Why Mamdani's rent freeze means disaster for NYC tenants
His success running as a 'freeze the rent' candidate has already moved the Rent Guidelines Board to OK dangerously low hikes for rent-stabilized units: 3% for one-year lease renewals, 4.5% for two-year ones — far less than what RGB staff report those landlords' costs are rising at.
Zero and near-zero rent hikes in the de Blasio years — RGB rents are up just 20% these last 12 years, vs. overall inflation of 36% — followed by widespread rent nonpayment during COVID (plus state 'reforms' that make it unaffordable to renovate units vacated by longtime tenants), already has many rent-stabilized landlords, especially smaller ones, on the brink of having to abandon their buildings altogether.
Others have no choice but to stint on maintenance, letting buildings and units deteriorate; everyone loses as these apartments grow shabbier and more scarce.
If Mamdani wins and sticks to his vow to appoint RGB members who'll freeze rents, the bottom is all too likely to fall out.
And the new mayor's fans will have a far tougher time finding a decent apartment in New York.
By the way, how many Zohran supporters realize that he can't freeze most rents?
The rent-stabilized units that the RGB governs are less than half the city's formal rental market, and at most a third of the full city housing supply, once you count coops and condos (even if sublet) and actual houses.
And a shrinking of the rent-controlled market is sure to push up prices of market-rate units, big time, because even more people will be chasing a smaller total supply.
Incidentally, this effect explains the 'record landlord profits' that Mamdani ally Brad Lander has been thundering about: It's landlord income from rents the city doesn't control.
Small, mom-and-pop landlords, who own about two-thirds of city's rent-stabilized units, are the ones who'll get reamed by the freeze (even though they're the little people that lefties claim to care about).
Tens of thousands of units are in dire shape in The Bronx alone.
Economists almost universally acknowledge that rent control is ruinous to housing markets; ones on the left mostly just don't talk about it, lest it make it harder for 'their side' to win elections.
The rent-freeze advocates have no idea how they're destroying New York's housing market — for the very people most desperate for apartments.
They're also likely ignorant about who benefits from below-market rents — i.e., folks who, like Mamdani, scored a rent-stabilized apartment, which is actually easier if you're wealthy (as he is).
One more irony here: The Supreme Court last year nixed New York landlords' claim that the rent laws violate the Constitution's 'takings' clause.
Thing is, that ruling relied on the assumption that the RGB has real independence — a fiction that will collapse if Mamdani wins on promises platform of 0% hikes and then delivers.
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