The process was not rigged. It was, for once, simply not rigged in the landlord’s favor. Those are not the same thing.
NEW YORK – Hours before the Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 in June to freeze rents on roughly one million stabilized apartments, board member Christina Smyth, appointed to represent landlord interests, resigned in a public statement declaring the board’s process illegitimate. She argued the rent order had effectively been decided on the campaign trail the previous year, and that once Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed six of the nine members in February, the board was, in her words, required to deliver a freeze regardless of what the hearings, public comment, and economic data actually showed. She called the intervening months of testimony and research theater.
Smyth’s underlying factual claim is not really in dispute. Mamdani did campaign explicitly and repeatedly on freezing the rent, he did appoint a majority of the board once in office, and that majority did, in fact, vote for the freeze he had promised. Where her argument collapses is in treating that sequence as uniquely illegitimate, as opposed to simply describing how mayoral appointment power over this specific board has always worked, for every mayor, in every direction, for decades. The previous administration’s appointees voted for annual increases with a consistency that tracked their own patrons’ preferences just as reliably as this board’s composition tracks Mamdani’s. Nobody on the real estate side called that process theater when the outcome ran their way.
The Rent Guidelines Board has never actually been the neutral, purely technical body its formal description suggests. It is, and has always been, a body whose composition determines its output, staffed by mayoral appointees who arrive with the priorities of the administration that selected them. What changed this year is not that the process suddenly became political. What changed is that, for the first time in memory, the political outcome favored tenants rather than owners, and the people who had quietly benefited from the board’s prior lean are now discovering, apparently for the first time, that the process was political all along.
It is worth taking the board’s own economic research seriously here, rather than dismissing it simply because Smyth invoked it. That research does show landlord operating costs for rent-stabilized buildings rising faster than inflation over the past year, a genuinely relevant fact for a board weighing rent adjustments. But the same board’s longer research record has also repeatedly shown landlord net income growing across multiple recent years, even in periods when the board still approved increases on top of that growth. A single year of elevated costs, far short of financial distress for the sector as a whole, is a real data point. It is not, on its own, evidence of a rigged or captured process simply because the board weighed it against tenant hardship and reached a different conclusion than ownership interests preferred.
The city has tried to address landlords’ cost concerns directly, with a forthcoming insurance program aimed at lowering premiums specifically for owners of rent-stabilized buildings, an acknowledgment that these buildings do require real, ongoing capital investment to remain habitable. That is a genuine attempt at balance, not a dismissal of landlords’ operating realities. What it is not is a promise that the board will always split the difference between owner and tenant interests in whatever proportion ownership groups consider fair, a standard no rent board anywhere has ever actually been held to, including under the administrations that housing advocates spent years criticizing for tilting the other way.
Smyth is entitled to resign in protest, and her resignation is a legitimate act of political dissent within a system that, by design, allows board members to disagree and depart. What her resignation statement is not entitled to is treatment as a neutral, disinterested account of a broken process, rather than what it actually is: the objection of an appointee who represented a specific interest group, watched that interest group lose a vote for the first time in years, and called the outcome illegitimate rather than simply calling it a loss.
Tenant advocates who spent years testifying before this same board, often to little visible effect, have earned the right to a bit of frank acknowledgment here as well. The hearings, the data, and the public comment periods Smyth dismissed as theater were, for most of the board’s recent history, exactly that, theater staged around a predetermined outcome that simply ran in the other direction. What tenants are experiencing this year is not the corruption of a previously pure process. It is the first time in a long while that the same process has actually worked for them.
If landlord representatives want the board treated as genuinely deliberative going forward, the remedy is not resigning in protest when a vote goes against them. It is showing up to next year’s hearings with the same data, the same testimony, and the same willingness to actually persuade a board majority that tenants have had to rely on for years, rather than simply declaring the outcome predetermined the moment their own preferred result stops being guaranteed.
For related commentary on institutional power and who gets to define legitimacy, see UK Comedy: A State of the Nation and News Satire Sites, along with further reading at News Parody.
Additional coverage at Satire And Politics.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/