NEW YORK — After Zohran Mamdani’s resounding victory in New York City’s mayoral race, Brooklyn landlord Humberto Lopes took to TikTok to blast out a warning: “The storm is here.”
He’d been preparing for it. One week earlier, Lopes launched Gotham Housing Alliance, a new landlord coalition, to rally owners against Mamdani’s proposed rent freezes and other unfavorable policies. Owners are already getting a raw deal, he lamented, and the new mayor’s agenda could force them into ruin. “Enough’s enough,” Lopes declared in one recent video.
His frustration is not unique.
An entire industry that once bankrolled mayors and governors — and wielded weighty influence in City Hall and Albany — is on the defensive, scrambling to prove it still has clout in a city that just elected a far-left mayor with a controversial and costly policy agenda.
For decades, New York’s landlords were power brokers, not protesters. But after years of losses in Albany and at the ballot box, the industry has been increasingly sidelined — and Mamdani’s victory is the starkest indication yet of that reversal of fortune.
The mayor-elect is gearing up for an unprecedented step: freezing rents for up to four years across nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments, which house about two million people — or roughly a quarter of the city’s population. Mamdani and his allies argue the dramatic move — which would be carried out through a mayor-appointed board — is needed to help renters stay afloat in an increasingly unaffordable city.
Landlords are scrambling to stop him: pondering legal action, hoping lame-duck Mayor Eric Adams can kneecap Mamdani for a year or two with last-minute appointments, and sounding the alarm that many rent-regulated buildings are on the verge of collapse. Some are banking on the expectation that, eventually, conditions in their buildings will get bad enough that policymakers will be forced to act in their favor.
“The crisis this housing is in is certainly not Zohran’s fault, but his threats against this industry are very concerning for members whose housing is on the brink of extinction,” said Kenny Burgos, head of the New York Apartment Association and a former Democratic state lawmaker. “We need to work with the administration, but all options remain on the table.”
For years, Burgos’ members benefitted from state laws that allowed them to eliminate rent caps for some 170,000 apartments over two and a half decades — all while insufficient housing growth fueled a record shortage. During that time, landlords became a convenient boogeyman for a spiraling affordability crisis, which eventually set the stage for Mamdani’s rise.
The showdown isn’t just about landlords and tenants — it’s another illustration of how Mamdani has flipped the levers of power in America’s biggest city. Mamdani’s rent-freeze plan will be one of the most high-profile tests yet of a movement that’s reshaping Democratic politics, and its outcome will have political and policy consequences across the country.
Lopes, who runs a firm called H.L. Dynasty, believes the mayor-elect “will be forced to sit down with us” due to the sheer number of disgruntled owners he plans to mobilize. He drew hundreds to a “landlord town hall” with the sympathetic Mayor Eric Adams a few months ago. “You’ve woken up a lion,” Lopes told POLITICO.
Mamdani’s supporters — the “kids” who helped get out the vote for him – “don't have an understanding, they're immature,” he said.
“They think that freezing the rent and free food and all this shit — I would like to take a bunch of them and throw them in Cuba for a little while.”
Rent freeze push
Hunting for a place to live in New York City entails being at the mercy of a harsh and unforgiving rental market. Cramped, shabby apartments draw lines around the block. Renters are so desperate for options that bidding wars sometimes break out.
And there is perhaps no better illustration of the rage renters feel in this precarious landscape than the annual votes of the Rent Guidelines Board. Hundreds of tenants converge at these notoriously raucous meetings each June, when the mayor-appointed panel determines how much rents can go up in regulated housing.
Tenant groups pack the auditorium, holding signs with messages like, “Stop real estate greed!” and chanting so loud they can render the final decision inaudible. At one recent meeting, activists continuously yelled “Shame!” at the nine-member board, which sat silently until the chants faded. At another meeting, activists and politicians stormed the stage — prompting a former board chair to decry the move as “aggressive and threatening” and float virtual meetings going forward.
Despite these protests, Adams has overseen a cumulative 12-percent rent hike over his four-year tenure, higher than all the increases approved under predecessor Bill de Blasio, the left-leaning mayor who froze rents three times in eight years. While owners of rent-stabilized apartments found even Adams' rent increases insufficient, the mayor himself frequently empathized with them as a fellow small landlord (Adams rents out part of his Bed-Stuy brownstone and once proclaimed, “I am real estate.”)
Mamdani’s rise to City Hall is the most glaring manifestation of this long-simmering anger. Last November, when he was still virtually unknown, the mayor-elect — who lives in a rent-stabilized apartment — ran the New York City marathon wearing a t-shirt that read, “Eric Adams Raised My Rent!” On the back: “Zohran will freeze it!”
The pledge galvanized tenant activists, who argue a rent freeze will help preserve low-cost options in a market where they are increasingly scarce. The vacancy rate for apartments renting below $2,400 per month is less than 1 percent, according to the city’s most recent housing and vacancy survey.
Rent-regulated housing “is really the largest and most critical resource for low-income New Yorkers and people working minimum-wage jobs,” said Cea Weaver, a tenant activist and Mamdani adviser.
Landlords once protected their considerable influence in state government by contributing millions to Republicans who controlled the state Senate until 2019 and sided with landlord interests. That strategy became moot after Democrats took over the chamber and promptly set about passing laws that tilted the balance of power in favor of tenants — eliminating avenues to raise rents and take apartments out of rent-stabilization. The industry has struggled to regain its footing ever since.
Despite four years of a friendly mayor and a moderate governor, significant rollbacks to the 2019 rules have largely been a non-starter with the state Legislature, save for modest changes that most real estate players consider insufficient.
Landlord groups have repeatedly said there are tens of thousands of apartments being left vacant by owners after long-term tenancies because the rents are too low to justify renovations. (The city’s housing department has disputed these figures.)
The lobby has pushed for state changes that would allow higher rent hikes upon vacancies. But their increasingly dire rhetoric is still viewed with heavy skepticism by many lawmakers.
“The real estate industry has one tune and the tune is, the world is on fire,” said Democratic state Assemblymember Harvey Epstein, who previously served on the Rent Guidelines Board as a tenant representative under de Blasio.
In 2015, when the board approved its first rent freeze in its history, “landlords were saying, ‘The sky is falling,’” Epstein said. “The sky didn’t fall.”
Complicated path ahead
The rent board’s deliberations, which typically start in early spring, set off months of fierce jockeying and debate — a fight that will take on even greater magnitude during Mamdani’s first year in office.
And unlike some of Mamdani’s other plans, like universal childcare — which will be at the mercy of unpredictable machinations in Albany — the rent guidelines process is highly structured and highly public. The board follows a virtually identical schedule each year, with the same number of meetings, the same reports and the same key data points.
The annual data release, expected in March and April, may cut against the new mayor’s case for a rent freeze, particularly if it shows landlord incomes have dropped, or their costs have risen considerably. Owner advocates have suggested Mamdani’s “premeditated” pledge for a rent freeze could be outside the bounds of the law since it gets ahead of that process — and could potentially spark a legal fight.
Part of the trouble in deciphering the financial data is that rent-stabilized apartments, which make up nearly half of the city’s rental housing stock, are far from a monolith.
They include brand-new apartments in gleaming towers on the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts; buildings in prime Manhattan neighborhoods where one or two units might still be rent-stabilized but the others are renting at steep market rates; and older buildings in the outer boroughs where all the apartments are capped at relatively low rents.
The extensive data compiled annually by the RGB often contains statistics each side can frame in their favor.
For example, the net operating incomes of owners spiked 12 percent in 2023 — the highest increase in more than 30 years. Industry groups,
however, note this was driven by buildings in Manhattan that contain pricey, market-rate apartments.
Meanwhile, the share of rent-regulated buildings that are considered distressed — defined as costs exceeding gross income — is up sharply from the years prior to 2019, when the tenant-friendly overhaul was approved. Tenant advocates say the distress rate is still in line with historical levels.
Concerns about growing financial distress in some rent-regulated buildings are shared by prominent housing experts, some of whom had top roles advising prior mayors, like Alicia Glen, who was deputy mayor for housing under de Blasio, and Rafael Cestero, who was housing commissioner under Mike Bloomberg.
Mark Willis, a senior fellow at the respected NYU Furman Center, which conducts housing research, presented an analysis to the rent board this year that showed how rent increases are failing to keep up with expenses for older rent-stabilized buildings in the Bronx.
In recent months, Mamdani has placed more emphasis on lowering landlord costs, like property taxes, insurance and water bills, as part of the larger equation around a rent freeze.
“To freeze the rent does not also preclude you from working on the necessity of a property tax reform agenda that is currently part of the reason why it's so difficult to maintain rental housing across the city,” Mamdani said at a forum in October.
Issues like property tax reform, however, are notoriously thorny and have eluded several mayors.
Some owners who are adamantly opposed to Mamdani’s proposed rent freeze are skeptical he will make much headway on the other pieces. As such, they are preparing for a doomsday scenario.
“There are already several nails in the coffin, a rent freeze will be the one that decimates everything,” said one Bronx landlord who owns three rent-stabilized buildings and requested anonymity out of a “strong fear of retaliation.”
Her family would love to sell the buildings, “but the market for them is decimated,” the owner said. “These are biohazard assets and nobody wants them.”
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