{"id":315884,"date":"2025-10-19T11:39:47","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T11:39:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/315884\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T11:39:47","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T11:39:47","slug":"would-zohran-mamdanis-rent-freeze-keep-rent-stabilized-apartments-empty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/315884\/","title":{"rendered":"Would Zohran Mamdani\u2019s Rent Freeze Keep Rent-Stabilized Apartments Empty?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The previous tenant paid nine hundred and three dollars a month. (A steal!) On the free market, the unit could fetch three thousand, easy. (Lee said he had to call it a \u201cde-facto\u201d two-bed, because legally, a living room has to have windows.) But he estimated that it would cost him a hundred and twenty thousand dollars to make the place livable, and, under the current rent-stabilization laws, the most he could charge would be twelve hundred a month\u2014which he said just about covers the operating cost of the apartment but not the renovations.<\/p>\n

We continued the tour. \u201cI\u2019ll probably get rid of this,\u201d Lee said, waving at the paint around some windows, \u201cbecause this is all lead.\u201d Given how much lead he was pointing out, I asked Lee if it was safe for us to even be there. \u201cThat\u2019s a good question,\u201d he said. \u201cI think it\u2019s O.K. It\u2019s not really chipped off or anything like that.\u201d He peered at a wall. \u201cI don\u2019t know if you have an actual monitor to see if there\u2019s any dust?\u201d he asked. I told him I didn\u2019t. \u201cThis is par for the course for Chinatown tenement buildings,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are some buildings that have the toilet in the hallway.\u201d I asked him about the children\u2019s scooter on the ground. \u201cI don\u2019t know how that got there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Under current laws, landlords can raise the rent if they make improvements to a vacant apartment, but the amount is capped at fifty thousand dollars, spread out over fifteen years. (Before 2019, a landlord could charge a twenty-per-cent vacancy rise when a tenant moved out, and there was no fifty-thousand-dollar cap.) When I asked Lee why he hadn\u2019t renovated the apartment earlier, he said that it was because of the previous tenant. \u201cYou have to put them up\u2014if you take them out to renovate,\u201d he said. But the apartment had now been vacant for three years. Why was it still unrenovated and unrentable? \u201cThere\u2019s no incentive economically,\u201d he said. \u201cYou lose money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Approximately a million apartments in New York are rent-regulated, and living in one is sort of the dream. The rules are often arcane and not necessarily understood by the people who live in these places. (One renter in Harlem recently discovered<\/a>, after twenty years of paying market rents, that his apartment was rent-stabilized.)<\/p>\n

There are two kinds of rent-regulated apartments: rent-controlled and rent-stabilized. The popular conception of a rent-regulated apartment\u2014a walkup in Manhattan, somehow still leasing at decades-old prices\u2014is most likely a rent-controlled one. (On \u201cSex and the City,\u201d Carrie Bradshaw\u2019s fictional one-bedroom is seven hundred and fifty dollars a month and rent-controlled; in \u201cAnd Just Like That\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d the new tenant puts in a dividing wall so she can split it with a roommate.) But rent control was phased out in 1971, and now there are only twenty-four thousand rent-controlled apartments in the city. (These units can be passed down to family members, but generally when a rent-controlled tenant moves out, the apartment becomes rent-stabilized or hits the free market.) Meanwhile, there are 996,600 rent-stabilized apartments, whose rents are dictated by the nine-person Rent Guidelines Board. Under de Blasio, rents were frozen three times, and no single-year increase was above 1.5 per cent; under Adams, they rose 3.25 per cent in 2022, three per cent in 2023, 2.75 per cent in 2024, and will rise three per cent again this year.<\/p>\n

Lee\u2019s building has eight apartments that more or less tell the story of rent regulation across the years. One is rent-stabilized but vacant; six are rent-stabilized and occupied; and one, on the second floor, is market rate. That apartment, he told me, used to look like his vacant one\u2014tub in the kitchen, lead in the walls. In 2017, Lee spent more than a hundred thousand dollars to renovate it, which allowed him, under previous laws, to destabilize it. It\u2019s now renting out for thirty-five hundred dollars a month, as a two-bed, to a couple of Wall Street guys who moved from California. (\u201cVery reasonable for Manhattan,\u201d Lee said.) His other rent-stabilized apartments, which are similar in size, go for around a thousand dollars or less. He\u2019s done some minor renovations\u2014\u201cI put the shower, the bathroom, and sink together, nothing dramatic\u201d\u2014but decided to keep them rent-stabilized. Lee opposes Mamdani and the proposed rent freeze, but he said he doesn\u2019t oppose rent-stabilization over all. He was born in New York and grew up in the Two Bridges neighborhood. He told me, \u201cI wanted to keep a lot of the Chinatown tenants, the working families, here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The previous tenant paid nine hundred and three dollars a month. (A steal!) On the free market, the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":315885,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[852,5229,5705,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,8167,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-315884","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-affordable-housing","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-mayors","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-newyork","14":"tag-newyorkcity","15":"tag-ny","16":"tag-nyc","17":"tag-rent","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-united-states-of-america","20":"tag-unitedstates","21":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","22":"tag-us","23":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115400646801976671","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}