New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani rose to prominence on his campaign pledge to “freeze the rent” on the city’s nearly 1 million rent-stabilized housing units. But in his last days in office, Eric Adams—a vocal opponent of Mamdani’s rent freeze—tried to create a bureaucratic roadblock to his successor’s plans.
Now, an eleventh-hour bungle by the outgoing mayor has cleared away the final obstacle to Mamdani’s freeze. Everyday New Yorkers will be the ones forced to bear the costs: housing units that are shabbier, costlier, and fewer in number.
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Late last year, Adams declared his intention to appoint numerous new members to the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, which is responsible for voting annually on whether to adjust rents on stabilized units in the city. Adams’s appointees would have been removable only “for cause” and, like the former mayor, presumably would have opposed a Mamdani rent freeze. As such, a board with a majority of Adams appointees could have delayed any rent-freeze plans until a year or two into Mamdani’s tenure.
But in the final hours of the Adams administration, two of the former mayor’s picks declined to serve on the board, resulting in a botched appointment process. Thus, Mamdani will immediately be able to appoint five members of the nine-member board, giving his appointees majority control.
Mamdani has pledged to make his appointments “soon,” and the board will meet initially in the spring, before reviewing housing data and taking a final vote in the summer, with adjustments usually taking effect in the fall. Though a rent freeze is not guaranteed given the way the board’s membership terms are staggered, it appears likely that, by fall 2026 at the latest, New York City will have its first rent freeze since the Bill de Blasio administration.
The impact of this earlier-than-expected rent freeze will be substantial. Economic research is nearly unanimous in detailing the deleterious effects of rent control.
Artificially reduced rents lead to a backlog of deferred maintenance, as landlords struggle to make enough money to fund repairs. Partly as a result, researchers have consistently found that rent control leads to fewer available rental units, as landlords—unable to cover maintenance costs—hold more units idle or seek to sell them to buyers who will live in the units.
At the same time, rent in uncontrolled units usually rises. Data show that rents in unregulated units in New York City are 20 percent higher than they might have been without the city’s rent-control policies. Some locales also saw a decline in new housing construction after imposing rent-control policies, further aggravating the ongoing housing-affordability crisis.
The 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act makes this situation even worse. This law functionally eliminated “vacancy bonuses,” which allowed landlords of stabilized units to raise rent by as much as 20 percent when they had turnover in tenants. Other provisions for recouping costs were similarly curtailed.
The result has been a predictable spike in deferred maintenance, as well as an increase in “warehoused” units purposely kept off the market by landlords who have concluded that renting them will bring too paltry a return to be worthwhile. In fact, based on data crunched by the Columbia Business School, a four-year rent freeze will lead to significant long-term declines in the net operating income of units in fully rent-stabilized buildings. In certain economic-growth scenarios, the plunge could be catastrophic, turning net operating income negative within a decade-and-a-half—thereby “rendering the property worthless.”
When it comes to bad policy ideas like rent freezes, then, every year of delay counts. The costs of a sooner-than-expected rent freeze won’t just be felt by large property management companies. Many rent-stabilized units are managed by New Yorkers who own only a single building (and struggle to pay their mortgages).
For tenants living in stabilized units, it will mean run-down dwellings with more extensive deferred-maintenance backlogs. Tenants in non-stabilized units, meantime, can expect higher rents as competition gets fiercer for units not subject to the four-year freeze.
Former mayor Adams had a chance to limit the pain of Mamdani’s rent freeze. His fumble will cost New Yorkers dearly.
Photo by Zhang Weiguo/VCG via Getty Images