MAYOR ADAMS ANNOUNCES REAPPOINTMENTS AND APPOINTMENTS TO RENT GUIDELINES BOARD

 

Respected New York City Leaders Will Bring Decades of Experience Across Academia, Law, Finance, and Advocacy to Rent Guidelines Board 

New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced four appointments and reappointments to the Rent Guidelines Board. Arpit Gupta has been reappointed as a public representative while Christina Smyth has been reappointed as an owner representative. Additionally, Lliam Finn has been appointed as a public representative and Sagar Sharma has been appointed as a tenant representative. The members bring decades of experience across a diverse range of fields from housing policy to public advocacy and reflect the Adams administration’s ongoing commitment to affordable housing and evidence-based policymaking. 

 

“From passing historic zoning reforms to creating record amounts of affordable housing, we are proud to be the most pro-housing administration in city history. We’re using every tool in our toolbox to tackle our city’s housing crisis, and that includes appointing smart, seasoned experts to the city’s Rent Guidelines Board,” said Mayor Adams. “These respected appointees bring decades of experience in the housing sector and I am confident they will serve as responsible stewards of our city’s housing stock, using facts and data to reach the right decision for both tenants and property owners.” 

 

About the Reappointments and Appointments

 

Arpit Gupta is associate professor of finance at New York University Stern School of Business, where his research focuses on using large datasets to understand default dynamics in household finance, real estate, and corporate finance. His interests in policy research include real estate, housing, and land-use regulation, as well as transit, infrastructure, public finance, pedestrianization, and the management of urban street space. Gupta was the recipient of the 2016 Top Finance Graduate Award at Copenhagen Business School. He holds a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in finance and economics from Columbia Business School.  

 

He was previously appointed to the Rent Guidelines Board in 2022 and is being reappointed as a public representative. 

 

Christina Smyth, Esq. is the founder and owner of Smyth Law PC, a real estate law practice that represents multifamily residential building owners, operators, and management companies throughout Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. She is also an adjunct instructor at the New York University Real Estate Institute. Smyth has been a member of the Real Estate Services Alliance since 2011 and is a committee member of the New York State Bar Association’s Lawyers Assistance Program. She holds a B.A. in political science from Fordham University and a J.D. from St. John’s University School of Law. 

 

Smyth was previously appointed to the Rent Guidelines Board in 2022 and is being re-appointed as an owner representative. 

 

Sagar Sharma is the deputy director at Legal Services NYC, where he has worked in the Housing Unit since 2018 helping to fight poverty and seek justice for low-income New Yorkers. Sharma earned a B.A. in political science from The City College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and a J.D. from CUNY Law School.  

 

Sharma has been appointed as a tenant representative. 

  

Lliam Finn is a senior financial advisor with Merrill Lynch, where he focuses on large market retirement plans. In addition to his work in the financial sector, Finn served as a naval officer for six years. Finn received his M.B.A. from Fordham University as well as a B.S. in economics from the United States Naval Academy. 

 

Finn has been appointed as a public representative. 

 

Since entering office, Mayor Adams has made historic investments to create more affordable housing and ensure more New Yorkers have a place to call home. Earlier this year, Mayor Adams announced that his administration has created, preserved, or planned approximately 426,800 homes for New Yorkers  through the end of the last fiscal year — a number which has already grown to over 433,250 homes to date. Mayor Adams also announced that, in Fiscal Year 2025, the Adams administration created the most affordable rental units in city history and celebrated back-to-back-to-back record-breaking years for producing permanently-affordable homes for formerly-homeless New Yorkers, placing homeless New Yorkers into housing, and connecting New Yorkers to housing through the city’s housing lottery. 

 

In addition to creating and preserving record amounts of affordable and market-rate housing for New Yorkers, the Adams administration has also passed ambitious plans that will create tens of thousands of new homes as well. Last December, Mayor Adams celebrated the passage of “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity,” the most pro-housing proposal in city history that will build 80,000 new homes over 15 years and invest $5 billion in critical infrastructure updates and housing.  

 

Building on the success of City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, Mayor Adams unveiled his “City of Yes for Families” strategy in his State of the City address earlier this year to build more homes and create more family-friendly neighborhoods across New York City. Under City of Yes for Families, the Adams administration is advancing more housing on city-owned sites, creating new tools to support homeownership, and building more housing alongside schools, playgrounds, grocery stores, accessible transit stations, and libraries.  

 

Further, the Adams administration is actively working to strengthen tenant protections and support homeowners. The “Partners in Preservation” program was expanded citywide in 2024 through a $24 million investment in local organizations to support tenant organizing and combat harassment in rent-regulated housing. The Homeowner Help Desk, a trusted one-stop shop for low-income homeowners to receive financial and legal counseling from local organizations, was also expanded citywide in 2024 with a $13 million funding commitment. 

 

Finally, Mayor Adams and members of his administration successfully advocated for new tools in the 2024 New York state budget that are already helping spur the creation of urgently needed housing. These tools include a new tax incentive for multifamily rental construction, a tax incentive program to encourage office conversions to create more affordable units, lifting the arbitrary “floor-to-area ratio” cap that held back affordable housing production in certain high-demand areas of the city, and the ability to create a pilot program to legalize and make safe basement apartments.