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It’s a tale of two rental classes.
On the one hand you have the 1 million-plus New Yorkers in rent-stabilized apartments, who thanks to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s highly controversial rent freeze, will pay the same low rates for the next two years.
On the other, there are 1 million apartments that remain at market rates — with rents rising to their highest levels in history (the average monthly rent is a whopping $4,180) and squeeze hard-working New Yorkers, whose salary increases haven’t kept up with the staggering rent increases.
Median gross rent in New York City rose about 13.5% after adjusting for inflation over the decade ending in 2024, according to the NYU Furman Center, compared to the 3.2% average inflation rate in the period.
Mamdani’s policy, ironically for a Democrat Socialist, has created the kind of glaring two-tier social system he and his cronies rail against.
But the winners and losers in Mamdani’s New York aren’t necessarily who you think.
Yes, there are the stabilized tenants who are delighted to have more money in their pockets. But there are just as many with frozen rent who are panicking about the decline of their buildings.
And then, of course, there are the landlords themselves who are facing bankruptcy and the market-rate tenants who are being squeezed with rent rises they can barely afford.
Even President Donald Trump weighed in: “What the mayor doesn’t say is that these buildings will soon turn into ghettos and slums, and that everybody will continue leaving New York.”
Here, The Post spoke to tenants and landlords on both sides of the rent-freeze divide — and the losers are stacked high.
Losers
The market-rate renter already hit
An Upper West Side tenant, who spoke to The Post on condition of anonymity, suspects he has already been penalized because of the freeze.
The PR consultant lives with two roommates in about 1,000 square feet for a total monthly rent of $5,500.
The landlord recently informed them that the trio’s rent is going to increase by 6%, far more than the 2.9% increase they got hit with last year.
“I think my rent might have already been impacted,” said the consultant whose building has a doorman, laundry facilities and a gym along with rent-stabilized units.
He suspects that the landlord is balancing the books — upping rents on market rate apartments to offset losses from the frozen stabilized losses.
“They came to me with that number after [Mamdani] said he was going to freeze rents and he got elected.”
The PR guy believed the system was already rigged.
“I think that the rent-stabilized tenants are effectively being subsidized by the free-market tenants,” the PR pro said. The rent freeze compounds it. “It feels a little bit like a slap in the face,” he added.
A rent-stabilized tenant says freeze is bad for all
Lara Kossover, who who lives in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom rent-stabilized apartment in Park Slope with her husband and two teenage boys at a rent of $3,300 a month, is worried about maintenance suffering in buildings with the frozen units.
“My concern is the landlord won’t be able to afford to fix anything in the building,” said Kossover, a real estate salesperson with Keller Williams NYC — especially as expenses rise for property operators.
The family has resided in their apartment for more than 15 years.
“Right now it seems like a good thing, but in the long run it’s not going to be a good thing,” said Lara Kossover.
In fact, maintenance is already an issue for her.
Kossover’s bathroom door is broken and the kitchen linoleum floor is peeling.
Already “I feel like I’m calling my landlord at least three or four times a year for issues that I feel are emergencies,” Kossover said.
As prices stay flat, quality goes down
Alexandra “Sasha” Avchukov has a similar take. Bond’s Nancy Elton landed Avchukov a rent-stabilized one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment on the Upper East Side for $2,660 a month.
Avchukov anticipates building quality “going down” because the landlords can’t increase the rents to help with building upkeep.
“I feel like it’s already an issue,” she said. “I live in a pretty old building and there are constantly maintenance issues.”
The hallway has “rotten smells randomly, like trash and stuff,” Avchukov said, adding, “It’s probably coming from a tenant’s apartment, but it’s just not clean inside the building.”
“A lot of that is to be expected,” Avchukov said. “And I accept that — living in an old building, but also it would be nice for them to have a cleaner come through the staircase at least once a month or something.”
A bathroom ceiling leak took two months for the building to repair.
“I understand why it seems appealing on the surface,” Avchukov said of the freeze. “But when you consider more factors, I think it does more harm than good.”
Financial pressures boil over
Landlord Violet Zharku owns three fully rent-stabilized properties in Queens, each with about 16 units. She was already trying to offload the properties due to financial pressures, but now is in an even more dire position.
At her Woodside building, for example, the mortgage and operations there cost $2,400 monthly per unit. Rents there are all below $2,000 a month.
“So we are losing $172,000 annually,” she said.
Zharku said when she and her family acquired the properties a few years ago, they were willing to take the financial hit in the beginning to fix them up and add value and “eventually make the money back. But now we don’t have that,” she said.
“We are defeated and we just we have to find a way not to lose any further money than we have already lost within these past three years,” she added.
Bankruptcy would be a last resort for her.
“Now what we’re doing is trying to figure out — [whether to] sell it now and lose as little as possible, salvage as much as we can and not go into bankruptcy,” she said.
An inevitable decline
One stabilized property owner, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, talked about how conditions would inevitably decline.
“It’s obviously extremely bad,” as landlords like him won’t “invest in services,” he said, adding, “At a certain point [stabilized landlords] won’t be able to provide basic services.”
The landlord said not only will general maintenance decline, building services will be cut and market-rate rents will be inflated. It also discourages the supply of new housing.
“It seems to me like it would be unsustainable to maintain 0% indefinitely because of those buildings where the landlords will just lose the building to [the] bank,” the landlord said. “And it’s just not good for those people who live there. People would be better off having a 2% rent increase, but having their living situation functional.”
Will my good deal last?
Communications expert Kelly Kreth is concerned about getting an unfair rent hike for her market-rate one-bedroom unit on the Upper East Side.
“I am so worried that now that landlords can’t raise rent-stabilized units for two years, that the only way they can compensate is raising rents even more on market-rate units,” said Kreth, who pays $2,900 per month for her home.
She is critical of Mamdani saying that as he froze rents, he “should have also, simultaneously worked with the state to strengthen Good Cause Eviction, putting a smaller cap on market-rate raises. Right now it’s essentially about 8.75% which is a huge raise to deal with potentially each year as a market-rate tenant. Market-rate rents need to be capped to something more reasonable like 5%.”
Enacted in April 2024, the Good Cause Eviction Law gives eligible market-rate tenants the right to a lease renewal and a cap on annual rent increases.
Winners
‘I think it’s overdue’
It was a happy day for a Brooklyn man when he won a cheap apartment under New York City’s affordable-housing lottery in 2016.
After sharing apartments with roommates for years, he finally got to live by himself in a one-bedroom apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, for just $700 a month.
While low compared to market-rate apartments, in the last 10 years, his rent has climbed more than 45% to $1,020 a month, which he called “nuts,” and noted that even with the increases, there was a year-long period where he “had to hound” the management company to fix the elevators.
The Brooklyn resident is happy about the rent freeze.
“I think it’s overdue,” the tenant said.
A city to call home
Another rent-stabilized tenant praised the freeze.
“I’m really happy that this passed. It’s very important that we preserve affordable housing,” said Pia Isabella Palomino, a community organizer for an affordable housing-related nonprofit organization. Milton Coste of Keller Williams NYC found her a one-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment in Ridgewood, Queens, where she pays $1,380 a month. She noted the $0 rate won’t apply to her as she just signed her lease.
“I plan to stay there as long as I can,” she said.
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