The first lawsuit against Zohran Mamdani’s latest rent freeze on New York City apartments was filed Wednesday, as a group of landlords moved to overturn the New York City Rent Guidelines Board’s decision.
The suit argues that the Board went through a “sham process” before voting 7-1 in June to impose zero rent increases on one and two-year leases. Although the Board is supposed to operate independently, its members can be appointed and removed by the mayor at will. In fact, six of the current board members were appointed by Mamdani.
A group of landlords filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the new rent freeze on New York City apartments, the real-estate industry’s first legal challenge to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s signature campaign issue https://t.co/bjGJrAvYF9
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) July 22, 2026
While the Rent Guidelines Board is required to review the economic conditions of the residential real estate industry before voting, the lawsuit alleges that it cherry-picked the data, underestimating operating costs and overstating the money landlords were receiving in order to justify its decision. The suit also points to the resignation of one board member before the vote, noting that the landlord representative quit in frustration after concluding the board had ceased to function as a fact-finding body and that her former colleagues intended to freeze rent no matter what the evidence showed.
“Zohran Mamdani promised to deliver a rent freeze during his campaign and then he went to extraordinary lengths as a new mayor to guarantee it,” Randy Mastro, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said. “This is a perversion of the process.”
It remains unclear how likely the lawsuit is to succeed, but at the very least, it is a welcome sign that some New Yorkers are banding together against a terrible, and possibly illegal, policy.
Rent freezes are a policy that almost no economist would seriously recommend as a way to make housing more affordable, and this is one of those rare subjects where the “experts” are usually right. As left-leaning Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck famously said in 1971: “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing.”
That has not stopped these anti-free-market policies from remaining popular. Roughly 75 percent of Americans support rent control, including 66 percent of Republicans. But the policy is not merely bad economics; it also helps fuel the demonization of people who do not deserve it, as some on the left continue to embrace the idea that if someone makes more money than they do, or is a landlord rather than a renter, they are inherently exploitative and worthy of no consideration at all.