Mayor Adams’ Statement on Rent Guidelines Board Final Vote

June 30, 2025

NEW YORK – New York City Mayor Eric Adams tonight released the following statement after the Rent Guidelines Board took a final vote for rent-stabilized lease adjustments of 3 percent for one-year leases and 4.5 percent for two-year leases: 

“For the last three-and-a-half years, our administration has worked every day to make our city more affordable for working-class New Yorkers — lowering the cost of childcare to less than $5 per week for low-income families; winning the power to eliminate city personal income taxes for over half-a-million low-income New Yorkers and put $63 million back in their pockets; providing free high-speed internet to NYCHA residents; cutting the cost of riding the subway and buses in half for low-income New Yorkers; and putting up to 500,000 New Yorkers on the path to have more than $2 billion in medical debt cancelled. This is real work that has delivered real results and made New York City more affordable. 

“Another massive cost for New Yorkers each month is rent, and the city’s historically low rental vacancy has millions of us feeling the squeeze, which is why, earlier today, I urged the Rent Guidelines Board to adopt the lowest increase possible, as I’ve done in the past. While the board exercised their independent judgment, and made an adjustment based on elements such as inflation, I am disappointed that they approved increases higher than what I called for.   

“While our administration is always fighting to make this city more affordable, what we will never do is sell New Yorkers on an idea that would ultimately leave them in worsening housing conditions. Rent may be on the rise, but so are deteriorating housing conditions — including inadequate heat and heating breakdowns, mice and rat problems, mold, and leaks — especially for New Yorkers in rent-stabilized housing. Demands to ‘freeze the rent’ would exacerbate these harmful health and safety issues inside the homes of more than 1 million New Yorkers by depriving owners of the resources needed to make repairs — a cruel and dangerous proposal. While freezing the rent may sound like a catchy slogan, it is bad policy, short-sighted, and only puts tenants in harm’s way. As the mayor of this city, I will never choose a politically advantageous position over what I know in my heart to be best for New Yorkers. 

“We know that the city’s housing crisis cannot be solved by the Rent Guidelines Board alone. Doing so will require preserving our existing housing stock and building an abundance of new housing across our city, which our administration continues to do at record levels. We’ve created an unprecedented number of new affordable homes in back-to-back years, pushed Albany to help spur the development of new affordable housing, and passed the most pro-housing citywide zoning reform in the city’s history through the ‘City of Yes for Housing Opportunity’ — but we’re not stopping there. If our five neighborhood rezonings are approved, we will open the door to more than 130,000 homes to be built in New York City over the next 15 years — more than the 20 years of the last two mayoral administrations combined. Simply put, our administration is the most pro-housing administration in New York City’s history, and we continue to prove it every single day.”