It’s not uncommon to see hundreds of New York City tenants screaming at a Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) vote. In fact, it happens every single year. What is uncommon, however, is for them to be shouting for joy instead of in anger. On June 25th, for the first time since the de Blasio administration, the RGB voted to freeze the rent for New York City’s roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments. And for the first time ever, the board approved a rent freeze for not just one-year lease renewals, but for two-year leases too.
A two-year rent freeze provides rent stabilized tenants with much needed relief. Although it is not—and should not be—a means-tested program, rent-stabilized apartments are home to the largest share of low-income households of any housing type in New York City, with over three times more low-income households than in public housing. These apartments are also the largest source of housing for Black and Latino New Yorkers.
According to the RGB, last year 62 percent of evictions were in rent-stabilized buildings, with the largest share coming from the poorest borough — the Bronx. According to CSS’s 2025 Annual Survey of Housing and Economic Security, 67 percent of low-income rent-stabilized tenants cannot make ends meet or are barely managing to get by, and 83 percent have little or no emergency savings.
The Board heeded this data in their final deliberations. Some landlords, however, claim they did nothing of the sort, and instead pursued a vote that aligns with the mayor’s campaign slogans instead of the facts. But those making this claim should listen to the Board’s current landlord representative, Maksim Wynn, who offered a thoughtful explanation for why a rent freeze is right for both tenants and landlords.
Wynn rightly noted that a rent hike might sound sweet to a cash-strapped landlord, but in reality it could result in a net loss of revenue for that owner. Why? Because if tenants can barely afford to pay the rent they are currently charged, then when the rent goes up a sizable portion will go into arrears.
Instead of raising rents and creating an eviction crisis for tenants and a non-payment crisis for landlords, Wynn suggested a suite of public actions to reduce landlords expenses instead of raising tenants’ rents. He identified the three factors driving tight margins for rent stabilized landlords are taxes, fuel, and insurance.
On taxes, the city and state must pursue comprehensive property tax reforms in order to rebalance a thoroughly regressive system—one which charges the owners of the most expensive rent-stabilized apartments nothing in property taxes for 40 years, while overcharging the owners of the cheapest (and oldest) rent-stabilized apartments. CSS has strenuously advocated for exactly this type of reform and will continue doing so in the next state legislative session.
On fuel, we must continue to support a transition to environmentally friendlier alternative energy sources to curb both building emissions and costs. As the Climate and Community Institute has argued, New York City can lead the way in scaling up conversions to heat pumps and induction stoves, creating a market to bulk-buy these goods, thus bringing down purchasing prices in the short term and lowering operating costs over time.
On insurance, the Mamdani administration is already pursuing a city-backed insurance program for rent-stabilized buildings. Though in its early days, the city’s housing department has already initiated a Request for Expressions of Interest to help design the program and promised $100 million toward its launch. This could go a long way toward reversing the skyrocketing price of property insurance, which is by far landlords’ fasting growing cost factor.
But even before any of this takes place, the RGB’s data has been clear: most landlords are doing all right. Net Operating Income (NOI, or landlords’ revenues minus costs) grew by more than six percent last year—and that’s after they grew by 12 percent the previous year, and 10 percent the year before that. Over the long-term, rent-stabilized property ownership has been very lucrative, with inflation-adjusted NOI rising 57 percent since 1990. Roughly nine percent of rent-stabilized buildings are considered distressed, but this is well within the normal range, and the city and state have specialized programs meant to help such buildings.
As the Board’s chair Chantella Mitchell wrote in her statement explaining her vote, “The data make clear that current economic conditions place meaningful constraints on tenants, while also showing that, in aggregate, most owners remain able to meet rising costs without experiencing comparable levels of financial distress.” The rent freeze was entirely justified, and it will make a tremendous impact on millions of tenants’ lives in the coming years. We must all work together to ensure this is not the end of the story, but the beginning of a larger push toward affordability, sustainability, and justice.
David R. Jones, Esq., is President and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), the leading voice on behalf of low-income New Yorkers for more than 175 years. The views expressed in this column are solely those of the writer. The Urban Agenda is available on CSS’s website: www.cssny.org.
