In a highly litigious city like New York, even seemingly popular wins are regularly met with lawsuits, as programs ranging from congestion pricing to open streets to outdoor dining can attest to. And Thursday night’s landmark vote to freeze the rent for more than 2 million tenants living in stabilized buildings appears poised to be no different.
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Massimo D’Angelo, a partner at Blank Rome and co-chair of the firm’s real estate industry team, is as confident in the likelihood of a lawsuit as he was that the board would indeed vote to freeze rents.
“It’ll probably be weeks rather than days before a suit is filed because we have to carefully tailor these pleadings. But there will be a lawsuit,” he said in an interview earlier in the week.
D’Angelo spelled out some of the potential legal arguments for litigation, namely that the process was driven by politics and not by data.
“The landlord’s argument under a due process challenge is going to be that the blanket freeze has been enacted without any individualized cost-of-living and operating-expense analysis that the RGB is required to perform. That’s violation of substantive due process,” he said. “The process is not supposed to be politically driven. It’s supposed to be a bipartisan process devoid of political influence.”
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"The City Froze Rent for 2 Million Tenants. Now What?" by Julianne Cuba and Kathryn Brenzel was published in Crain's New York Business on June 30, 2026.