De Blasio To Rent Guidelines Board: Pass Rent Freeze Quickly

NEW YORK, NY — New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called on the city's Rent Guidelines Board to pass a rent freeze for the roughly 2 million tenants living in rent stabilized housing during his Friday press briefing.

The mayor — who previously promised New Yorkers that he and the state would suspend this year's rent guidelines process — said Friday that a report released by the RGB on Thursday that says landlords' costs to operated rent stabilized housing is "misleading."

"Challenges that landlords are facing right now are real, I'm not belittling them, but they pale in comparison to challenges than tenants are facing. It is abundantly clear — of course the Rent Guidelines Board will hold hearings, go through its processes very quickly and get to a decision — but to me it's abundantly clear we need a rent freeze," de Blasio said Friday.

De Blasio said Friday that the new coronavirus is causing an economic crisis on the scale of the Great Depression. The virus has sickened 141,754 New Yorkers, killing a confirmed 10,290 people with 5,121 probable deaths, according to city data as of Thursday, April 23.

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The Rent Guidelines Board held its first remote meeting and released its annual "price index of operating costs" report on Thursday. The report, which analyzes costs such as building maintenance, taxes, fuel, insurance and utilities estimates that costs for landlords increased 3.7% between April 2019 and March 2020. Two additional remote meetings are scheduled for April 30 and May 5 before a May 7 preliminary vote on guidelines for one- and two-year lease extensions.

The last time the Rent Guidelines Board passed a rent freeze was in 2016, which followed a freeze passed in 2015. In 2017 the Rent Guidelines Board ended the two-year freeze by passing one-year rent increases of 1.25%. In 2018 and 2019, the board has passed one-year rent hikes of 1.5%.

The Rent Guidelines Board generally votes on its final rent guidelines recommendations in June in order to hold meetings across the city. It's unclear whether the timeline will be affected by remote meetings.

When it comes to New York City tenants living in market-rate housing, the city has less power to affect rents. Despite the inability to regulate market rents, de Blasio said Friday that the city will ensure that no New Yorkers are evicted during the coronavirus crisis, saying the city will provide free legal representation against landlords attempting to force tenants out on a permanent or temporary basis.

De Blasio said Friday that state officials should pass policies allowing tenants to use security deposits to pay rent and allowing tenants who cannot afford rents to defer payment until the economy rebounds from the coronavirus crisis, saying "you can't ask people to come up with money they don't have."

"Deposits are stuck in escrow accounts — the tenant can't use them, the landlord can't use them — until someone leaves their apartment," de Blasio said Friday. "It makes no sense given that we're dealing with an absolutely unprecedented crisis. The state needs to act, free up those security deposits, let the tenant use them for rent. That helps the tenant, that helps the landlord, there's no reason not to authorize this right now."

New York housing advocates are organizing rent strikes across the state ahead of May 1. Advocates hope as many as one million New Yorker will participate in the May 1 rent strike to pressure Gov. Andrew Cuomo to cancel rent for the duration of the stay-in-place order — extended recently to May 15 — and through June.

Thus far, Cuomo has put a moratorium on foreclosures and banned landlords from evicting tenants between April and June. On Friday, de Blasio called on Cuomo to extend the eviction freeze until at least 60 days following the relaxation of New York's shutdown measures.

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