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Another Year, Another Rent Hike: It’s Time to Reform the Rent Guidelines Board


The Rent Guidelines Board in action (photo: William Alatriste/NYC Council Media Unit)


Last week, the New York City Rent Guidelines Board raised rents by 3% for one-year leases and roughly 4.5% for two-year leases for 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. Meanwhile, the Nassau County, Westchester County, Rockland County, and Kingston Rent Guidelines Boards approved either rent freezes or much smaller increases. What gives?

Part of the answer is that there are unique features to the New York City Rent Guidelines Board structure that need to be rethought.

Every April through June, the New York City Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) spends three months deciding if, and by how much, rents will go up for 2 million New Yorkers. This decision-making process is punctuated by the publication of eight (dry, data-driven) reports and at least four (boisterous) public hearings. 

These three months uniquely bring the intricacy of government processes to the foreground. There aren’t many institutions like the RGB, which makes major dollars-and-sense deliberations in public each year. And while RGB members and staff work hard to ensure the process is fair, the Board is in dire need of reform.

First, the RGB carries an air of impartiality, with its mission ostensibly to “consider research from staff, and testimony of owners, tenants, advocacy groups and industry experts” to arrive at its decisions. Unfortunately, it is naïve to pretend that any body with decision-making power over real estate profits – and particularly one whose members are selected by a single politician – could function without political influence.

New York City’s RGB is structurally beholden to the mayor, who appoints all nine members. Historical rent adjustments have tracked political allegiances of New York City’s mayors over time. Consider, for example, the cases of the RGB under Mayors Bloomberg and de Blasio: under Bloomberg, the average rent increase for a one-year lease was about 4%; under de Blasio, it was less than 1%.

Second, the Rent Guidelines Board’s staff, advocates (like us at the Community Service Society), and many others generate a ton of data each spring, all to help the Board to make a “fair” call about rent adjustments. But a ton of data doesn’t necessarily yield a better-informed decision, especially when the data is out of date or of questionable provenance. RGB staff are forced to rely on two- to three-year-old data, because of reporting lags.

Last year, the Board agreed to unreasonably high rent hikes, justified by housing market numbers from 2020, underscoring how stale data can lead to questionable decision-making. Further, some of the Board’s most crucial numbers rely on landlord self-reporting. When the Board last audited these filings, in 1992, they found that landlords were inflating their data by 8%

Most crucially, the data analyzed by the Board generally skews toward maintaining landlords’ profits. While the RGB’s staff does publish the latest income, employment, and human services data in an annual Income and Affordability Study, that data only has an impressionistic impact on the Board's deliberations. Early in the process, the RGB publishes what are called “commensurate rent adjustment formulas,” based in part on a “price index of operating costs” methodology that no other Rent Guidelines Board in the state uses. This shows what kind of increases are necessary to keep landlords’ net operating income steady compared to the previous year. These formulas set the ground for the conversation, without consideration for tenant conditions. In fact, there is not a comparable, easy to quote, tenant number for Board members, the public, and the press to latch onto.

And while tenant demonstrations at the public RGB hearings generally make the news, how much of an impact do tenants’ testimonies and protests really have on how much their rents will ultimately increase? The public hearings are always scheduled after the Board takes a preliminary vote, where they set the parameters for what the annual rent hikes may be. This year, in early May, the RGB approved a maximum rent increase of between 2% and 5% on one-year leases and 4% and 7% on two-year leases. After they set the parameters for a rent increase, they heard from hundreds of tenants about why the rent shouldn’t rise at all.

Most needed improvements to the New York City RGB require state action. Next year, Albany lawmakers should:

-Institute a measure of checks and balances, by giving the City Council confirmation powers over RGB appointments. The RGB’s set-up is fairly unique. Other Rent Guidelines Boards in other parts of the state and other politically-appointed boards in New York City do not concentrate appointment and oversight power with one individual in the same way.

-Move the RGB process – and therefore also the effective date for rent adjustments – to the fall, when more recent NYC Department of Finance data is available for the Board Staff to analyze.

Meanwhile, the NYC RGB staff should:

-Modernize its commensurate adjustment formulas and develop a comparable tenant formula.

-Regularly audit data provided by landlords and institute tougher penalties for falsifying data or failing to register apartments.

We cannot keep trying the same thing and expecting different results. If the RGB cycle remains the same next year, we will go through the same motions but will face all the same structural challenges. Yes, the data will be different; there may even be some new faces on the Board. But does anyone truly believe the outcome will be dramatically different, as long as all the other conditions remain the same? If lawmakers want a better outcome, they must change the process. 

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Oksana Mironova and Samuel Stein are Senior Policy Analysts at the Community Service Society. On Twitter @OksanaMironov & @CSSNYOrg.

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Follow Through, Mayor Adams: Our Children and All Our Neighbors Deserve Safety on McGuinness Boulevard


Lola Pavitt, a graduating fifth-grader at PS110 (photo: ZED Images)


On May 17, 2021, Matthew Jensen greeted my son at the entry to PS110 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and took his temperature, as he did every day during covid. The following afternoon, word started spreading at the playground that Mr. Jensen had died. Kids were saying that this was impossible: he’d just been in their classroom cracking jokes and doing his Donald Duck impersonation the day before. I had the wretched task of explaining to my children that it was true. That their teacher had been violently killed by a speeding car a block from their bedroom while they slept. 

In the days following the crash a pattern of conversation emerged among our community; shock, grief, and then questioning: “Why is McGuinness Boulevard so dangerous? Why is our community tolerating it?” These questions became the foundation of the Make McGuinness Safe coalition. In response to Mr. Jensen’s death — the third death on the boulevard in eight years — we held a rally to raise awareness and hold the City to account. Within weeks, the de Blasio administration announced an allocation of $39 million for a comprehensive redesign of McGuinness Boulevard.

I am a mother, an educator, an architect, a small-business owner, and now a community organizer. I am hardly the first mother to advocate for safety on McGuinness. The archives of the Greenpoint Weekly Star document decades of resistance to the repercussions of the widening of Oakland Street (later renamed McGuinness Boulevard). According to one article from October 1956, “residents drew up a 200-name petition. . .blasting the route as an extreme hazard and a ‘speedway’ for all types of motor vehicles. . .A survey at the time revealed that if no action was taken by the proper authorities, a human roadblock by mothers and housewives might be formed.”

The first person to die on the street was a three-year-old boy named Jimmy Bataglia. Our current fight for a safer McGuinness Boulevard fits firmly within its treacherous history. Matt’s death was our breaking point. 

For two long years, committed volunteers have spent hundreds of hours canvassing for Make McGuinness Safe petition signatures at local farmer’s markets. We’ve held teach-ins and given presentations at our Community Board. We’ve gained the support of 100 local businesses and every single elected official representing Greenpoint at the city, state, and federal levels. Our coalition has evolved to incorporate what we’ve learned from thousands of conversations with neighbors, families, and local businesses. 

Universally, what people want to see is a slower, safer, local street. We have worked with traffic engineers, transportation advocates, and urban planners to establish a design that will achieve this. The foundation of this plan rests on the removal of two automobile travel lanes, transforming this 4-lane highway into a 2-lane local street. The space gained will be reallocated to parking-protected bike lanes, filling a critical gap in the bike lane network. 

The knee-jerk reaction to the removal of two vehicle lanes is often, “Where will the traffic go?” But the facts are with us. According to DOT traffic studies, 30-50% of the vehicles on McGuinness Boulevard are using the road exactly as Robert Moses intended: as a shortcut between the BQE and the LIE, even though it only shaves about 90 seconds of travel time. These are not local drivers, local deliveries, or local pickups. We’ve explained to our neighbors that reducing the capacity of the road will reduce the number of vehicles cutting through the neighborhood. Nearly anyone who is willing to listen signs on, and conversation by conversation we’ve amassed over 5,600 supporters.

You can imagine the celebration that followed DOT’s public presentation in May of a design for McGuinness that largely reflects our community plan, with an implementation date of summer 2023. Fueled by a most unthinkable tragedy, we secured the funding, support, and approval of a plan that will make Greenpoint safer for generations to come.

Yet now, at the eleventh hour, despite a comprehensive engagement process and DOT’s multiple traffic studies, it seems that powerful special interests are trying to undermine the McGuinness Boulevard plan. 

The grassroots, deep, local passion that fuels the Make McGuinness Safe coalition cannot be swayed. We believe in facts. We believe in data. And we believe in Mayor Adams. We believe in his record as a champion of safer streets. We believe that he will be the Mayor who will help us take back McGuinness after years of death, danger, tragedy, and trauma. And when we do this, together, we will never know the names of all the lives that have been saved. 

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Bronwyn Breitner is a parent and Coordinator for Make McGuinness Safe. On Twitter @mcguinness_safe.

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A Courageous Step to Unlock the Power of Reading for New York City Kids


NYC Reads! (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


I spent most of my kindergarten year envious of Gina and Adam. These classmates had found the holy grail of learning: they could read.

Our teacher continually praised them for their intelligence — and dismissed mine. I remember thinking, “If someone would just show me how, I could read, too.”

Thankfully, my first-grade teacher helped me unlock the magic code by explaining that letters stood for sounds that then blended together into words.

Year after year, hundreds of thousands of students in our city’s public schools experience the same frustration I felt decades ago in kindergarten. They want to learn how to read. But many do not get the instruction they need.

Fewer than half of New York City kids are proficient readers, and the percentage dips as low as one in five in some schools. But we finally have a mayor, Eric Adams, and a city schools chancellor, David Banks, with the courage to acknowledge that the city’s reading instruction has been failing for decades. Even better, they plan to fix it. Mayor Adams and Chancellor Banks recently announced they will require all but a handful of schools to use one of three reading curricula that the Department of Education has vetted — all of which include phonics instruction.

Banks is doing what others have been afraid to do, and the city’s young people will benefit, hopefully for decades to come.

That said, although phonics instruction is necessary to teach reading, it alone is not sufficient to develop proficient and engaged readers. 

A decade ago, The New York Community Trust began distributing approximately $35 million from Brooke Astor’s estate to improve reading instruction in early grades. Our investments demonstrated that the city’s teachers can provide excellent reading instruction and that students who are often wrongly written off as incapable can become proficient readers. 

We funded 18 city nonprofits that worked with teachers to improve reading instruction in more than 200 schools and early childhood centers across all five boroughs. An extensive external evaluation by Metis Associates found that, on average, the portion of students reading on grade level in participating schools increased 15 percentage points.

Beyond phonics instruction, several factors contributed to the success of the reading instruction supported by our grants.

First, high-quality reading instruction expands students’ background knowledge (what they know about the world around them), vocabulary (words and their meaning), and oral language skills (speaking and listening). After all, sounding out the word “emergency” does not do much good if you do not know what it means. 

Every person in a child’s life can contribute to these skills.The Trust helped after-school programs provide enriching experiences that improved students’ knowledge and vocabularies.

In the “Ready Readers” program for early elementary students, after-school staff learned to read aloud for at least two hours a week using proven techniques to build students’ skills. They then reinforced students’ knowledge and vocabularies with art, games, and field trips. ReadWorks and New York University developed materials for teachers and students that incorporated rich vocabulary and built students’ knowledge of the world. Fixing reading instruction in our city is an all-hands-on-deck endeavor that should involve every one of the city’s programs for kids. 

Second, reading instruction is a science. We saw success where teachers had opportunities to work together and with expert coaches to learn more about the science and get feedback on what was happening in their classrooms.

Just like any other scientific endeavor, teachers benefitted from resources that allowed them to collect and analyze data about students’ progress. Teaching Matters and New Visions for Public Schools worked together to build a system to help teachers assess students’ progress and figure out where early readers were getting stuck. Regular student assessments, digital tools to track and analyze results, and professional development resources helped teachers design instruction to meet the specific needs of their students.

Finally, nonprofits incorporated the assets that multilingual learners brought to the classroom. And several grantees incorporated literature that reflected the racial and cultural diversity of the city’s public school students. If the city’s chosen curricula do not address the diversity of its students, supplemental programs developed by nonprofit groups and academic experts can help fill the gap.

The Department of Education has started on a systemic path to making sure the city’s kids can read. Ensuring adequate phonics instruction is the first and right step. If the city incorporates phonics into a more comprehensive effort that expands students’ background knowledge, vocabulary, and oral language skills, and gives teachers the time and tools they need to monitor and understand their students’ progress, it will finally prove that all New York’s kids can learn to read well.

We just need to show them how.

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Shawn V. Morehead is vice president for grants at The New York Community Trust. On Twitter @NYCommTrust.

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