NYC Rent Guidelines Board Approves Mamdani’s Rent Freeze
Next they’ll complain when the buildings start to rot and landlords cannot make even the simple repairs. Have fun.
The New York City Rent Guidelines panel voted 7-1 to freeze the rent on almost one million rent-stabilized apartments across the five boroughs.
“I’m grateful for the board members’ thoughtful consideration of the data, including tenants’ ability to pay, cost of living and building operating costs,” stated NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “I’ll continue working to deliver a more affordable city by building and preserving affordable housing, lowering building operating costs like insurance, and ensuring tenants know their rights.”
The panel voted hours after Christina Smyth resigned. The panel usually has nine members, but since she left, the vote was only eight people.
Smyth protested the rent freezes, accusing the panel of ignoring data and insisting the decision was made during Mamdani’s campaign:
The board “stopped being a fact-finding body” and was rebuilt “to deliver a rent freeze” no matter what, Smyth, one of two landlord advocates on the board, wrote in her scathing resignation letter.
“Everything else has been theater,” she wrote. “The hearings, the reports, the public comment, the data. None of it was ever going to change the result.”
Smyth was one of three members appointed by Adams. Mamdani appointed the other six members after taking office this year.
Smyth is not wrong. Landlords raise rent when utility costs and repair items go up.
Why must people complicate economics?
Real estate is a great investment. The rent freeze likely won’t hurt the wealthier landlords, but smaller landlords? Yeah.
The smaller landlords are also working people. What about them? They’ve said they’re already struggling with those rising costs.
“We’re going to have to cut back. We’re gonna have to lay off some of the people,” said landlord Humberto Lopes, according to ABC7NY. “We’re gonna have to lay off supers. Only choice, it’s a business. People don’t get it. This is a business. It’s not a choice that this is for free.”
Last month, Mamdani threw a lifeline to a few rent-stabilized landlords, allowing them “to charge a one-time rent increase on certain empty units.”
The exemption applies only to vacant apartments “financed and regulated by the city’s housing agencies.” In other words, private landlords get screwed.
How much can the landlords increase? Officials will decide the percentage on a case-by-case basis.
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Comments
As buildings decay, Democrats will take them over as neglected properties.
Exactly, it’s the plan
And then they’ll find out that they can’t fix them because there’s no money and they’re not charging enough for rent to pay for it. So all of those apartments will go off the market too
or the banks will take them in foreclosure
It does not matter if the rent freeze “won’t hurt the wealthier landlords”. It should make no difference whether a landlord is wealthy or less fortunate. Government-mandated rent freezes should be illegal. The free market, not the government, should determine rents.
Rent freezes ARE illegal. It violates the ‘taking clause’ of the Fifth Amendment: “… nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” People just think we have protections provided by the Constitution – nothing could be further from the truth.
Congratulations, rent in New York City just got more expensive and it got even harder to find an affordable apartment. Someday people might figure out that communism doesn’t work
That’s no problem. There is now a movement afoot to raise the minimum wage to $25/hour.
Why stop at $25? CA wants to raise it to $50.
Sure. Why not?
The vile Dhimmi-crats will vociferously assure us that socialism/communism do indeed work; they just haven’t been properly implemented, yet.
nor have they ever, nor will they ever.
The vile Mamdani clan’s Ugandan lakeside mansion should be seized by Uganda, or at least tossed off of the AirBnB platform — why should these communist/Islamofascist/Muslim supremacist, hypocrite-pukes be allowed to earn a dime of rental income? Their Ugandan real estate should be seized by the state and redistributed to poor Ugandans.
NYC will solve the housing crisis as the Soviets did. Three families for every apartment. They have a right to housing and will get it (good and hard). Having visited Moscow in 1971, I see a great opportunity for NYC to become the sister city to that era of Moscow. Instead of the Russian military, Mandami can have the Red Rabbits and Antifa “patrol” the streets. Yonkers will go bonkers.
Dr. Zhivago redux.
In Soviet Manhattan, rent controls you!
This is fantastic! Just what we want. Now the landlords will band together, challenge the constitutionality of Rent Control on the Takings clause, and have rent control banned nationwide in a 6-3 decision. They just ruled this week that “temporary” something less than 10 years, so the “wartime emergency “ under which it was first enacted during WWII will be considered expired. This is great news!
I said something similar to my wife… this decision makes the entire “Rent Guideline Board” process a joke and it might be just what courts finally need to rule that rent control / stabilization is an illegal taking.
Unfortunately, the action will take so long to go through the courts that all the complainants will lose their properties — not to mention their standing — in the meanwhile.
If property values (and thus taxes) are inflating then this is soviet thug behavior to force put private ownership
Moscow on the Hudson?
“soviet thug behavior”
Not all that surprising from an out-and-out commie.
What many people don’t understand is that owning a building or many buildings in NYC, is a small business. People invest in rental property in order to make an income, no different than one starts a restaurant or a retail clothing business or sells used shoes on Ebay.
Not that Mandami and cronies wouldn’t be delighted to tell any business owner (except donors, of course) how much profit they are allowed to make.
But rent control really needs to be challenged in court. No one has a “right” to live in a particular city or area of a city, to make use of another’s property and deny them compensation for it.
For some reason it has fallen out of fashion, but defending property rights of ownership is a bedrock American ideal; nowhere in our history or culture have we agreed that it’s government’s place to determine the income of any citizen, particularly because giving to one means stealing from another.
If I was a landlord, I would say, “Fine, but I’m getting out of the landlord business.” Everyone would get evicted by the book.
Then, I’d tear down the building,
THEN I’d sell the property.
And you would take massive losses in the process. Nobody’s going to buy the property because it won’t be useful for anything. It’s not like anybody else would be able to make money on it either
You can’t evict someone on a rent controlled or stabilized lease except in very rare instances. Even if you got the court to finally give you an eviction order, it requires a different city agency the “New York City Marshal” to effectuate the eviction. and guess what, the Mayor appoints those too.
Nah, the commies got that covered, too.
Was it Chicago? Seattle? where the gibsmedats were complaining that all the stores they had been shoplifting and looting were closing, and the commie government tried to tell the stores that they weren’t allowed to go out of business?
The communist’s answer to the ills of communism is always more communism.
If the government can freeze the cost of rent, they should be able to freeze the price of everything. That would stop inflation in it’s tracks.
Supply is the Achilles heel of command economies. No amount of government edicts can make more of something appear out of thin air.
I’m so old, I remember when Nixon did exactly that… causing an inflation that Gerry Ford had to Whip Now.
So more rent control + a stacked review board + activists helping tenant create bogus complaints for repairs + rent strikes + property tax hikes will result in Property in declining material condition b/c the landlords (mostly Mom/Pop) won’t receive sufficient rent income to cover the repairs demanded. The City will eventually put them out of business and directly/indirectly seize possession for unpaid taxes/fines or draconian code enforcement- tenant rights violations. Welcome to Socialism but it won’t end there. The property, according to the city, will be uninhabitable without significant repairs. Where’s that $ coming from? Either taxpayers from general revenue transfers or the property gets ‘sold’ to cronies of the Mamdani regime. Of course the prior owners will likely bounce from NYC lowering tax revenue or worse take non rent control properties off market to wait out the Mamdani regime lowering available housing supply, all of which will drive rents higher.
Wasn’t rent-control the reason that many apartment buildings went condo a few years ago?
Rent control has been tried again and again with the same devastating outcomes. But Mamdopey and pals don’t want it to work they just want cheap quick wins and to ultimately seize the property and make it all under their control. After all this brain trust promised to seize the reigns of production and basque NYC in the glow of collectivism. Well enjoy the glow morons !
The only people who like the idea of rent control in NYC are the tenants who can easily afford to live elsewhere, but pretend they can’t afford to. Yes there is such a thing.
Freeze the rents but raise the taxes. Classic Dr Zhivago
It is my understanding that for the rent controlled apartments, the legal rent based on the Maximum Base Rent (MBR) formula will still increase. (Now this may not put the landlords in sweet clover.) What is frozen is that the eligible tenants rent payments are frozen. Then the city will reimburse the landlords the rest of the legal rent. The tenant eligibility rules are for Seniors 62+,Disabled tenants 18+, Households earning $50,000 or less, and for Tenants spending more than one‑third of income on rent. The rent of all other apartments cannot be constrained under current legislation. It all sounds very complicated to me and I can see why the supply of new housing stock is not keeping up. Also, it is not clear to me how many illegal aliens are occupying rent controlled housing. They must be thrilled.
Thank God I’ve no knowledge or experience in these democrat hell holes…EVERYTHING I’ve ever read about “rent control” locations point to the hard facts that utter disaster will soon be forthcoming…democrat policies ALWAYS suck and end up hurting the very people who they claim they’re trying to help.
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