Congratulations On Your Rent Freeze, Rent-Stabilized New Yorkers!

'Cause everything is rent?

Jun 26, 2026

It’s an exciting day for New Yorkers in rent-stabilized apartments — which are just under half of rental units in the city. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has kept his promise of freezing the rent for two years, which is a pretty big deal in a city where the median monthly rent is now upwards of $5,100 a month and just keeps increasing exponentially year after year.

On Thursday, in a 7-to-1 vote, the city’s Rent Guidelines Board approved the rent freeze for both one- and two-year leases.

Via the New York Times:

“This is a historic victory for New York City tenants,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement after the vote. He added, “I’ll continue working to deliver a more affordable city by building and preserving affordable housing, lowering building operating costs like insurance and ensuring tenants know their rights.” […]
“The working class makes this city run, and we deserve to live in dignity,” said Farhana Rahman, a tenant leader in Astoria, Queens, for CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, which advocates on behalf of low-income Asian communities. “A freeze on rents for two years means relief and peace of mind for 24 months.”

This is true. Everyone I know who rents is regularly anxious about how much their rent is going to go up every year. Giving people that peace of mind is an incredible gift.

Of course, it’s not a gift anyone would need if landlords would just stop being ridiculously greedy. To that end, one of the things Mamdani looked for when he was appointing people to the board was an understanding that landlords are doing just fine.

Unsurprisingly, the Mamdani rent freeze is already living rent free in the heads of hundreds of right-wing social media users who do not live in New York, but whose hearts break for the landlords who are going to be hurt by this, as well as claiming that this will actually make the housing market worse in the long-run as landlords won’t be able to afford maintenance and repairs on the apartments if they have to go two to four years without raising the rent on their tenants. Landlords might, through no fault of their own, end up Jared Kushner-style slumlords, even!

However, as it turns out, these landlords — specifically landlords of rent-stabilized apartments — have seen their profits increase for several years now. There are also myriad stories online from tenants whose landlords have been illegally overcharging them for rent, or not even telling them that they live in rent-stabilized housing. One preliminary study found that about 30 percent of rent-stabilized tenants in the city have been overcharged.

So there’s really no need to worry about them, they’re doing just fine.

The fact is, whether people who don’t live there like it or not, the city literally cannot function if everyone has to pay upwards of $5000 a month for rent, because many of the people the city relies on to function do not even get paid that much in total. There have to be people to work in the restaurants, bars, shops, salons and other customer service roles that keep the city going. Because you know what happens when those things all have to shut down because no one who works in those industries can afford to live in the city? Rich people won’t want to live there either. Also, tourism — a thing that’s pretty important to the New York City economy, as well as to the dirtbag landlords who converted their buildings into AirBnBs — dies.

I don’t actually understand how this is hard for people to understand. Businesses want to pay people starvation wages, landlords want to charge exorbitant amounts of money for rent, Republicans don’t want the government to give anyone a “handout” — if all three get what they want, there really is no possible way for society to continue functioning.

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Even Maksim Wynn, one of the landlords on the board, understands that this is a good idea for the city, and even for landlords, ultimately.

Mr. Wynn said in a statement that the problems facing landlords needed broader solutions from the city and state, and that increases might actually decrease income collected by landlords if tenants stop paying.
“Those systemic issues need to be addressed, but, at this moment, the tools this board has are more likely to cause owners harm rather than help, while the tools that the city and state have will definitively help,” he said.

Because everyone knows the rent is too damned high.

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