The city’s Rent Guidelines Board is expected to take a preliminary vote early next week on whether almost 1 million rent-regulated tenants should face a rent hike this year.
If the board were to vote in favor of a rent increase for roughly 33 percent of the rent-regulated housing units in the city, the issue would be the subject of various public hearings. The board would then vote again in late May. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who appointed six members of the nine-member board, supports making rent-regulated tenants entirely exempt from a rent increase for the rest of the 2014. Meanwhile, landlord operating costs climbed 5.7 percent in the year that ended in late March, as a result of city taxes and heating and insurance costs.
“The administration plans to undertake an ambitious agenda that confronts the affordability crisis facing the city’s tenants,” Wiley Norvell, spokesperson for de Blasio, told the Wall Street Journal. “The board’s work is only now just beginning and it has a lot more data to review and stakeholders to hear from before it considers its approach for the coming year.”
Rachel Godsil was appointed the new chair of the board last month, as previously reported. [WSJ] — Mark Maurer