For many New York City tenants, this week is likely to deliver a reprieve, with a New York City panel expected on Thursday to approve freezing rents on almost one million rent-stabilized apartments. At the same time, a majority of residents in one vast affordable housing complex are confronting a possible rent increase of more than 30 percent over four years.
That such wildly disparate outcomes could arise under Zohran Mamdani, a mayor who has pledged to “freeze the rent,” is in part because the complex, Tracey Towers in the Bronx, is governed by a different program than rent stabilization.
But the juxtaposition is posing a political problem.
On Thursday, hours before the panel’s meeting, six elected officials — including the City Council speaker, Julie Menin; the Bronx borough president, Vanessa Gibson; and U.S. Representative Adriano Espaillat, a Democrat who just lost a re-election bid against a candidate backed by the mayor — sent a letter to Mr. Mamdani arguing that he has “the authority and tools necessary to reduce or avoid a rent increase of this magnitude,” and urging him to act on that authority.
The City Council plans to hold a hearing on the matter in July.
Jean Hill, a retired bookkeeper who serves as president of the tenant association at Tracey Towers, said the proposed rent increase might make apartments so expensive that some tenants could lose their homes.
“That is not the platform the mayor ran on,” she said.
Matthew Rauschenbach, a spokesman for Mr. Mamdani, said the administration would make “critical investments” in developments like Tracey Towers. He said that state law required the city to back the rent increase.
“Our responsibility is not only to preserve affordable housing, but to stand with the New Yorkers who call it home,” he added.
The situation at Tracey Towers represents a decades-long predicament. Completed in 1974, the complex of 871 units represents a small share of the roughly 45,000 such homes remaining in New York City’s Mitchell-Lama program, which dates to the 1950s. The program secured affordable rents for New Yorkers by providing tax breaks and low-interest loans to developers.
Many other Mitchell-Lama developments have been converted to market-rate housing over the years. Several that remained in the program deteriorated. An audit by the state comptroller in March found the 92 Mitchell-Lama developments in New York City to be in chronic disrepair and said fiscal oversight by the city was insufficient.
Roughly 10 percent of those developments are in a state of financial distress today, housing officials said. They said it was not unusual for landlords to ask for increases in monthly charges for rentals and co-ops: In 2025, 37 different developments were subject to some increase. The average increase, according to the housing department, was 26 percent.
This year, another Mitchell-Lama development on the Upper West Side, Lincoln Amsterdam House, is seeking an increase that would bring the total monthly cost of a two-bedroom apartment there to $1,072 from $750, a 43 percent uptick that would be the first in 25 years. In that development, a lucrative commercial space helped keep rent increases to a minimum, the housing department said.
Still, Mitchell-Lama developments continue to serve as a rare bastion of middle-income and working-class housing in an increasingly unaffordable city.
The two buildings that comprise Tracey Towers — one 38 stories tall, the other 41 — stand near the corner of Jerome Avenue and Mosholu Parkway in the Bedford Park neighborhood, steps away from a subway station. They are among the borough’s tallest, offering commanding views, ample floor plans, outdoor space, good transit access and affordable rents. A two-bedroom apartment rents for about $1,680, and a one-bedroom for about $1,344.
But the buildings are plagued by leaks and elevators so dysfunctional that the Fire Department had to rescue people trapped in them dozens of times in the last year, according to Ms. Hill and the elected officials who signed the letter.
“I always tell tenants: Keep bottles of water in your house, because you never know when they’re going to cut it off,” Ms. Hill said.
In May, the towers’ landlord formally requested a rent increase from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which oversees it. The proposed increase, which was first reported by The New York Post, would go into effect about four to six months after the application was filed, and after a process that includes a public hearing, according to the department.
Asked why the rent increase was necessary, a spokesman for the landlord, RY Management, said only that such increases were “permitted” and would be approved by public agencies. The spokesman, Don Miller, said that the company had an “excellent working relationship” with the tenant association and that tenants should be confident that the money would go toward improving conditions in the buildings.
“Residents are always encouraged to contact the management company with any concerns,” he said.
The proposed increase would be phased in over four years, starting with 15 percent the first year, followed by 5 percent in each of the second and third years and 3 percent in the fourth year.
Without those increases, the building would operate at a deficit, according to both the landlord and the city. They added that the owner of Tracey Towers had seen a sharp spike in costs for insurance premiums, security and labor.
But tenants said they should not have to shoulder such steep costs just a few years after another set of rent increases: 13 percent in 2022, 5 percent in 2023 and 3 percent in 2024. (City officials noted that rent was frozen at Tracey Towers from 2015 to 2021.)
“If you think about the Rent Guidelines Board, people are apoplectic that they’re even considering a 2 percent rent increase,” said Eric Dinowitz, the city councilman representing the district, referring to the panel that votes on rent increases for rent-stabilized apartments. “But the city otherwise seems fine with a 30.59-percent rent increase.”
According to city officials, their hands are effectively tied.
State law requires that requested rent increases be approved to allow buildings to cover their costs, according to the housing department. That rule differs from the rent stabilization system, under which the Rent Guidelines Board decides each year whether to raise rents and by how much, and its members can be swayed by city officials or housing advocates.
At least a third of Tracey Towers residents have federal Section 8 housing vouchers, or are covered by city benefits for older people or people with disabilities, according to the city, so they will not see any rent increases. And the city is already pouring about $36 million into the development to improve conditions there, while the landlord has fallen behind on mortgage payments, officials said.
The elected officials challenging the mayor to take action find that argument unpersuasive, stressing that the city has ample financing, subsidy and insurance tools at its disposal.
“We’ve got a situation where, in an affordability crisis, raising the rent 30 percent on these Mitchell-Lama residents is completely unacceptable,” Ms. Menin said in an interview. “We have real concerns about how this situation got to this point.”
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