The Rent Guidelines Board is pushing back after City Council members and tenant advocates derailed a preliminary vote on rent hikes Tuesday evening by taking over the stage to demand that rents be rolled back.
In a letter to Mayor Eric Adams and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams Wednesday, board chair Nestor Davidson expressed “strong concerns” about “the aggressive events of yesterday evening.”
The crowd that “stormed the stage” to protest a rent increase “went beyond the bounds of public participation and created a chaotic environment that raised serious concerns for me about public safety,” Davidson wrote.
Davidson did not name the City Council members involved. But a video of the hearing shows members Tiffany Cabán, Sandy Nurse, Alexa Avilés, Shahana Hanif and Chi Ossé among the group of protesters that crashed the vote.
Just as Christina Smyth, one of the board’s landlord representatives, began speaking about her proposal for rent increases, several people took to the small stage. They stood in front of the table, pumping their fists and chanting “rent rollback,” the video shows.
The board then took a small break while the Council members addressed the crowd.
When the hearing resumed, the two-dozen interlopers onstage began marching around the board’s table, first repeating “rent rollback,” and then shifting to chants of “shame on you.”
At one point, as landlord representative Robert Ehrlich was speaking, someone on stage procured a microphone from the audience and said, “If you are broke, have the landlords open the books up.”
Tensions at rent board votes have hit a fever pitch in recent years as landlords claim their rent-restricted buildings will sink without larger rent increases and tenant advocates stress that rent-burdened tenants can’t afford to pay any more.
Landlords’ net operating income fell 9.1 percent from 2020 to 2021, the heaviest decline since the board began tracking the metric in 1990, a recent rent board report showed.
Using its own data, the board recently determined that an 8 percent hike for one-year leases was necessary to keep landlords’ operating income consistent.
Board members on Tuesday approved a 2 to 5 percent rent hike for one-year leases, a middle-ground choice that disappointed both sides of the debate.
“As for the vote, let’s be clear: It does not come close to covering the rising costs in rent-stabilized buildings,” said Jay Martin, executive director of the Community Housing Improvement Program, a landlord group, in a statement.
“Even the highest end of these ranges will not put a penny in rent-stabilized building owners’ pockets,” Martin said.
The board chair, in his letter, stopped short of encouraging disciplinary action for City Council members who disrupted the hearing Tuesday.
Rather, he expressed “hope that Administration and City Council leadership will work with the Council Members involved in this disruption to help ensure that the Board, its staff, and members of the public can feel safe at future public meetings and hearings.”
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office said the administration takes Davidson’s “safety concerns extremely seriously, and we appreciate that he shared them with the mayor today.”
“No one should feel threatened while doing their job, and we will ensure the volunteers on the Rent Guidelines Board are able to conduct their important work safely,” the spokesperson added in a statement.
The board’s final vote is set for June 21.
This article has been updated to include a comment from the mayor’s office.
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