Rent irregulation

Mayor de Blasio fell just short of getting the rent freeze he had ordered up. But make no mistake: The 1% hike on one-year leases approved Monday night by the Rent Guidelines Board — a historic low — is very much a victory for his populist reign.

While everyone of good sense wants to ease the blow for residents of New York’s almost 1 million stabilized apartments, the RGB is supposed to do one thing: set maximum annual hikes by weighing the best economic evidence.

On Monday, that mandate turned to farce as de Blasio virtually commanded his six representatives on the nine-member board to exempt tenants from hikes — after the panel offered eight proposals that veered wildly from an increase of as much as 5.5% to a rollback of 6%.

By design, the board includes tenant and landlord representatives, but that doesn’t explain the ludicrous range of proposals. Witness the earlier actions of two landlord representatives, one appointed by Mayor Bloomberg and the other by de Blasio: Bloomberg’s appointee pressed for a big hike, while de Blasio’s voted for a possible freeze.

All parties had their thumbs on the scale, no one more heavily than de Blasio.

Just hours before the board was to vote on increases for the coming year, the mayor announced he had looked at the economic data it was supposed to consider and determined the panel should vote for a zero on one-year renewals. He had made the same call during his campaign for mayor, before the data were available.

De Blasio said he found “a pattern of unfairness”: namely, that rent increases in recent years had outstripped property owners’ reported costs. In the meantime, he suggested, tenants’ rent load has only grown as a share of their income. So he urged a “course correction” to repay tenants.

To support his crowd-pleasing conclusion, de Blasio relied on cherry-picked economic data, in effect discarding the formula the board had used under previous administrations.

In particular, the mayor willfully ignored a price index the board has historically relied on in setting rents, which tracks trends for such expenses as real-estate taxes and heating fuel — both of which jumped some 5% over the past year.

Tenants, many of whom are voters, got a break that will surely be appreciated. But if that’s to be the sole deciding factor from here on out, the toll on New York’s limited stock of decent affordable housing will eventually be severe.