The New York City panel that sets rents for the roughly 2.3 million residents of rent-regulated apartments yesterday froze those rents for a year, delivering a slight reprieve to tenants struggling in the worst economy in decades, the New York Times reported. By a 6-to-3 vote, the panel, the Rent Guidelines Board, approved a measure that froze rents on one-year leases at their current levels and imposed a similar freeze in the first year of two-year leases, while allowing landlords to raise rents 1 percent in the second year. The vote came after dueling proposals offered by the board’s tenant and landlord members failed. The tenant proposal would have frozen rents for two years, while the landlord members sought to raise rents 2 percent on one-year leases and 5 percent on two-year leases.
