Left-wing mayoral candidates and a newly launched "housing justice" group are promising a multiyear rent freeze on the city's nearly 1 million rent-regulated units. That's more than half the rental apartments in Gotham. It's a cynical political strategy: Pander to a block of single-issue voters almost too large to resist -- and capture the mayoralty.
Actually implementing that freeze would turn the entire city into a slum, with dilapidated, abandoned buildings and thousands of occupants forced to live in squalor because their apartments are no longer maintained.
It could happen. In New York City, occupants of rent-stabilized apartments -- about 1.7 million people living in about 980,000 units -- outnumber residents of unregulated apartments. If these rent regulation beneficiaries are mobilized as single-issue voters, they can swing an election. Barely a million people voted in the 2021 mayoral primary, and just over 1.1 million in the general.
Leftist candidates are not leaving it to chance. Zohran Mamdani, Brad Lander and Jessica Ramos commit to freezing rents if they're elected.
"Tenants are a majority, and it's time we had a mayor who acted like it," Mamdani says. He's calculating that this single-issue voting bloc can carry him to victory.
New York State Tenant Bloc is making the same calculation statewide. "There are over 9 million tenants in New York," its website declares. "There's millions more tenants than there are landlords. We have the power to break the real estate industry's grip on our lives by uniting as a bloc." The group's battle cry is "freeze the rent."
Cornell University professor Russell Weaver, who provided the analysis behind the NYS Tenant Bloc's formation, calls tenants the "sleeping giant" in future elections.
Not sleeping for long. Assemblywoman Sarahana Shrestha, a democratic socialist representing the Hudson Valley, credits her own win with activating tenant voters. Now she is sponsoring the Rent Emergency Stabilization for Tenants Act, which would permit towns and cities in all parts of the state to impose rent caps. Current law limits rent stabilization to New York City and downstate counties, unless towns in other areas perform vacancy studies. Those requirements have kept Poughkeepsie and Kingston from capping rents.
Shrestha rants that "tenants are half the state" and should vote as a block to stop "price-gouging landlords."
New Yorkers need to know the brutal consequences of rent regulations and rent freezes before they fall for this demagoguery.
In New York City, the Rent Guidelines Board's nine members -- all mayoral appointees -- set permissible rent hikes once a year. Succumbing to political pressure, the RGB generally sets hikes at about half the inflation rate, meaning building owners, facing rising property taxes and labor, energy and water costs, get shortchanged. Eventually, many let properties fall into disrepair, allow dilapidated units to sit vacant, or even abandon their buildings.
The Citizens Budget Commission's housing expert Sean Campion testified to the RGB on May 22 that a significant share of buildings are heading into this maintenance "death spiral."
That's the damage already caused by rent regulation even before the threatened freeze. The city's older housing stock is crumbling, and fewer units are available, causing a shortage.
Nationwide, for 19 consecutive months, rents have fallen in metro areas ... everywhere but in New York City, the city with the fastest-rising rents. Denver, the metro area where rents are falling fastest, has no rent regulation. Colorado state law forbids it. That's what should be done in New York state.
What about helping the poor? Rent regulation doesn't accomplish that. There is no means testing to get a rent-regulated apartment. You need luck, sharp elbows and often a wad of cash to buy your way in. Occupants of rent-regulated apartments -- call them privileged renters -- tend to have somewhat smaller incomes but are also generally adults without young children. Families, who you would think need rent breaks most to shelter their children, are less apt to luck out, according to the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
A fair system would provide assistance based on need and funded by all taxpayers, not shouldered by owners. New York doesn't command certain grocery stores to sell food at below-market prices to the needy. The taxpayer-funded SNAP program is there for that purpose.
Rent regulation rewards pandering politicians, not the poor, and survives because of that.
The radical calls for rent freezes are a red flag that New Yorkers are in danger of being crushed -- steamrolled -- by a mobilized block of voters looking out for themselves.
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