Zohran Mamdani wants to freeze rents for New Yorkers. Here's why it's controversial.
It's not unusual for a New York City mayor to support temporarily pausing rent increases on the city's nearly one million rent-stabilized units, which make up about half of all rental apartments and house more than 2 million people. But Mamdani has gone a step further, promising to replace the members of the Rent Guidelines Board with individuals committed to freezing rents every year of his term.
Tenant advocates say that a rent freeze would provide crucial relief to low-income New Yorkers — especially families of color, seniors, and Gen Z renters — in one of the most expensive cities in the country. But landlords say rent freezes would starve many buildings of crucial income needed to maintain and repair stabilized apartments, while some housing economists say depressing rents could discourage much-needed housing construction.
Here's what's really going on with Mamdani's rent freeze, and what it would mean for the city.
How New York renters are actually doing
Mamdani's rent freeze pledge comes as the city's renters are struggling. About a quarter of all city households that don't live in public housing or use a housing voucher are severely rent-burdened, meaning they spend at least half of their income on housing. The typical tenant household earns about $70,000 a year, but citywide median rent hit almost $3,700 a month — or over $44,000 a year — in late 2024.
Rent-stabilized apartments make up the biggest share of the city's affordable housing. The median rent in a stabilized apartment was is about $1,500 in 2023 according to the city's latest data — about $141 less than the total median of $1,614 for all rental units.
Black, Latino and low-income residents are overrepresented as tenants in rent-stabilized apartments and thus could especially benefit from a freeze.
The rising cost of living is making it hard for New Yorkers to stay in the city. "The median income for a rent-stabilized household is $60,000 a year. Any rent hike could push them out of the city," Mamdani said in a campaign video.
For now, rents will keep rising. Less than a week after Mamdani's primary win, the nine-member Rent Guidelines Board voted on Monday to raise rents for one-year leases in stabilized units by 3%, and by 4.5% on two-year leases.
The board raised rents by a total of 9% during the first three years of Mayor Eric Adams' term. That's up from Adams' predecessor, Mayor Bill De Blasio, who oversaw three rent freezes during his eight years in office and a 6% increase in stabilized rents overall.
One of the Rent Guidelines Board members who voted in favor of the rent increase, Alex Armlovich, called it "a nuanced compromise" between competing testimonies from landlords and tenants.
The pros and cons of a rent freeze
Critics of rent freezes point to a few major issues. They argue that rent increases are needed to allow landlords to keep up with their costs, including building repairs and maintenance.
Proponents of freezing rents argue landlords can tap other resources to fill the gap in revenue. Sam Stein, a housing policy analyst with the Community Service Society — a nonprofit focused on aiding low-income New Yorkers, said that city-run targeted programs designed to aid landlords who can't cover the costs are better-suited to address the problem rather than raising rents for all stabilized units.
Mamdani and other rent freeze advocates argue that many landlords of stabilized units are doing fine. Indeed, a report by the Rent Guidelines Board found that these landlords' average income, after subtracting expenses and adjusting for inflation, was up 8% between 2022 and 2023.
But that number doesn't give a full financial picture, as landlords could have mortgages and other debts, and it's an average across a very diverse array of buildings.
Buildings with rent-stabilized apartments range from brand-new, high-end complexes with sky-high market rents and a small number of stabilized units, to 100% rent-stabilized buildings that have had controlled rents for 70 years. That diversity makes it especially tricky to fit a citywide rent increase to all those units.
"We have both the newest, healthiest, most expensive rental buildings in the city and the most distressed, low-rent buildings in the city all under one system, and we're supposed to pick one number," Armlovich said.
Addressing the housing shortage
Fundamentally, New York's affordability problem is caused by a shortage of homes. Recently, apartment vacancy rates hit a more than 50-year low of 1.4%.
Some housing economists worry that freezing rents on stabilized units could discourage housing construction, further depressing the supply of homes and hurting affordability. They point to real estate developers who accept tax incentives on new and converted buildings that include a certain amount of rent-stabilized units. Some argue builders would be less likely to take advantage of these programs if the stabilized units brought in less revenue under a rent freeze.
Armlovich said that several rent freezes under a future administration would likely only have a modest impact on housing construction broadly. But he worries that an environment of frozen rents could scare off some developers and financiers.
"It's just like old conservative, middle-aged bankers being like, 'Oh my god, you want to underwrite a construction loan under socialism?'" Armlovich said.
Mamdani has also floated other pro-building housing policies. The candidate has proposed building 200,000 subsidized affordable homes and doubling the city Housing Authority's funding for preserving existing affordable housing, while he's expressed some interest in loosening land-use regulations to spur new construction.
What renters and landlords think about a rent freeze
While Mamdani's win was something of an upset, lifelong New Yorker John Leyva said it was a reflection of renters' desire to see a mayoral candidate promising to tackle affordability issues head-on. Leyva has been organizing tenants in Brooklyn who he said have been squeezed with rents for the past decade.
"I was paying $400 a month for a two-bedroom when I first got here," said the 54 year-old, who's lived in his rent-stabilized apartment for the past 30 years. At the time, he was able to afford college, a car, and rent on a minimum-wage job. "Tenants now have two and three jobs just to try to pay what they can now."
Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, said that renters' and landlords' interests don't need to be opposed in solving New York City's affordability crisis, but that a rent freeze isn't the solution.
"When it comes to affordability, the only proven way to reduce the rent is increase the supply," Burgos said. With the volume of new housing that New York desperately needs, Burgos said Mamdani will have to work with developers and the private sector to meet that demand if he wins this fall.
Property taxes in New York City are the "single largest expense in operating their housing," Burgos said. Without raising rents, landlords are facing a "dire" situation.
But Leyva said it's not as simple as supply and demand. It takes time to build new, permanently subsidized housing, and the private sector isn't sufficiently incentivized to do so, he argued, adding that renters need immediate relief.
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