A Manhattan Supreme Court judge on Thursday ordered more than two dozen top city officials and Rent Guidelines Board members to turn over their phone and email communications as part of an ongoing legal challenge that could upend a first-ever freeze on two-year leases for roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments.
The freeze takes effect on Oct. 1, and Judge Brendan Lantry said it will stay in place even if he cannot rule on the legal challenge before that deadline.
Attorneys representing a group of aggrieved landlords had asked Lantry to revert to last year’s 3% increase on new leases until he issues a ruling.
Lantry said he does not have the authority to halt the rent freeze pending the outcome of the case.
“We are working as expeditiously as we can to resolve this case,” Lantry said. “I’m not going to operate with a shotgun to my head.”
But he did order 13 officials from the Mayor’s Office and 13 staff and appointees to the Rent Guidelines Board to turn over their emails and personal and work cellphones so that their texts and other communications can be copied, a process that could take up to eight hours. The city’s top attorney, Steve Banks, criticized the decision in court.
“The people on this list are running New York City,” Banks said. “Giving up their phone for four to eight hours is not an insignificant thing.”
Lantry responded that the review was essential for assessing the credibility of a board decision with broad implications for “millions of New Yorkers.”
Copying cell phone data, he said, will “determine whether or not those staffers were inappropriately communicating with the Rent Guidelines Board after the mayor guaranteed a rent freeze, and then the board did grant a rent freeze.”
The list of City Hall officials includes Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Office to Protect Tenants Director Cea Weaver and Deputy Mayor Leila Bozorg. In a court filing Wednesday, city lawyer Rachel Moston said lawyers had already searched the mayor’s email account and found no communications with the board.
Lantry last week called his discovery order “rare” but wrote that it was “also rare (in fact, it is unprecedented) for a candidate for Mayor of New York City to guarantee that the Board, an entity that the parties concede is independent from the Mayor’s Office, will freeze the rent upon his election to office."
Randy Mastro, an attorney for the landlords and a former first deputy mayor under previous Mayor Eric Adams, said he would “immediately” make an emergency application to stop the freeze from taking effect on new leases even if Lantry rules after Oct. 1.
The landlords suing the Rent Guidelines Board each own rent-stabilized apartments and have accused board members of ignoring data on rising owner expenses in order to deliver on Mamdani’s campaign pledge to freeze the rent for stabilized apartments. The board is made up of nine members appointed by the mayor but is supposed to work independently of City Hall.
Mastro has sought communications between City Hall staff and the Rent Guidelines Board that he says could reveal a campaign of influence intended to secure the two-year freeze. City Hall spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach denied the allegation.
Though Mamdani campaigned on keeping rents flat and named six of the board’s nine members, he stopped publicly calling for the rent freeze after taking office.
The board’s 7-1 decision to freeze rents on one- and two-year leases signed after Sept. 30 followed the dramatic resignation by one of the board’s landlord representatives earlier in the day. The former member, landlord lawyer Christina Smyth, accused the board of crossing a “legal line” by ignoring owner expense data and delivering a preordained decision.
But a day after the vote, another member, economist Arpit Gupta, said he observed no meddling from City Hall “unlike in some previous years.”
Gupta was the only member of the board to oppose the rent freeze decision.
