Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out about an analysis that says a rent freeze wouldn’t mean catastrophe for landlords. We’ll also get details on why a bird that is at home in and around New York is suddenly facing extinction.
A centerpiece of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was his promise to freeze the rent for about a million rent-stabilized tenants. The real estate industry countered that landlords could go bankrupt and the city’s economy could falter — and Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani’s main opponent, dismissed “freeze the rent” as “political blather” and “a great three-word slogan for TikTok.”
But now an independent analysis says that freezing the rent wouldn’t mean doom for landlords.
The analysis, by the debt-rating firm Moody’s, is somewhat technical. Here’s the short version:
Of the 481 landlords with loans that Moody’s looked at, only 6 percent, or 29, were at risk of defaulting on their mortgages if a five-year rent freeze took effect. My colleague Mihir Zaveri writes that this is because most landlords could ease the pressure by raising the rent on market-rate units in the same buildings as stabilized apartments — or on units that are not stabilized in other buildings they own.
Still, Darrell Wheeler, the head of commercial mortgage-backed securities research at Moody’s, warned that there would be “some economic pain” for some building owners if a rent freeze became reality, especially if the only units those landlords owned were rent-stabilized.
There’s no question that housing costs are soaring. The median citywide asking rent was about $4,120 in April, according to the renting platform StreetEasy, up from $2,800 in April 2019.
There’s also no question that rent takes a bigger proportion of tenants’ income in New York than almost anywhere else. The Moody’s analysis includes a calculation of rent-to-income ratios for the lowest-income households from 11 large cities. New York has the highest rents on the list, with rent accounting for as little as 62 percent of household income and as much as 133 percent.
There’s also no question that many landlords of rent-stabilized apartments are struggling with rising property taxes, higher insurance premiums and escalating maintenance costs. Mamdani has said the city could subsidize insurance costs or allow landlords in financial distress to raise rents on vacant apartments that are subject to other affordability requirements.
He can’t unilaterally order a rent freeze. But mayors appoint members of the Rent Guidelines Board, which can. That panel hasn’t finalized the numbers yet, but last month it cast a preliminary vote that might have set the stage for increases of zero. The vote was for the range of increases on lease renewals — between 0 and 2 percent for one year and 0 and 4 percent for two years.
Some housing experts say that a rent freeze could scare away banks that arrange loans for housing construction. That would mean fewer buildings with apartments would go up — and that, in turn, would undercut another of Mamdani’s goals.
Moody’s looked at 481 loans made to owners of apartment buildings. Those loans cover roughly 42,400 apartments in buildings across the city, of which about 43 percent are rent-stabilized.
The loans are part of financial products known as commercial mortgage-backed securities, which are essentially bundles of loans that are packaged together. The bundles include loans for office buildings, malls and restaurants as well as apartment projects, and are marketed to investors — who could sour on mortgage-backed securities if a long-term rent freeze materialized.
The New York Apartment Association, a landlord advocacy group, said that the Moody’s analysis was limited because it covered only a small subset of newer apartment buildings that are part of large portfolios. The group also argued that the report ignored the problems facing older, smaller buildings in the boroughs outside Manhattan.
“If a freeze moves the needle on the strongest players in our market,” said Kenny Burgos, the chief executive of the association, “just imagine what it does to the most vulnerable buildings.”
Weather
It will be a sunny day today with a high near 86. The sky will remain clear tonight as temperatures drop near 68.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until June 19 (Juneteenth).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“He’s the owner representing icons of Manhattan and the city at large, and to be so unloved — people love to hate him. I don’t think it applies more aptly to anyone else than Jim Dolan.” — Brad Hoylman-Sigal, the Manhattan borough president, on James Dolan, the owner of the New York Knicks.
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A heron that calls New York home is facing extinction
They’re about two feet tall. They’ve been seen in Harlem, along the East River in Queens and on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, where they are rumored to have a taste for the local rats. They’re in Central Park, too, where Valerie Wald, a high school teacher, enjoys watching their “characteristic behavior of doing absolutely nothing.”
They are black-crowned night herons. And they might not be there in just over a decade.
A new study by several groups, including the NYC Bird Alliance, the nonprofit formerly known as NYC Audubon, says that they could go the way of the passenger pigeon, which apparently disappeared in one generation, between 1870 and 1900.
My colleague Hilary Howard writes that it is a mystery why the black-crowned night heron seems to be on a path to extinction.
They are the dominant water bird in the New York/New Jersey Harbor area, which has the largest population of nesting herons and egrets in the Northeast. Their disappearance could indicate a looming threat, and not just for other water birds.
“We need to remember that if conditions are not healthy for birds, they’re unlikely to be healthy for us,” Amanda Rodewald, an ornithologist at Cornell, said in the 2025 “State of the Birds” report. More than 110 species had lost more than half of their populations during the last half-century, the report said.
The last time water birds disappeared from the harbor was amid the pollution from the Industrial Revolution. Birds returned after the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972. By the late 1990s, the New York/New Jersey Harbor was home to nearly a quarter of the nesting wading birds on the Atlantic coast, from Maine to Virginia.
Dustin Partridge, the director of conservation and science at the NYC Bird Alliance, said that the disappearance of black-crowned night herons in such a plentiful nesting area could mean that the species is at risk throughout the Northeast. “If we lose New York Harbor, we may entirely lose these birds,” he said.
METROPOLITAN diary
Jamaica Avenue memories
Dear Diary:
Since moving away from St. Albans, Queens, many years ago, I have carted around an old wooden clothes hanger that I “inherited” from my grandparents.
It is stenciled with the name of a shop on Jamaica Avenue that closed long ago, B&B Clothing Store. Now that I live in the Midwest, it’s a quirky reminder of my New York City roots.
Recently, I met a woman from Oklahoma, another Queens transplant, and impulsively shared a photo of my hanger with her.
To my surprise, she had a picture of her own New York keepsake: an identical wooden hanger from the very same Jamaica Avenue store.
— Thomas Piché
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post How Landlords Can Cope With a Rent Freeze appeared first on New York Times.
