The democratic socialist leading the race to become the next mayor of the country’s largest city wants to freeze rents for more than 2 million New Yorkers, saving tenants up to $6.8 billion.
The move — which could last up to four years — would represent one of the boldest efforts in the country to tackle the affordable housing crisis. If it’s successful, Democrats across the country will likely look to New York for inspiration as they seek novel ways to address pocketbook issues for their struggling constituents.
But implementing the bold plan is a risky endeavor that could run into thorny economic challenges.
That’s because the rent freeze proposed by Zohran Mamdani — who scored a massive upset in the city’s Democratic primary, with affordability the centerpiece of his campaign — would apply to the city’s rent-regulated housing stock, a vast and diverse portfolio of buildings that provide affordable rents to largely lower-income New Yorkers and has been showing signs of growing financial distress in recent years.
It would be an unprecedented move, eclipsing three rent freezes spread over eight years under staunchly liberal former Mayor Bill de Blasio. Proponents say it would provide desperately needed financial relief for renters at a time when sky-high costs are pushing people out of the city. It would follow four consecutive rent hikes under Mayor Eric Adams totaling 12 percent.
But the landlord lobby — which largely backed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s doomed Democratic primary campaign — has warned of a looming decline in rent-regulated buildings since the state approved a tenant-friendly overhaul of rules governing them in 2019. Concerns about the aftermath of those changes — specifically on older buildings in the outer boroughs — have increasingly come from prominent housing experts, including top de Blasio officials.
The 2019 changes eliminated or curtailed avenues to increase rents outside the annual hikes approved by the Rent Guidelines Board, a mayor-appointed panel.
“What the RGB does now is much more important,” said Alicia Glen, who served as de Blasio’s deputy mayor for housing and contends a rent freeze at this juncture would be misguided. Glen is now founder and managing principal of the mixed-income housing developer MSquared. “What happens there is now not just political theater; it’s real economics.”
New York’s housing crisis is severe enough that there are few simple, straightforward solutions to lowering housing costs — and meaningful reforms often need some state or federal involvement. The rental vacancy rate — 1.4 percent — is at its lowest in more than 50 years. Some 85,000 people slept in city-run homeless shelters on a recent night.
Against that grim backdrop, appointing members to the rent board — and influencing the outcome of their deliberations — is one of the most direct and singular ways a mayor can shape housing policy.
“The other things a mayor can do are important but the size and scale of what this will mean is extraordinary,” said Cea Weaver, who leads a coalition of tenant groups pushing for a rent freeze. “Amongst low-income New Yorkers — people who are earning below 50 percent of area median income — they are more likely to live in rent-stabilized housing than any other type of housing.”
Adams has rejected calls for a rent freeze over his tenure, pointing to the rising cost of maintaining buildings.
“You have people running around saying, ‘No increases, no increases,’ while everything is going up around you,” Adams said at a recent town hall.
The price of insurance, fuel and other expenses are indeed significantly higher than in 2015 and 2016 when the first two freezes were enacted under de Blasio. (The third was in 2020 in response to the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.)
The overall cost of maintaining buildings has risen a cumulative 28 percent over the last five years, according to the board’s research, far outpacing even the hikes approved by the rent board under Adams.
Meanwhile, the share of buildings that are considered distressed — defined as costs exceeding gross income — is up sharply from the years leading up to 2019. The property values of rent-regulated buildings are also down significantly since then.
Complicating that picture, however, is the fact that landlord incomes have on average spiked in recent years — driven by massive increases in Manhattan, according to Rent Guidelines Board data.
Even as Adams’ rent board has approved higher increases than his predecessor, rent-stabilized landlords have continually complained that these hikes are insufficient in the post-2019 landscape.
Ann Korchak, a Manhattan landlord and board president of an association representing small owners, said the most recent rent hike “failed” small property owners and “didn’t follow the math.”
Post-2019, “the RGB is the only way to get meaningful rent increases, which we’re not even getting,” she said.
The landlord representatives on the board had argued for increases as high as 8 percent over one year.
For a typical rent-stabilized apartment — at the median rent of $1,500 per month — that would mean a rent spike up to $1,620, or an extra $1,440 per year for the median household.
The median income for rent-stabilized tenants was $60,000 in 2023, according to the city’s most recent housing and vacancy survey. Vacant apartments affordable at that income level are exceedingly scarce.
“Rent-stabilization is one of the only lifelines and we have to do everything we possibly can to keep it affordable,” Weaver said.
Of all the candidates in the Democratic primary, Mamdani ran most forcefully on a rent freeze, while his opponents either waffled or rejected the idea.
“I’m going to freeze the rent for more than 2 million rent-stabilized tenants because that’s the mayor’s power — the last mayor did that three times,” the democratic socialist said in a radio interview before the primary. “We have these tools; it’s just a question of do we want to do this.”
“The landlords of those same units just gave [former Gov. Andrew] Cuomo $2.5 million. The same landlords who say they don’t have enough money to be able to freeze the rent just found $2.5 million,” Mamdani added, referring to massive contributions from major landlords and developers to a Cuomo-aligned super PAC called Fix the City.
Indeed, landlord interests lined up behind Cuomo in the Democratic primary, albeit somewhat reluctantly. It was Cuomo, after all, who signed the 2019 rent legislation, though the driving force behind the changes was a newly-Democratic state Legislature.
The 2019 reforms dramatically limited how much landlords can raise rents outside the annual guidelines. The rules previously permitted owners to hike rents 20 percent whenever a unit became vacant, allowed for generous — overly so, many argued — rent increases after building and apartment upgrades, and let apartments ultimately phase out of regulation once they hit a certain rent threshold.
“Post-2019 it’s a new world, and this new world all but guarantees that rent increases won’t be sufficient for buildings primarily reliant on revenue from rent-stabilized units,” said Mark Willis, senior policy fellow at NYU’s Furman Center.
He presented research to the rent board earlier this year that focused on a pool of older buildings in the Bronx where at least 90 percent of apartments are regulated. Many buildings included in the board’s overall data — particularly those in Manhattan, where landlord incomes have risen the most — are only partially regulated, making it easier for them to absorb cost increases.
Willis’s research detailed how these Bronx buildings, on the other hand, were struggling to absorb increased expenses, potentially jeopardizing their long-term stability.
Willis and others argue that part of the issue is the board is charged with an “impossible task” of solving a problem that requires reforms outside the annual guidelines process, like state legislation.
“There is no rationale for having the same rent increases approved for a 20-unit building in the Bronx that was built in 1943 that is owned by Mr. Brown, and a 1,000-unit luxury building owned by a large developer or public company,” Glen said. “The current rent stabilization framework is too blunt an instrument.”
Rent increases approved by the RGB outpaced the rate of inflation, excluding shelter costs, for much of former Mayor Mike Bloomberg's term, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute — a trend rent-stabilized tenants have “still not recovered from,” said Samuel Stein, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society, which supported a rent freeze this year.
“There is a pool of buildings that are in a heightened state of distress,” Stein acknowledged — albeit, he says, one much smaller than landlord interests claim. “A universal rent increase is a bad way to fix that problem.”
He pointed to city programs that landlords can take advantage of, like one rolled out by the Adams administration that offers $50,000 grants per unit to owners rehabbing vacant rent-regulated housing, which has not drawn significant interest from owners.
“If [landlords are] not willing to take free money to fix apartments in exchange for keeping the rent what it is, then they're not really being good faith actors,” Stein said.
Despite arguing for years that the Adams-era board did not go far enough to support struggling landlords, those decisions aren’t looking so bad to some building owners in light of a potential Mayor Mamdani.
“The current Rent Guidelines Board really has to be commended for standing against pressure right now,” said Kenny Burgos, executive director of the New York Apartment Association, a leading landlord group.
Cuomo is now running as an independent, but since his primary drubbing many of those developers have lined up behind Adams.
The mayor has raked in cash from real estate interests over the last month, as some major landlords and developers see him as the best bet to beat Mamdani in November. Others are more or less resigned to Mamdani’s strong likelihood of winning the race as the Democratic nominee in a deep-blue city.
“At this current moment I am not seeing any clear path or indication that there is an ability to elect someone other than Mamdani, and therefore we’re operating on that premise and moving forward,” Burgos said.
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