{"id":61859,"date":"2026-05-08T03:36:07","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T03:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/61859\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T03:36:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T03:36:07","slug":"vote-brings-freeze-the-rent-closer-to-reality-in-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/61859\/","title":{"rendered":"Vote Brings \u2018Freeze the Rent\u2019 Closer to Reality in New York"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s push to freeze rents<\/a> for nearly one million New York City apartments cleared a major hurdle on Thursday night when a city panel backed rents that included leases with no increases.<\/p>\n

In a preliminary vote, the panel, the nine-member Rent Guidelines Board, supported increases of between 0 and 2 percent on one-year leases, and 0 and 4 percent on two-year leases for rent-stabilized apartments. A vote on the final numbers, which will fall within those ranges, will take place on June 25.<\/p>\n

The vote was seven in favor, one against and one abstention, with the two representatives of landlords not voting yes.<\/p>\n

\u201cNew Yorkers are being crushed by the cost of living, and they need real relief,\u201d Mr. Mamdani said in a statement after the vote.<\/p>\n

He said he thought that the board had appropriately taken into account \u201cpressures facing both tenants and small property owners\u201d to set the preliminary ranges and that the board would \u201carrive at a decision later this summer that reflects the urgency of this moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The decisions of the panel<\/a> are contentious every year, but the stakes are especially high as the city faces one of its worst affordability crises in generations.<\/p>\n

An extreme shortage of housing has sent housing coasts soaring, with the median asking rent on a new lease citywide at about $4,120 in April 2026, according to the renting platform StreetEasy, up from $2,800 in April 2019.<\/p>\n

The rent-stabilization system, by contrast, was designed to protect renters from price shocks, and it has largely moderated increases: A household that rented an apartment that was $2,800 in 2019, and renewed a lease every year, would pay about $3,250 monthly today.<\/p>\n

The board bases its decisions on the economics of rent-stabilized buildings, renter incomes, wage data, inflation and changes in the city\u2019s housing supply, among a host of other metrics.<\/p>\n

Last year, it voted to allow increases of 3 percent on one-year leases and 4.5 percent on two-year leases, a decision that angered tenant advocates. But this year, its work has attracted even more attention, given Mr. Mamdani\u2019s campaign promise of a rent freeze and landlords\u2019 complaints about the increasing costs of owning and maintaining property in New York City.<\/p>\n

All the members of the board are mayoral appointees, and Mr. Mamdani has named a majority of its current members. Still, in theory, the board is supposed to operate independently.<\/p>\n

Ann Korchak, the board president of the Small Property Owners of New York, a landlord advocacy group, said in a statement after the vote on Wednesday that the board \u201cwas violating its statutory mandate of objectively analyzing relevant data and basing their rent adjustments on the health, preservation and viability of rent-stabilized housing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis vote instead continues a decade-long pattern of defunding privately owned rent-stabilized housing stock and clearly surrenders to City\u2019s Hall\u2019s political pressure,\u201d Ms. Korchak said.<\/p>\n

H.L. Lopes, 60, a landlord who owns more than 100 buildings, dismissed the vote on Thursday.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a show,\u201d said Mr. Lopes, who formed a landlord advocacy group called the Gotham Housing Alliance to challenge Mr. Mamdani. He said he loves tenants, but contended that many buildings are on the brink of financial disaster.<\/p>\n

Tenant groups had a different take.<\/p>\n

\u201cOrganized tenants helped put Zohran Mamdani in office, and organized tenants will ensure the Rent Guidelines Board delivers on a promise supported by over one million New Yorkers,\u201d said Sumathy Kumar, director of New York State Tenant Bloc, a lobbying group. \u201cA rent freeze on one- and two-year leases is a common-sense intervention supported by the data and by tenants who make up the majority of New York City.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, some renters who attended the hearing were dismayed that any increase could happen. After the panel approved the preliminary ranges that included the possibility of increases, hundreds of tenants and tenant advocates in attendance at the hearing at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, began booing and shouting, \u201cShame on you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI know a lot of people want a rollback,\u201d said Shelby Chen, 16, who lives in a $1,200-a-month subdivided studio apartment in Chinatown with her mother and brother. She attended the meeting with members of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, which advocates on behalf of low-income Asian communities. \u201cThat\u2019s something I also want to achieve,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The board\u2019s research showed that<\/a> between 2023 and 2024, the most recent period for which data is available, the \u201cnet operating income\u201d \u2014 a metric of a building\u2019s financial health that takes into account revenue from rent and some costs like insurance \u2014 increased in every borough except in the Bronx, where it dipped slightly. Citywide, it increased by more than 6 percent.<\/p>\n

But the data is highly contested, with tenants and landlords both complaining that it falls short.<\/p>\n

Rent stabilization is a form of rent regulation that was created in the mid-20th century to protect New Yorkers from sharp rent increases.<\/p>\n

Forty percent of all rental apartments in the city are rent stabilized, and they are home to a vast and diverse set of New Yorkers.<\/p>\n

A median rent-stabilized studio apartment rents for about $1,360, and a two-bedroom rents for about $1,530 a month, according to city data. The median rent for a market-rate studio is $2,000, and for a two-bedroom it is $2,200.<\/p>\n

Most rent-stabilized apartments are occupied by people with lower or middle incomes: The median household income for rent-stabilized tenants is about $60,000, compared with $90,800 for market-rate households, according to a 2023 city survey<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But people with higher incomes can live in rent-stabilized apartments, too, and many do. About 7 percent of rent-stabilized households \u2014 tens of thousands of people \u2014 earn between $150,000 and $200,000, according to an analysis of city housing data by the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit fiscal watchdog.<\/p>\n

Many new, expensive units are kept rent-stabilized by developers in exchange for property tax breaks. According to the board\u2019s most recent analysis, the city added nearly 15,000 rent-stabilized units<\/a> in 2024, which had a median rent of more than $3,100.<\/p>\n

The economics of these buildings may be very different than those of older, more affordable rent-stabilized buildings. Older buildings tend to have lower<\/a> net operating incomes than newer ones.<\/p>\n

The diverging trends are most apparent in the Bronx. Between 2023 and 2024, the net operating income rose by 1.5 percent in buildings there that were constructed in or after 1974, but decreased by 0.8 percent in those built earlier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s push to freeze rents for nearly one million New York City apartments cleared a major…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[148],"tags":[559,560,27917,36650,22193,17016,553],"class_list":{"0":"post-61859","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-zohran-mamdani","8":"tag-mamdani","9":"tag-new-york-city","10":"tag-real-estate-and-housing-residential","11":"tag-rent-control-and-stabilization","12":"tag-rent-guidelines-board","13":"tag-zohran","14":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116536868151371458","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}