A Manhattan judge overseeing a lawsuit challenging Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rent freeze on rent-stabilized homes dealt the mayor a setback on Wednesday, ordering his administration to turn over any communications it had with the panel that approved the freeze.
The order, issued by Brendan T. Lantry of New York State Supreme Court, was the latest turn in a lawsuit brought by landlords that seeks to nullify the rent freeze. The suit claims that the panel disregarded landlords’ financial challenges under pressure from Mr. Mamdani as he sought to deliver on a campaign promise.
In his order, Justice Lantry acknowledged he was taking a “rare” step. But he said he needed the information to decide whether the panel’s decision was “an arbitrary and capricious action, an abuse of discretion, an action affected by errors of law or a violation of lawful procedure.”
The members of the panel, known as the Rent Guidelines Board, are appointed by the mayor, and its decisions typically reflect the mayor’s priorities.
If the judge invalidates the rent freeze, the decision could undo one of Mr. Mamdani’s key achievements, underscoring the limits of the mayor’s ability to reshape city government to improve affordability for tenants.
The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
City lawyers had argued that such a disclosure was unnecessary to inform the judge’s decision in the case. Lawyers for the landlords, on the other hand, had sought an even greater amount of data, including internal text messages and emails between city employees.
Justice Lantry’s order is more narrow, requiring City Hall to turn over only written communications between personnel in the mayor’s office and the Rent Guidelines Board between Jan. 1 and June 26, when the vote took place.
Randy Mastro, a lawyer representing the landlords who was a first deputy mayor under Eric Adams, said in a statement that he was gratified by the judge’s decision.
The order “goes to the heart of our position that this was a sham process with a predetermined outcome,” he said, “and communications between the mayor’s office and the Rent Guidelines Board, which all parties admitted is supposed to be independent of the mayor’s office, should show that.”
Mr. Mamdani’s vow to “freeze the rent” became a rallying cry for his supporters, representing his focus on affordability as many New Yorkers struggle to keep up with the rising costs of housing and other essentials.
But it drew the ire of landlords and some housing experts, who said the slogan played down the serious economic challenges facing the owners of many rent-stabilized buildings. They argued that given the increasing financial burden of insurance, building upkeep, taxes and other costs, a rent freeze would hurt landlords’ ability to properly maintain their properties.
In February, Mr. Mamdani appointed six members to the Rent Guidelines Board, the nine-person panel that decides annually whether to increase rents in rent-stabilized homes and by how much.
At the end of June, the board voted in favor of the freeze, halting rent increases on both one- and two-year leases for the first time in its nearly 60-year history. (The board has frozen rents just on one-year leases a few times before, including in 2015, 2016, 2020 and the first half of 2021.) The freeze applied to leases starting on or after Oct. 1.
Pro-landlord groups immediately denounced the vote. Critics have said the board is too willing to do the current mayor’s bidding and is not living up to its mandate to be independent.
On July 22, several landlords sued, saying the board had ignored landlords’ financial challenges and had relied on limited and sometimes outdated data.
In his order on Wednesday, Justice Lantry noted a campaign video in which Mr. Mamdani promised to “freeze the rent” for rent-stabilized homes every year he was in office and said “that’s a guarantee.”
“The question naturally arises: How would the mayor comply with his ‘guarantee’ to the voters to ‘freeze the rent’ unless he, or his staff, communicated with the board to ensure that the board refrained from imposing any rental increase?” the judge wrote.
The lawsuit was originally filed on Staten Island, where Mr. Mastro has brought a number of legal challenges to Mr. Mamdani’s actions. But the Mamdani administration successfully requested that the case be moved to Manhattan, where the Rent Guidelines Board is based.
In court papers, the landlords said the board had focused only on affordability for tenants, “to the exclusion of every cost and income factor the statute requires it to consider.”
The board and city lawyers argued that the board had acted properly when it approved the freeze, a move that they said in court papers “appropriately recognizes that most tenants simply cannot absorb higher rents, while most landlords can manage a rent freeze.”
The lawsuit asked the court to declare that the freeze was illegal and to make the board start the process over again.
The judge ordered the parties to attend a conference about the new materials on Monday morning.
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