Mamdani Can Secure Rent Guidelines Board Majority

In the final hours of the Adams administration, the incoming mayor was handed a win.

One of Mayor Eric Adams’ new appointees to the Rent Guidelines Board, Lliam Finn, decided against serving, leaving a vacancy for Zohran Mamdani to fill, The Real Deal was first to report.

Before leaving office, Adams tried to replace him with Christie Peale, head of the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, a nonprofit focused on affordable homeownership. Though Peale appeared briefly on the board’s website over the weekend, she also turned down the role.

“It was an honor to be selected to serve in a role of vital importance to so many New Yorkers, however, I decided it was not appropriate for my nomination to the Rent Guidelines Board to move forward at this time,” she said in a statement.

The New York Daily News first reported that Peale was up for Finn’s seat.

Last month Adams announced the appointment of two new members to the board: Finn, as a public representative, and Sagar Sharma, an attorney with Legal Services NYC’s housing unit, as a tenant representative. It’s not clear when Finn rejected Adams’ offer, but he did not go through the process of getting approval from his employer, Merrill Lynch, to serve on the board.

Adams also reappointed landlord attorney Christina Smyth as an owner representative and Arpit Gupta as a public one. A representative for Mamdani didn’t return requests seeking comment.

Those appointments meant that in Mamdani’s first year as mayor, a majority of the board’s members would be Adams appointees. The move was viewed as an attempt to prevent

Mamdani’s campaign pledge to freeze rents for stabilized tenants for four years.

Finn’s departure and Peale’s rejection mean that Mamdani can replace as many as five members (including the chair) whenever he chooses, ensuring that his appointees make up a majority of the nine-person board. Next year, he can replace the four remaining members.

Appointing a majority of the members doesn’t guarantee a rent freeze. The board is supposed to be an independent body, though mayors have historically influenced its decisions.

The final day of the Adams administration proved to be an eventful one. Adams vetoed 19 bills, including the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, or COPA. He also tried to secure a last-minute deal with developers to drop their lawsuit related to their planned development at the Elizabeth Street Garden, but they rejected the administration’s offer.

Meanwhile, Mamdani’s first actions as mayor included intervening in a major bankruptcy case that will decide the fate of Pinnacle’s rent-stabilized portfolio, relaunching the Office to Protect Tenants and announcing “Rental Ripoff” hearings for tenants to sound off on bad landlords.