New York City, NY, USA: New York City Mayor Eric Adams has appointed two Indian Americans to the Rent Guidelines Board, the panel responsible for setting yearly rent adjustments for nearly one million rent-stabilised apartments across the city.
Arpit Gupta has been reappointed as a public member, a role he has held since 2022, while Sagar Sharma has been named as a tenant representative on the board.
Gupta is an associate professor of finance at New York University Stern School of Business. His academic work centres on housing markets, mortgage lending, foreclosures, and household debt. He relies on large-scale data analysis to examine default patterns in real estate and corporate finance. His research also explores foreclosure spillover effects in mortgage markets and how negative health and economic events influence bankruptcies and housing security.
In the past, Gupta worked with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as a doctoral summer intern and has advised on matters related to real estate and urban public policy. Earlier in his career, he served as a research coordinator at Columbia Law School and consulted for Edgewood Management LLC, where he developed and taught courses focused on investments and corporate finance.
Sharma currently holds the position of deputy director of the Housing Unit at Legal Services NYC, where he has been employed since 2018. His responsibilities include representing low-income tenants in housing court, enforcing rent stabilisation regulations, and crafting litigation approaches aimed at preventing displacement and protecting affordable housing.
Before assuming the deputy director role in 2024, Sharma worked as both a supervising attorney and a staff attorney within the Housing Unit. He has also served as an adjunct clinical professor at New York Law School. Earlier in his career, he was associated with New York State’s Tenant Protection Unit and the New York State Fair and Equitable Housing Office, where he supported enforcement efforts, settlement discussions, and legal research connected to rent regulation and tenant rights.
The Rent Guidelines Board holds a significant influence over housing affordability in New York City, as its determinations directly shape rent increases for rent-stabilised apartments at a time when pressure on the city’s housing market remains high.
