomberg and Adams administrations, or the more receptive DeBlasio and Mamdani administrations—tenants return to the RGB’s public hearings and make demands that go beyond what any administration has been willing to offer.
Outside the Hearings
To understand why tenants continue to return to the RGB’s public hearings each year, it’s necessary to step outside of those hearings and see where they fit in New York City’s broader organizing infrastructure.
For decades, organizers from community-based nonprofits and autonomous tenant unions alike have knocked on New Yorkers’ doors and organized tenant associations within rent-stabilized buildings. In addition to fighting landlords over conditions, rents, and evictions in specific buildings, these tenant organizers develop tenants as leaders to participate in larger fights. Many of these groups host monthly community meetings with leaders from different buildings, offering tenants the chance to share strategies, learn their rights, and make decisions about policy demands. From these spaces, organized tenants emerge to fight rezonings, demand housing court reforms, win increased tenant protections, and testify at the RGB.
These tenants enjoy some of the strongest renter protections in the country. In addition to rents set by the RGB, these rent-stabilized tenants enjoy the right to renew their lease and access to courts where they can file summary lawsuits to win repairs. And yet, New York City’s rent-stabilized tenants struggle with two of the same issues that organizers developing building-based tenant associations deal with nationwide: demobilization after victory and scaling participation beyond a single building.
Consider, first, the challenge of demobilization. If the infrastructure of tenant organizing relies on the building-based tenant association as the source of its base, those tenants need to stay engaged long-term. If you think of workers organizing a union, once they win recognition, the process of contract bargaining and expiration set up a renewal cycle, creating natural moments to build towards. However, there is no obvious corollary in tenant organizing. While some tenant organizers are beginning to select organizing targets based on a strategic analysis of the strength of buildings’ finances, much organizing occurs in buildings where tenants are highly agitated to take immediate action (what labor organizers call hot shops). In New York City’s rent-stabilized housing, this often occurs when deferred maintenance triggers an emergency or when a landlord applies for large rent increases (through, for instance, major capital improvement rent increases). Tenants organize, fight, and sometimes win. But absent the equivalent of a future expiring collective bargaining agreement, victory without repetition of organizing cycles can lead to demobilization.
The second issue is one of scale. The NYU Furman Center estimates that the median building with 90 percent or more rent-stabilized apartments contains just 16 units, and, as I have explained elsewhere, landlords are increasingly using limited liability companies to constrain tenants’ ability to threaten meaningful financial harm, such as through a rent strike, across multiple buildings. As a result, tenants, organizers, and lawyers must spend tremendous amounts of energy fighting for material improvements a single property at a time. While tenant organizers attempt to unite tenants across building-based tenant associations at neighborhood-level meetings, it can be difficult to inspire tenants concerned with immediate improvement in their own apartments to join a coalition to advance a bill before City Council or get on a bus to the State Legislature in Albany to advocate for legislative reforms. Strong municipal and statewide policies can have a massive impact, though they rarely improve a tenant’s bottom line in the short-term.
This is where the RGB serves as an important organizing foothold. For nearly thirty years, tenant organizers working within the Rent Justice Coalition (and in the last year, with both the Rent Justice Coalition and the newly formed Tenant Bloc), have used this local administrative board as a mechanism to unite tenants across boroughs, a process I have described elsewhere as sectoral mobilization.
The Board’s repeated public hearings are an administrative apparatus that allow tenants to connect on an issue—namely rent—outside of their own building while directly advocating to benefit their own immediate, material conditions. The annual repetition of the hearings presents an opportunity to mobilize active tenant association members and reinvigorate the participation of those who have fallen off. Where building-based tenant organizing can be incredibly time intensive and even isolating and the impact of legislative advocacy can feel too diffuse, the borough-wide public hearings create an opportunity to mobilize at scale with a short time commitment and a concrete outcome.
Standing in the Seats
As noted above, tenant testimonials at the public hearings often include concerns beyond rent setting, such as landlord harassment and ignored repairs, over which the RGB has no control or enforcement power. Yet rather than being futile appeals to a body unable to address the underlying problems, these testimonies can help develop tenants’ leadership capacity and further politicize them in response to the RGB’s decisions.
For tenants who fear speaking publicly on an issue, testifying offers an opportunity to do so with a supportive crowd at their back. For tenants who fear their landlord’s reaction to contacting code enforcement or demanding a meeting, these hearings create an opportunity to share their story with an audience less likely to retaliate. In the process of developing their testimony, tenants may develop what Marshall Ganz has called a public narrative, motivating others to join them and take action for a shared purpose. The open hearings also create a space to identify and connect with unaffiliated tenants who felt moved to speak. These are all experiences and skills that tenants can take back with them to their buildings or to policy campaigns.
Finally, the hearings are politicizing. A tenant testifying for the first time is not standing alone—they have other tenants standing behind them in matching t-shirts to represent their common organization and common experience. They may witness industry representatives, appearing on behalf of landlords who themselves refuse to meet with their tenants, describe the impact of rent-stabilization on their clients’ multimillion dollar portfolios, an experience that can be profoundly agitational. And last, they watch a local administrative board, after having heard their stories, raise their rents yet again. Experienced in isolation, this could have a demoralizing effect. But, experienced alongside groups of mobilized tenants prepared to harness the resulting frustration, these public hearings can become a springboard for increased participation.
Rent Rollbacks and Real Estate Backlash
If the RGB has become a part of the infrastructure of New York City tenant organizing, what does it mean for tenant organizers to mobilize tenants when Mayor Mamdani has pledged a rent freeze? How might tenants use the RGB to build momentum for future housing fights?
To answer these questions, we can look back to the DeBlasio-era RGB, which approved rent freezes in 2015, 2016, and 2020. While the rent freeze in 2015 was novel, that year and subsequent years, the Rent Justice Coalition and its affiliated members organized tenants to demand a rent rollback. Organizing in the context of a more politically favorable administration, tenant organizers drove participation demanding what tenants actually needed, even if it was at the edge of what felt possible.
One important realization for tenants concerned the limits of the RGB to address their affordability needs. While the RGB controlled their annual rent increases, it was the State Legislature and the Governor who had, over the previous decades, created a series of loopholes in the state’s rent stabilization laws that allowed for massive rent increases and the deregulation of apartments. Using building-based tenant associations and RGB mobilizations (along with other organizing fights) as a catalyst, the tenant movement organized across Rochester, Buffalo, Ithaca, Albany, and the Hudson Valley. In 2019, the broad political support developed through this organizing helped close those loopholes and create opportunities to opt into rent stabilization statewide.
It is crucial that the RGB remain a site where tenants can organize, at scale, to win material changes in their own homes. Already, rather than take a rent freeze for granted based on Mamdani’s campaign pledge, tenants are mobilizing to demand a rent rollback. Such a rollback is not unprecedented in New York State, with the Kingston RGB approving at 15% reduction in rents in 2022, a reduction upheld by the New York Court of Appeals last year. To ensure that tenants do not see the RGB as a rubber stamp of the administration’s campaign pledge, mobilized tenants should be empowered to demand what they need, whether that’s a rent freeze or a rent rollback.
This is particularly important because the real estate industry is already preparing for battle. In an era where rent freeze is the demand, real estate lobbyists are asking the RGB to make novel distinctions between different classes of rent-stabilized buildings. After June, we can also expect the backlash to be fierce, and for the contest to move beyond the RGB. The tenant movement should expect legal challenges, media blitzes blaming long-looming landlord financial distress on the rent freeze, and vacant apartments held off the market as bargaining chips for legislative negotiations in Albany. Even with a “rent freeze” mayor, tenants cannot afford to take the ultimate outcome for granted, either this year or over the remaining three years of Mamdani’s first term. By turning out to the RGB’s hearings, tenants are not just making their voices heard before a local administrative board stacked with mayoral appointees. They’re engaging in a decades-long mobilization that unites them with fellow tenants, develops their leadership capacity, and prepares them for the next fight on the horizon.
