Rents for New York’s stabilized apartments are set to rise for the first time in three years after the Rent Guidelines Board approved a 1.25 percent hike for one-year leases and a 2 percent hike for two-year leases.
The decision, reached in a 7-2 vote, applies to leases signed between October 2017 and September 2018.
Tenant advocates criticized the rent hike. “Without any more income, we have to pay more to the landlords who are getting richer and richer off our backs,” Bronx resident Althea York told the New York Daily News.
But a spokesperson for Mayor Bill de Blasio countered that the past four years taken together saw the slowest rent growth in history. “We will never go back to the days when the landlord lobby got big rent hikes regardless of what the data said,” the spokesperson said. [NYDN] — Konrad Putzier