It’s one of the city’s most familiar political battles.

Every year, tenants and landlords pack Rent Guidelines Board hearings, each arguing they can’t afford the other side’s solution.

What You Need To Know

  • The Rent Guidelines Board is considering anything from a rent freeze to a 2% increase on one-year leases and up to a 4% increase on two-year leases

  • Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on a rent freeze and appointed a majority of the board’s nine members. Many tenants say now is the time to deliver

  • The board will make its final decision on June 15. It will impact leases starting on or after Oct. 1

On Thursday, the board stopped in Brooklyn.

“I want to wake up in my apartment feeling a little stressless,” tenant Jaren Brown said.

For Brown, rent already takes up more than half of her paycheck.

“Where’s that money going? I’m not seeing it in my building,” Brown said.

She’s among the roughly 2.5 million New Yorkers living in rent-stabilized apartments who are pushing for a rent freeze. With Mayor Zohran Mamdani having campaigned on a rent freeze and appointing a majority of the board’s nine members, many tenants say now is the time to deliver.

“They are forgetting the elderly. Everybody, up, up, up, the money, and things like that, but what happens to the people whose paychecks don’t go up?” Crystal Marshall, a tenant, said.

The board is considering anything from a rent freeze to a 2% increase on one-year leases and up to a 4% increase on two-year leases for the city’s one million rent-stabilized apartments. But landlords say a freeze would leave them even further behind.

“We have property taxes that are going up, we have utilities that are going up, we have insurance bills that are going up,” landlord Sophia Hepheastau said.

Hepheastau owns three buildings with 60 apartments.

“We’re consistently in the red and have been for years, and it’s only gotten worse since COVID,” Hepheastau said.

Advocates for small property owners echoed that message, arguing rent increases haven’t kept pace with the cost of maintaining older buildings.

“It’s not nearly enough to keep up housing that’s 100 plus years old,” Ann Korchack, board member of Small Property Owners of New York, said.

Now, both sides wait for the board’s final decision for an outcome that could determine what they pay or collect starting this fall.

The board will make its final decision on June 15. It will impact leases starting on or after Oct. 1.