When faced with Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to freeze the rent on 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, the owners of said apartments countered with a theory that was a little like the Law of Conservation of Mass: Rents are neither created nor destroyed, only rearranged. Their argument was simple — costs are rising for landlords, and if they can’t raise the rents on their stabilized units, then they’ll have to raise them on the market-rate ones. The idea was to divide renters on the proposal: Your neighbor might have their rent frozen, but as a market-rate tenant, you’re the one who will pay for it. “Freezing the rents for some means raising the rents for others,” Kenny Burgos, the head of the New York Apartment Association, an organization of rent-stabilized landlords, said over the summer.
Now, all these months later, Mayor Mamdani seems to have the majority he needs on the Rent Guidelines Board. So what happens next, if close to a million households start paying four years of flat rents? Does the status quo hold, or will it be something closer to “A Tale of Two Apartments”?
