Photo: Christian Monterrosa/Bloomberg
Zohran Mamdani has made freezing the rent on the city’s more than 1 million rent-stabilized apartments a cornerstone of his mayoral campaign, but with less than three months to go in his term, the administration of Mayor Eric Adams is considering a way to thwart Mamdani’s ability to do just that should he be elected.
More than 2 million New Yorkers live in rent-stabilized apartments, and the amount they pay every month is set by the Rent Guidelines Board, whose members are appointed by the mayor. Currently, six of the nine are serving under expired terms, allowing Adams to either simply reappoint them or name other members who would be even less disposed to Mamdani’s rent freeze. (A seventh member has a term that expires at the end of the year.) With terms lasting between two and four years, Adams may be able to stop Mamdani from fulfilling his campaign promise for the first several years of his administration.
Freezing the rent is the plank of Mamdani’s platform that many policy experts thought to be the most achievable. He has called for free bus fare, but that requires approval from the Metropolitan Transit Authority. He has called for free child care for children up to 5 years old, but that would likely require a massive tax hike that Governor Kathy Hochul has pledged to resist.
A number of major players in the city’s real-estate industry have been quietly nudging the administration to pack the board in their favor. Yet Adams has so far declined to replace the board members, which is a mystery to many in the real-estate industry, leaving some to fear that he is miffed at them. Though the city’s real-estate titans poured money into his independent mayoral campaign after Mamdani crushed Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, many in the industry also privately urged Adams to abandon his bid once it became clear that his remaining in the race only increased the chances of a Mamdani victory in a rematch with Cuomo, now running as an independent.
Most owners of rent-stabilized properties are not major real-estate firms but mom-and-pop outfits that own just a handful, if that many, of what are often multi-family homes in the outer boroughs. They have the most to fear from a rent freeze and hope that Adams would at least buy them time.
“Even if it would just give us a year or two, it would be something quite helpful,” says Bob Knackal, a longtime commercial real-estate broker. “The reality is that the rent-stabilized housing market has been completely eviscerated by public policy, and Mamdani and his rent freeze would be the final nail in the coffin.”
The stalemate between Adams and landlords over the Rent Guidelines Board also comes as the mayor has been making fewer public appearances than he was in the weeks before he dropped out, save for a surprise and unannounced multiday visit to Albania.
“The mayor will announce any new appointments at the appropriate time,” says spokesperson William Fowler.
Building owners say that it is necessary to continue to raise rents in order to deal with rising costs and insurance premiums, and that the sector has never recovered from a 2019 law reform that limited the ability of property owners to raise rents and kept more apartments in the rent-regulated system.
“People on the Rent Guidelines Board take their jobs very seriously, and once you present them with the data, they will come to realize how severe the distress is in the rent-stabilized industry,” says Kenny Burgos, the CEO of the New York Apartment Association, which represents rent-stabilized-building landlords.
Mamdani lives in a rent-stabilized apartment in Queens with his wife that costs $2,300 per month. Over the summer, Cuomo tried to make political hay out of Mamdani’s rent situation, saying that as an assemblyman who makes $142,000, he was taking the apartment of a more needy New Yorker, and even proposed something he called “Zohran’s Law,” which would enact means testing for rent-stabilized-apartment tenants.
Rent increases were frozen three times during Bill de Blasio’s eight-year term. Tenant activists pushed for the same under Adams, but the board chose to raise rents every year, totaling a 12 percent hike over his four-year term.
Tenant advocates and allies of Mamdani say that they are very aware of the fact that Adams may use his remaining three months in office to block the center of the candidate’s platform and have been exploring ways to circumvent a potential Adams-appointed majority on the board. Board members can be removed, but only for cause, and there is a belief among advocates that remaining board members can be persuaded by the kind of organizing push that Mamdani has powered his rise to front-runner.
“Rents continue to skyrocket, and the data shows that a rent freeze is overdue,” says Mamdani spokesperson Dora Pekec. “Zohran is confident that the Rent Guidelines Board will deliver a rent freeze when he’s in office.”
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