The Rent Freeze Case Moves to Manhattan

The legal climb will be getting steeper in the lawsuit by property owners against Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rent freeze. The suit, which argues that the Rent Guidelines Board acted as Hizzoner’s rubber stamp when it approved the freeze, was filed at Staten Island. A Republican judge, Ralph Porzio, was assigned the case. Yet the case, at Mr. Mamdani’s request, is now moving to Manhattan, where the political climate is different.A lawyer for the landlords, Randy Mastro, tells us that “no matter where this case is heard, we should prevail on the merits.” He avers that “the evidence is overwhelming that the Board failed to comply with its statutory mandate and manipulated and ignored its own data.” He laments that the purportedly independent board engaged in “a sham process to produce a predetermined outcome and deliver on Mayor Mamdani’s rent freeze campaign promise.”The case has yet to be assigned a new judge. It’s not our intention to impugn the impartiality of Manhattan’s Supreme Court bench, who hear trial-level disputes. Yet these are elected officials, and the partisan composition of Manhattan, where 70 percent of voters are Democrats, tends to yield a predominantly left-leaning crop of judges. Indeed, per Ballotpedia and other sources, all of Manhattan’s 36 elected Supreme Court judges are Democrats.In the rent freeze case, Mr. Mastro argued that Staten Island was a valid place to hold the trial. After all, he asserted in a court filing, some 8,200 of the city’s rent-stabilized apartments are located at Richmond County. Plus, too, the Rent Guidelines Board’s public hearings took “testimony from Staten Island landlords and tenants,” the lawsuit says, though no hearing was held on the island. Per Mr. Mastro, “material events” relevant to the case indeed “occurred” at Staten Island.Judge Porzio, though, agreed with city lawyers to move the case to Manhattan, where the Rent Guidelines Board voted. “The mere location of a person or business that will be subject to said decision does not constitute a ‘material event’ in relation to venue,” he said. Even so, he stressed “the enormity of the impact” of the rent freeze, which affects “thousands of landlords, nearly one million tenancies and possibly millions of New York City residents.”The case, too, Judge Porzio concluded, “raises serious questions as to the propriety” of the Rent Guidelines Board’s proceedings and its vote barring landlords from raising prices in rent-stabilized apartments. The judge pointed to the property owner’s allegations of “errors of fact and law, irregularities in process and even malfeasance.” Will a judge at Manhattan approach the case with the same degree of open-mindedness? The last time the question of a rent freeze was before a judge in Manhattan, during the mayoralty of Bill De Blasio, the property owners’ case failed to prosper. A Democratic judge, Debra James, in 2017 ruled that the Rent Guidelines Board could put the concerns of tenants ahead of any economic hardship of landlords. “The court finds that the Board acted with a rational basis in taking into account ‘tenant affordability,’” Judge James concluded.Yet even as property owners’ expenses are “soaring at a rate higher than inflation and their income is declining,” Mr. Mastro tells us, “this is the first time in its 57-year history” that the Rent Guidelines Board “has imposed a rent freeze on both one-year and two-year leases at the same time.” This decision was made, he adds, “without any rational explanation whatsoever. That is illegal, and we remain confident that we will prevail.”Correction: Rent Guidelines Board public hearings in other boroughs heard testimony from Staten Island landlords and tenants regarding the rent freeze. An earlier version misstated the scope of the hearings’ locations.

The Rent Freeze Case Moves to Manhattan

The Rent Freeze Case Moves to Manhattan

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