It’s an annual — and stressful — summer rite of passage, up there with lugging your box AC out of storage and scraping off the pigeon poop, or watching the Mets rack up losses on their way to another disappointing season.
On Wednesday evening, the Rent Guidelines Board will decide on how much rents will increase for tenants in roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments next year.
The nine-member panel’s vote on the rent increase will take place at Hunter College, and follows months of financial analysis and impassioned testimony at public hearings from tenants and landlords.
The Rent Guidelines Board decided last month on the likely contours of the increase when they voted to consider a rent hike between 2% and 5% on new one-year leases or 4% to 7% increases on two-year leases. If history is any indication, the final vote will likely fall within those ranges.
The board once again faces pressure from tenants to limit the increase, or freeze rents altogether amid high inflation and an unstable economic recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I see the price going to the grocery,” said East Flatbush resident Laura Tross, who has a fixed income and lives in a rent-stabilized apartment with her granddaughter. “I don’t know if I could afford the prices of food plus the percentage of rent that they want.”
Tross was one of hundreds of Brooklyn tenants who showed up to demand a rent freeze at the board’s final public hearing last week.
Landlords, on the other hand, are pushing for a significant increase to keep up with their own rising costs, including the price of property insurance, fuel and materials for repairs.
“This is simple economics. If you continue to defund these buildings they will deteriorate,” said Jay Martin, executive director of the rent-stabilized landlord group Community Housing Improvement Program. “That is not good for renters, their housing providers or New York City.”
But Tim Collins, a housing attorney who served as the Rent…
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