Housing Justice for All, a statewide coalition of tenant advocacy organizations, has launched a campaign in New York City to pressure mayoral candidates to freeze future rent increases for stabilized apartments if elected to office. Though the campaign’s goal is to instate a rent freeze, the tenant organizing groups hope to use the campaign to build a powerful tenant voting bloc that can exert influence in city elections.
“There’s consensus amongst renters that it seems that they’re not being served,” Jordan Alexander, a tenant organizer for the Met Council on Housing, a member organization of Housing Justice for All, said. “And more than not being served, they’re being intentionally targeted.”
Housing Justice for All announced the launch of a “Freeze the Rent” campaign in New York City in December 2024 and began circulating a petition “to pressure our mayoral candidates into promising a rent freeze for the next four years through the Rent Guidelines Board,” Alberto Oliart, an outreach coordinator for the Met Council on Housing, said.
The Rent Guidelines Board is a city agency that annually determines rent adjustments for those living in the city’s close to one million rent-stabilized units. Though the board is independent, the mayor appoints all nine board members. Under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, the board froze the rent on three separate occasions in 2015, 2016, and 2020. In 2017, he said the previous two-year rent freeze happened because he “instructed [the board] not to follow the biases of the past.”
The board controversially voted to propose a rent hike for rent-stabilized tenants on April 30 for the upcoming year, beginning October 1. The board will consider raising the rent by 1.75-4.75% for one-year leases and 4.75-7.75% for two-year leases, and will hold its final vote in June.
The board’s decision prompted immediate outcry from tenants and advocacy groups in attendance at the April 30 meeting, who began chanting “freeze the rent” following the board’s announcement. Landlords welcomed the board’s decision, though Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, a coalition representing property owners and managers that provide affordable housing, told the New York Times that the proposed hikes would not adequately cover the money needed for repairs on thousands of rent-stabilized buildings.
According to the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, rent-stabilized tenants tend to have more difficulty affording their rents than tenants of market-rate housing. In 2023, median household incomes of rent-stabilized tenants were 34% lower compared to that of market-rate tenants, and those living in rent-stabilized households were more likely to experience food insecurity compared to market-rate tenants by 50%.
In 2023, rent-stabilized units made up about 28% of all housing stock and over 44% of all rental units. In that same year, New York City lost close to 4,200 rent-stabilized units, the largest decline in eight years.
The rent freezes under de Blasio’s administration were all met with widespread relief from tenants. As New York City faces a housing crisis that disproportionately affects Black and brown residents, tenants have begun organizing to ensure the next mayor supports the preservation of existing rent rates to prevent further displacement.
“It really matters who the mayor is,” Pamela Aahn, a volunteer with the “Freeze the Rent” campaign, said. “So I think that if we get enough signatures here … the mayor is going to realize that unless [they’re] going to go for a freeze, which de Blasio did vote for when he was mayor, they’re not going to get people’s votes.”
For Aahn, this issue is important and important to her. “I just retired, and that’s exciting, except your income goes down,” she said. She also has a 26-year-old daughter who lives with her in their Inwood apartment. “It’d be really great if she could move out, and she will, but I think the rents are too high,” Aahn said. “The rents are increasing too quickly, and it makes it very hard for people to have the kind of life that they want for their own apartments.”
A new Data for Progress poll shows that 3 in 4 New York residents support a rent freeze. Several mayoral candidates have expressed support for freezing the rent if elected to office, including Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, State Senator Jessica Ramos, and former Assemblymember Michael Blake, who has supported this policy throughout their campaign season. They’re joined by City Comptroller Brad Lander, former Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who all recently hopped on the wagon.
Burgos told the Amsterdam News that a rent freeze would make it difficult for property owners to maintain residential buildings.
“It’s, to me, a dishonest way to appeal to voters who are certainly looking for some level of relief, but if you offer them that relief in the form of a rent freeze, you’ve really destined for them a very unlivable experience in a building that will be strapped for cash and will ultimately fall into disrepair given all the costs that have increased over the years,” Burgos said. He pointed, a reduction in housing price through the reduction of property taxes and water rates, “which the mayor and city hall have tremendous power to do.”
Through a combination of monthly canvassing events, phonebanking, and other forms of outreach, “Freeze the Rent” campaign organizers hope to get 20,000 signatures on their petition and aim to get all its signatories to vote for tenant-friendly candidates in the June 24 Democratic mayoral primary election. Campaign organizers have collected around 10,800 signatures on the online petition, not including signatures on physical petitions passed around at canvassing events.
According to Alexander, the campaign’s initial efforts have been promising.
“All these people that we talk to on the street are for this campaign. All the people that we talk to in the buildings are for this campaign,” Alexander said.
He also noted that the campaign has seen lots of tenant participation. “The community is coming out to help because this is something that is important to people. The rent is too damn high,” he said, repeating the campaign’s unofficial tagline, “and so people are participating because it matters.”
Lydia Shestopalova, a tenant in a rent-stabilized apartment and a “Freeze the Rent” campaign volunteer, called a rent freeze “such an obvious first step” to dealing with the city’s housing crisis and an “easy opening” for people to talk to their neighbors about housing issues.
“If we want to build a movement, people have to be connected,” Shestopalova said. Her sentiment reflects the campaign’s larger goal.
Though the campaign’s demand is getting a rent freeze, Oliart said, the rent freeze wasn’t “the ultimate objective” of the campaign or coalition. Instead, Oliart said organizers hope to use the campaign as a way to “activate tenants politically.”
In 2021, close to 70 percent of New York City households were occupied by tenants. Though tenants are the majority in New York City, housing advocates have said that the real-estate lobby wields an outsize influence on politicians through tactics such as lobbying.
Housing Justice for All coalition groups and advocates launched the New York State Tenant Bloc, a sister-like nonprofit organization able to explicitly support specific political candidates that back tenant-friendly policies. The Tenant Bloc’s ultimate goal is to build a statewide network of 250,000 tenant voters, Cat Weaver, the director of Tenant Bloc, told City & State. The “Freeze the Rent” campaign marks what the organization hopes will be the beginning of a longer fight to enhance tenant power and protections in New York state.
“The actual objective is to activate tenants politically, to get tenants to understand themselves as political subjects, if that makes sense, and be able to demand more important, more pressing things than just the rent freeze, which is really the bare minimum,” Oliart said.