The main thrust of Zohran Mamdani’s housing plan — to “Freeze the Rent” for rent-stabilized apartments — sounds pretty good for the roughly two million people living in them.
But it also raises a question: If he’s elected, what will he do for the three million or so New Yorkers who rent their homes at market rates?
For them, Mr. Mamdani’s rent freeze would, at best, have no broad effect. And some housing experts say that holding rents on stabilized units steady could drive market-rate rents up. Freezing stabilized rents would likely encourage their tenants to stay put longer, these experts say, leaving the rest of the rental market to absorb the huge demand to live in New York City.
There are nearly one million rent-stabilized units in the city, according to the most recent figures, compared with about 1.1 million market-rate rentals. But, according to figures from 2023, just 24 percent of rent-stabilized apartments turned over in the preceding year, compared to 57 percent of market-rate apartments.
Mr. Mamdani’s proposal to more strictly regulate rents could also scare off banks thinking about financing housing construction in the city, leading to less housing getting built, said Alex Armlovich, a member of the Rent Guidelines Board, the panel that decides on rent adjustments for stabilized units.
And many rent-stabilized landlords are struggling financially from rising costs for insurance and maintenance. Capping rents could prompt them to take units off the market, said Mr. Armlovich, who is a senior housing policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a nonprofit public policy group.
Ashley Hendel, 27, pays more than $1,600 to split a market-rate two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. That takes up about 30 to 40 percent of her income, she said.
“I don’t think it will necessarily solve the whole housing affordable crisis,” she said of Mr. Mamdani’s rent policy. “I think it could have negative effects toward people like me, in a nonregulated unit, and sort of the market in general.”
But, she said, Ms. Hendel still supports Mr. Mamdani because of his general focus on affordability.
Freezing some rents is not the only plank in Mamdani’s housing policy. He also wants to encourage more housing to be built.
Mr. Mamdani has said he would spend $100 billion to build 200,000 new affordable homes and to preserve others, and he has indicated he wants yet more housing built across the city.
He has also said he would expand a program through which the city’s Social Services Department leverages housing vouchers to finance housing development. And he has pledged to eliminate the city’s arcane, decades-old parking requirements for new developments, which often increase the cost of construction.
Mihir Zaveri covers housing in the New York City region for The Times.
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