It's already been a banner week for Mayor de Blasio, who's dominated headlines with the long-awaited announcement of his $41 billion, 10-year plan to tackle the city's massive, much-discussed affordable housing crisis. The ambitious proposal is a landmark for New York real estate, to be sure, but has left a lot of New Yorkers (including us!) with a slew of follow-up questions, and ended up burying the week's second major housing story: yesterday's Rent Guidelines Board vote to potentially freeze rent increases for stabilized units. So, should we all start eagerly awaiting our new, bargain basement rents?

Not quite yet. De Blasio's plan centers on the creation or preservation of 200,000 affordable units city-wide, a large number of which are expected to come from a requirement that developers set aside apartments in new buildings for low- and middle-income renters and buyers. The exact details have yet to be determined, though, and indeed, the New York Times reported that "mayoral aides conceded on Monday that many of their ideas to create affordable housing needed to be extensively studied before they could be enacted."

In other words, de Blasio's looking out for renters, yes, but he's also playing a long game. In the meantime, what will change renters' day-to-day life--at least those lucky enough to live in a rent-stabilized apartment--is the outcome of last night's "raucous" meeting of the Rent Guidelines Board, the agency that oversees the city's thousands of rent-stabilized units and metes out the annual rent increases.