NEW YORK — In a city packed with mighty real estate titans, they are the small ones.
They bought or inherited aging apartment buildings, hoping to bring home a little extra cash as property values grew and they fulfilled the dreams of their immigrant parents. For decades, the investments appeared to pay off, despite stringent rules restricting rental increases for apartment buildings constructed before 1974.
But in recent years, as maintenance and insurance bills surged, the problems added up. Rental incomes largely stagnated even as the costs to replace boilers, roofs, windows and lead-soaked walls soared, leaving property owners in the red.
Now, with the city’s political landscape shifting around them, New York landlords say they are at their breaking point as Mayor Zohran Mamdani begins to implement even more aggressive tenant-friendly policies.
The democratic socialist easily prevailed in the November election by tapping into the cost-of-living worries of New Yorkers, two-thirds of whom rent. He vowed to freeze what tenants in the city’s 1 million rent-stabilized apartments pay monthly. And he made landlords an early foil for his administration, scheduling “rental rip-off” hearings to showcase “illegal, unfair, abusive, deceptive, or unconscionable landlord practices.”
“Why is he targeting us?” asked Valentina Gojcaj, who owns two rent-stabilized apartment buildings in the Bronx. “This is my investment and something I expect to retire on. What happens to me when I can no longer afford to run these buildings?”
Gojcaj’s concerns reflect a broader fraying of relations between landlords and the Mamdani administration that could have nationwide implications for the debate over affordable housing, with some experts calling the nation’s stock of aging rental units a crucial component of any long-term strategy to stabilize prices.
Housing advocates say relief is desperately needed in New York, where a third of households spend at least half of their income on rent. They’ve been buoyed by the mayor’s day-one decision to strengthen the Office to Protect Tenants and hire Cea Weaver, a nationally recognized, albeit controversial,activist as its director.
“Today is the start of a new era for New York City,” Mamdani declared in January, recounting stories of residents living with shoddy heating systems and roaches. “New Yorkers voted for a new day for our city because the past one is clouded by housing insecurity and instability, where they cannot afford a life of dignity in a city they love.”
The promise of new tenant protections has especially rattled landlords who do not hold vast real estate portfolios — people such as retired transit worker Irving Lee, who inherited an eight-unit rent-stabilized building in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
Lee said his father, a bookkeeper and laundryman originally from China, bought the building in the 1980s when Mayor Ed Koch was urging immigrants to invest in distressed properties to combat blight. He now wonders how much longer he can hold on to his family’s investment, given monthly rents of $700 to $1,500 for units that on average take $1,300 apiece to maintain.
“There are forces in this city that make it extremely difficult for property owners to care for and renovate these buildings,” he said.
Ann Korchak, president of the Small Property Owners of New York, estimated that the city has 22,000 buildings consisting of six to 10 units per property. Thousands of them, she said, are owned by New Yorkers like Lee.
City data show the rent-stabilized units represent about 40 percent of all rentals. Their average monthly rent: about $1,600.
The city’s Rent Guidelines Board annually establishes how much landlords can raise what they charge for the units. The board didn’t approve an increase for two years during the pandemic but allowed increases of about 3 percent each year since 2022.
Landlords once could recoup more monthly income when a tenant left a rent-stabilized apartment, claiming a “vacancy bonus” to hike the price by up to 20 percent. They could also renovate vacant units and pass the costs of those upgrades on to a future tenant.
But in 2019, concerned that landlords were abusing the provisions, state lawmakers passed far-reaching legislation to limit how much monthly rents could rise when an apartment was vacated and subsequently renovated. The cap is now about $160 a month.
Korchak said the law decimated landlords’ ability to recoup the costs of major improvements, causing many to leave units vacant. The New York Apartment Association estimates the city has 50,000 rent-stabilized “ghost apartments.”
“If you walk into pretty much any rent-stabilized building in Northern Manhattan or the Bronx, there will be vacant units that are never going to come back online,” said Kenny Burgos, who heads the association. “And that is really sad when we are in a housing crisis.”
Meanwhile, for occupied units, landlords say they are being burdened by a continual stream of new regulations that make it exceptionally difficult to generate cash flow. One of the latest, taking effect in 2030, will require them to provide window air conditioners to tenants upon request.
Tenants have their own perspective on the issues, of course. Those living in rent-stabilized apartments say the city’s policies — and Mamdani’s pledge to freeze rents — are the difference between living with dignity and facing potential homelessness.
Joanne Grell has been in the same two-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment in the Bronx for 24 years, raising two children as a single mother while working as a paralegal. Her monthly rent was about $850 when she moved in and slightly over $1,500 several years ago. She now pays just under $1,800, about 40 percent of her salary.
She credits her children’s educational and professional success — a daughter in medical school, a son who’s a filmmaker — to the security provided by rent stabilization.
“It allowed me to be a present parent and not to have to work three jobs,” she said. “I was able to be here in important moments and to guide them accordingly and make sure that they didn’t fall into bad crowds or bad friends.”
She and her neighbors have ongoing maintenance concerns. The building’s buzzer hasn’t worked for two years, Grell said, and another resident has complained for a year about a hole in his ceiling as well as mold. Most repairs needed in her apartment, Grell does herself.
Tenant advocates push back on property owners’ claim that they cannot afford a rent freeze. According to a 2025 reportfrom the Rent Guidelines Board, net operating income, defined as the amount a building generates in revenue after operating costs, was up about 12 percent from 2022 to 2023. Much of those gains were concentrated in Manhattan, however. Net operating income fell by about 15 percent in Jamaica, Queens, and by lesser amounts across six neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island.
During that same period, the report said, tenants’ rent increases outpaced their income gains.
Several programs offer landlords help in recovering losses, noted Ritti Singh of the New York State Tenant Bloc, and even pay for upkeep of rent-stabilized apartments.
“If they actually took advantage of the programs available to them, then they wouldn’t be able to have excuses to try to roll back rent stabilization,” she said. “It’s not really about if they’re struggling or not. It’s actually about how they don’t want to see any limits at all.”
Natalia Bonanno’s family owns 200 apartment units, about half of them in three rent-stabilized buildings in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Her father, an immigrant from Italy, bought his first building in 1983 after saving money he made as an engineer. He moved his family into one of the units and amassed enough equity to finance several other properties.
For decades, Bonanno said, the properties generated enough revenue that the family lived a solidly “comfortable” lifestyle. “We never had to complain about anything,” she said.
But in the past few years, as Bonanno and her sister took over the business, she has watched costs rise at the three rent-stabilized buildings — each more than a century old — and profits disappear.
Tenants, some of whom have lived in their apartments for decades, pay between $650 and $2,000 a month. Bonanno estimates her monthly costs run about $2,000 per unit, driven by maintenance expenses, utilities, insurance and real estate taxes that have jumped by almost a third since 2015. She says she has been able to raise the rent just 13 percent during that time, stretching her ability to make major renovations.
“We are taking money from our own savings to pretty much keep the buildings going,” said Bonanno, describing a $200,000 loss on one property last year. “Every year around this time, when we pull our figures together for the accountant, she asks why we still own it because it’s not making money.”
Like other landlords, she deals with some tenants who stop paying rent — a behavior that has spiked since the pandemic. In a city where eviction can take years, she has one tenant who owes her $52,000 on his $1,100-a-month apartment.
She estimates it would cost $70,000 to upgrade some of her oldest units and wonders how she would ever recover that investment, even with programs that help compensate landlords of rent-stabilized properties.
“We have one tenant who pays $675 for a four-bedroom apartment,” Bonanno said. Should the person leave, she’d keep the unit vacant “because it would take decades to pay off the cost of the renovation.”
Landlords with small portfolios say city assistance programs are difficult to navigate and slow to reimburse. Throughout the industry, there is also broad concern that city leaders want properties sold so they can be acquired by nonprofits.
A bill approved last year by the city council would have required the owners of some distressed apartment buildings to first give nonprofits an opportunity to buy them. Mayor Eric Adams vetoed it, but landlords fear Mamdani would sign such legislation if it’s brought back.
“I see this as part of a long-term strategy to drive us out,” said Lee, noting that his Chinatown building would not turn a profit if it were not for ground-floor commercial units.
Yet while highlighting many tenants’ struggles — “people need real relief,” Deputy Mayor Leila Bozorg said in a statement last week — the Mamdani administration maintains it also is focusing on the challenges landlords face. “We’re working to lower costs across the board,” Bozorg said, listing property tax reform and insurance costs as two prime targets.
In the Bronx, Gojcaj said the problems are only magnified for small property owners like herself.
She moved to the United States as a child when her parents, ethnic Albanians, fled Yugoslavia in the early 1970s. She and her husband got into real estate “as a side thing” and purchased their two properties.
“Our expectation was you acquire the assets, you put in some upgrades and provide housing while making a decent return,” she said. “But right now we are barely breaking even, and that is just operating costs. Never mind improvements.”
Gojcaj said the 50 units in her buildings rent from $700 to $2,000 monthly — with operating costs averaging $1,500 per unit. And at one location, she added, tenants owed her $229,000 in overdue rent as of mid-January.
“When is the breaking point when you have to say to the bank, ‘I am sorry, but I can’t afford this property anymore and you have to take it back,’” Gojcaj said.
The landlords concede that the value of their properties has grown, in some cases substantially, since they or their parents bought the buildings decades ago. That doesn’t mean it will be easy to recoup their investments at sale.
Sharon Redhead owns five rent-stabilized buildings in Brooklyn, each containing between six and 39 units. They are the legacy of her parents, Caribbean immigrants who purchased them in the 1970s. Their value peaked in the late 2010s, she said.
“I don’t know anyone who wants to buy a business that is running in the red and has no prospects of being profitable,” Redhead said. “So I am going to try to hold on as long as I can and hope eventually common sense prevails.”
Gupta reported from Washington.
The post NYC’s small landlords say they won’t survive Mamdani plan to freeze rent appeared first on Washington Post.
