Over 5,000 buildings in the Big Apple are nearing total financial collapse, as Mayor Zohran Mamdani continues to support a rent-freeze for the city’s nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments.
Building owners are offloading properties at discounted rates up to 90%, as they’re attacked with insurance hikes and “chronic non-payment” of rent, landlord reps warned at a Rent Guidelines Board meeting Thursday.
As the RGB gears up to vote on a preliminary rent increase or freeze in early May, landlord groups pleaded for the board to consider an increase.
“The analogy we use is 100 hard working firefighters trying to put out blazes in 5000 buildings,” explained CEO of the New York Apartment Association Kenny Burgos.
“It’s not possible… a rent freeze now would not hold the line. It would deepen the problem immediately in the buildings that are already closest to the edge,” he said.
Burgos noted the financial catastrophe is the worst in the Tremont, Hunts Point, and Fordham neighborhoods of The Bronx–which accounts for over 34% of the city’s dilapidated buildings– and is the only borough where landlords saw negative income across the board.
While income for landlords was up 6.2% in the lates RGB report, Burgos argued they group was using a “millionaire average” in their calculations.
“If you take one millionaire and average it with minimum wage earners, you will not get a realistic average of wages, and you can’t do that with these buildings either,” he said.
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