Let me tell you something about a preliminary vote. A preliminary vote is not a promise. A preliminary vote is the Rent Guidelines Board clearing its throat in April so it can talk louder in June. But — and I want you to hear me on this — a zero is a zero. They put a zero on the low end of the proposed range for the first time since Bill de Blasio was running the show, and that zero means something to the woman on the third floor of a walk-up in Woodside who has been watching her stabilized rent climb every single year like it's training for a marathon.
The board meets again in June for the final vote. That's when the landlord lobby shows up in force, the tenant advocates show up louder, and the nine appointed members of that board decide whether the zero survives the room or gets trimmed into a one-point-five and called a compromise. It has happened before. It will try to happen again. The preliminary number is a kite. The final vote is whether the wind holds.
Now here is where I have to be straight with you, because a man of my character does not hide his business interests from his readership. My cousin Paulie — you do not need his last name — had a theory. Paulie's theory was that if the board passes a freeze, every landlord in Queens is going to be desperate to rent out units that were sitting vacant, because a freeze locks in whatever number they get right now, and they will want that number to be high. Paulie had a contact. Paulie had a truck — borrowed, technically, from his brother-in-law in Maspeth. The plan was we drive around Astoria, we pick up furniture from curb alerts, we stage three apartments, we pocket a finder's fee from desperate landlords before the June vote closes the window. Beautiful. Airtight. I had a spreadsheet on a napkin.
The board's preliminary range, for the record, runs from zero to two percent for one-year leases and zero to three percent for two-year leases, according to reporting from Curbed. The tenant advocacy community has noted that even a freeze only freezes — it does not walk back the increases of the last several years, which stacked up considerably during the post-pandemic adjustment period. The real ask, from where the tenant side sits, is rollback. A freeze is the floor of the conversation, not the ceiling.
What this vote tells you is that political pressure moved a board that has not shown a zero since the last time a mayor needed to show his base he remembered what a kitchen table looked like. Whether that pressure holds through June is the whole story. Watch the final vote. Watch who shows up to testify. Watch whether the zero is still standing when the gavel comes down.
Paulie's truck got a flat on the Expressway Thursday morning, the brother-in-law wants it back by Sunday, and it turns out landlords in Astoria are not desperate yet — they are waiting to see what June looks like, same as everybody else. The spreadsheet napkin is in my coat pocket. It is not looking good for the napkin.