Mamdani’s Rent Freeze Faces First Major Test in Preliminary Rent Guidelines Board Vote

The panel that regulates rents for nearly 1 million New York City apartments will vote Thursday night on proposed rent adjustments, offering the first major test of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s promised rent freeze.

The preliminary Rent Guidelines Board vote will not make any increases (or a freeze) official—that decision is expected June 25. But Thursday’s vote will show whether the board is prepared to start from Mamdani’s position of 0% increases, or whether rising building costs will push members to consider some rent hikes.

Ahead of the meeting, the Small Property Owners of New York (SPONY) warned that a freeze would ignore the financial pressure facing owners of older rent-stabilized buildings, where rising insurance, taxes, maintenance, and repair costs have already strained operations.

“This isn’t the time to further defund rent-stabilized housing,” said SPONY board president Ann Korchak. “The disparate operational realities between aging and newer buildings call for separate rent adjustments for older, majority rent-stabilized properties.”

Why the vote is drawing unusual attention

The panel’s decisions are always contentious, but this year’s vote has attracted an unusual amount of attention because of how directly it’s tied to Mamdani’s housing agenda.

All nine RGB members were appointed by Mamdani after a failed effort by former Mayor Eric Adams to block four of the appointees, in what was seen as a last-ditch attempt to prevent the rent freeze from ever materializing.

The vote also comes at a time of growing financial hardship for New York renters. In early 2026, the median asking rent in New York City reached $3,616, up $211, or 6.2%, from a year earlier, according to Realtor.com® data.

And today, more than half of renters in the city are rent-burdened—meaning they spend at least 30% of their income on rent, according to research from the NYU Furman Center.

The pressure is especially acute for very low- and extremely low-income renters. Among those households, more than half are severely rent-burdened, spending a majority of their income on housing.

That’s the case tenant advocates have made for a freeze: For these renters already stretched thin, even a modest increase can threaten displacement.

Small property owners call for relief

But the push for a rent freeze is colliding with another concern: Whether older rent-stabilized buildings can absorb another year of rising costs without more rental income.

The most recent Price Index of Operating Costs Report shows that operating costs for stabilized buildings rose 5.3% over the last year, while insurance alone climbed 10.5%, accounting for 9.5% of the index—and landing after an 18.7% jump the year before.

But those costs were not equally shared by the city’s housing stock. The most recent Income and Expense Study shows that pre-1974 buildings are operating on a much tighter budget than newer stock—generating about $512 in net operating income per unit citywide, compared with $1,454 for post-1973 units.

It’s important to note that NOI is not the same as profit, and it does not account for operating expenses like outstanding mortgage payments, maintenance, and other essential expenses of owning a building.

That gap is why SPONY is urging the RGB to consider a split rent order, rather than a single citywide adjustment. Under that approach, pre-1974 rent-stabilized buildings could receive a different rent adjustment from newer buildings with better cash flows.

“The future viability of older rent-stabilized housing is dependent on ‘split’ rent orders that will help mom-and-pop, mostly immigrant and generational owners operate and maintain their older buildings and house millions of New Yorkers,” Korchak said.

SPONY’s analysis argues that regulated rents have not kept pace with broader cost growth. From 2016 to 2025, one-year rent increases set by the RGB compounded to about 14.84%, compared with a cumulative 32.44% increase in the New York-area Consumer Price Index over the same period. That amounts to a 13.29% decline in real rent growth for stabilized apartments, according to the group—one much harder to bear on such tight margins.

“If RGB members concede to the politics of a rent freeze or insignificant rent increase, they will be following a path of defunding rent-stabilized housing. We all know how this story ends,” Korchak said.

The Mamdani administration has offered at least one olive branch: a new city-backed insurance program that officials say could reduce premiums by 20% to 30%.

But Korchak questioned whether that relief would reach the small rent-stabilized owners who say they are under the most pressure.

“Does the pilot include a proportional number of small rent-stabilized property owners, the city’s backbone of affordable housing?” she told Realtor.com in April. “Or is the mayor only interested in helping his friends in the nonprofit housing sector who already receive numerous government subsidies and are exempt from property taxes?”

Tonight’s vote may offer the first hint of an answer. While far from a final decision, the preliminary result will show how far Mamdani’s newly appointed board is willing to go to deliver on one of his most visible housing promises.