Tenant advocates are already squealing after Thursday’s preliminary decision by the city’s Rent Stabilization Guidelines Board to OK modest rent hikes for the city’s 965,000 rent-regulated units.

The de Blasio years had fed activists the habit-forming drug of zero-dollar increases — and tenant groups continue to demand them. But the preliminary authorization by the nine-member board of rent hikes of between 2% and 4% for one-year leases and 4% to 6% for two-year leases (a final figure is expected by next month) is still less than it should be when compared to inflation and a slew of rising costs.

At best, such hikes are but a down payment on protecting the city from the disinvestment and decay that threaten our regulated housing stock. Indeed, the fact that increases in this range amid 8% inflation are even controversial reminds us of how unusual rent regulation is and how it distorts New York’s housing market.

After all, landlords are not exempt from rising costs. Per federal data, the cost of heating oil rose 70% from September to March; natural gas 21.6%; electricity, 11.1%. The city’s Water Board has approved a 5% hike and post-COVID property-tax assessments are likely to spike as well come July. Small contractors — plumbers, electricians, carpenters — whom landlords hire for repairs will be raising their fees, too.

Arbitrarily capping increases for one sector of the economy will have side effects. Absent a sufficient rent hike, owners might have to choose between, say, utilities and roof repairs — and hope for a dry summer. That’s especially true for the mom-and-pops, many of them immigrants, who account for as much as half of all rent-stabilized-building owners.

The point is that when landlords are starved, tenants may also suffer. The modest increase on the table will be little more than life support, not the higher hike or full deregulation New York housing really needs. Not when the net income of landlords has declined 7.8% over the past year by the board’s own figures — only the fourth such decrease in the last 30 years.

The tight regulation of fully a third of New York’s housing stock stands in stark contrast to the larger economy. America hasn’t engaged in wage-and-price controls since the Nixon administration, when they backfired dramatically and sparked food shortages. Even Con Ed, a regulated utility, is permitted to pass through skyrocketing natural-gas prices.

Large corporate landlords may be able to absorb the shock of low rents — those who bemoan the rise of corporate ownership of residential property will only see it accelerate — but over time, new investment in housing will inevitably ebb, throttling supply. Too-small increases will also drive up rents for non-regulated “market units” — as owners with a mix of apartment types raise rents on non-regulated housing to make ends meet.

Nor is it inevitable, as many assume, that tenants are poor and landlords greedy fat cats. There is not now, nor has never been, any income test for those living in rent-stabilized units. NYU’s Furman Center found that, on average, 57% of rent-stabilized tenants in core Manhattan were not of low income. Remember, owners of rent-regulated units have every incentive to rent to high-income tenants, if only to ensure they’ll pay the rent.

Advocates insist that rising eviction cases are a sign that heartless rent-gouging has taken off, too. But the long-extended COVID eviction moratorium kept cases in limbo; we shouldn’t be surprised at their rebound — nor forget that many owners try to avoid the courts, both because of the legal costs and because, with the drop in the city’s population, finding a replacement tenant remains no sure thing. Indeed, permitting a rent increase is not the same as actually raising someone’s rent, especially when a tenant has been reliably paying.

Mayor Eric Adams, himself a small landlord, correctly signaled that it was time to move away from a zero increase. He’d do even better by replacing all the de Blasio holdovers, who continue to hold the board’s balance of power, when their terms expire at year’s end.

Adams has already taken a step in the right direction by appointing a bona fide economist, NYU’s Arpit Gupta, to the board. At least that’s a start — along with Thursday’s decision to accept reality and allow rents to go up.

Howard Husock is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.