With less than two weeks left in office, Mayor Eric Adams made sure to stack the city’s rent board.
Adams announced the appointment of two new members: Lliam Finn, a senior financial advisor with Merrill Lynch, as a public representative; and Sagar Sharma, an attorney with Legal Services NYC’s housing unit, as a tenant representative.
He also reappointed landlord attorney Christina Smyth as an owner representative and Arpit Gupta as a public one.
In a statement, Adams said the appointments “will serve as responsible stewards of our city’s housing stock, using facts and data to reach the right decision for both tenants and property owners.”
The move has been viewed as an attempt to sabotage Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s campaign pledge to freeze rents for stabilized tenants for four years. The city’s Rent Guidelines Board decides what rent increases are permitted on one- and two-year leases, though mayors have influenced their decisions.
“If rents don’t keep up with operating costs, these buildings will soon be in physical decline as well,” Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, said in a statement. “We hope the new RGB members take into account the risk of deterioration and eventual destruction of stabilized housing when they come to a decision next year.”
Tenant groups remained defiant after news of Adams’ appointments.
“We’re getting our rent freeze,” Sumathy Kumar, managing director of the New York State Tenant Bloc, said in a statement. “Over one million New Yorkers just voted for a mayor who will freeze the rent.”
Ridding the nine-member board of potential Adams loyalists isn’t as simple as Mamdani cleaning house. Under the city’s administrative code, a mayor can only remove members of the board before the end of their term with cause, and “not without an opportunity to be heard in person or by counsel, in his or her defense.”
Still, the new mayor can appoint some new members as soon as he takes office, and more in his second year. Mamdani will be able to replace four members (the chair, as well as members representing the public, owners and tenants) when he takes office. The other five, all Adams appointees, could be replaced in 2027.
In other words, if these members stand in the way of a rent freeze, they can only do so for one year.
Some of the other public members have been publicly skeptical of the mayor-elect’s rent freeze promise. In a November Daily News op-ed, public member Alex Schwartz (who was replaced by Finn) called the proposal “misguided.”
Alex Armlovich told the New York Times in October that Mamdani’s rent freeze proposal could scare investors away. Ahead of his 2022 appointment, Gupta wrote that he was skeptical of rent regulation as a concept.
Earlier reports indicated that Adams was considering a close ally, Douglas Elliman agent and reality TV star Eleonora Srugo, for the rent board. Srugo told The Real Deal that she had preliminary conversations with a senior administration official, but had other priorities to consider.
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