Mamdani’s ‘rent freeze’ vow, stacked Rent Guidelines Board invites SCOTUS scrutiny

This week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani stacked the Rent Guidelines Board with appointees who should ensure gets his “rent freeze” — at the risk of having the US Supreme Court toss the rent laws entirely.

“I trust they will consider all the factors facing our city’s rent stabilized tenants and come to an appropriate decision,” the mayor piously told reporters in a bid to suggest he hasn’t predetermined the outcome.

But he can’t undo his months of campaign promises to freeze (regulated) rents, so if his appointees go ahead and “decide” that zero increases are in order, it’ll destroy the ever-thinner fiction that has so far preserved the rent laws.

“The law requires RGB members to evaluate all relevant data and make a decision based on facts — not political ideology,” warns New York Apartment Association CEO Kenny Burgos; if they choose to ignore the facts, “they will be opening up the process to legal scrutiny.”

That is: The statute actually requires board members to consider the increases in landlords’ costs as they decide what increases to allow, and those costs have been soaring to the point that buildings hosting tens of thousands of rent-regulated units are already under water.

Insurance, utilities and other expenses have gone up far faster than inflation, even as the City Council sticks landlords with new costs for broker fees, “de-carbonization” and more — not to mention property taxes that have jumped even without Mamdani’s new proposed hike.

It’s been a decade or more since the board allowed increases anything like what its research staff determined that building costs had risen.

If the board still goes ahead with the freeze (or anything close to it), the mask will be off: It’ll be obvious that city controls rents on a purely political basis.

The Supreme Court has declined to hear several challenges to the rent-stabilization laws in recent years, but Justice Clarence Thomas warned that the issue is an “important and pressing question” that the high court should eventually review in an appropriate case.

In our view, the city plainly crossed the line when Mayor Bill de Blasio’s RGB froze rents, but the Supremes are plainly reluctant to scrutinize these laws.

Mamdani’s in-your-face rent-freeze vows, if realized, may make it impossible for the high court to keep ignoring this obvious injustice.