Zohran Mamdani won the election in New York City by promising a lot of things that people liked (free buses, free childcare) but which he could not possibly deliver on his own. All of his promises were dependent on decisions that would be made by other, ostensibly independent, individuals (the governor, the legislature). Case in point: Mamdani promised a four year rent freeze. And while he may eventually get it, he had no right to promise it in the first place.
Mamdani staked his campaign on an unequivocal commitment to a four-year-long rent freeze. From his campaign website: “As Mayor, Zohran will immediately freeze the rent for all stabilized tenants, and use every available resource to build the housing New Yorkers need and bring down the rent. The number one reason working families are leaving our city is the housing crisis. The Mayor has the power to change that.”
But the mayor does not “have the power to change that,” as Mamdani now admits. The RGB is not merely a commission that is nominally independent of the mayor. It is a tribunal that is required by law to render its determinations based upon the criteria set down in the city’s Administrative Code.
The mayor’s appointees to the board have no more right to carry out his political wishes than do the judges that the mayor appoints to the Criminal Court...
Moreover, the board must engage in its evaluation annually. It cannot, as Mamdani falsely suggested, enact a four-year-long “freeze.”
He made a promise he knew he could not keep because the decision isn't up to him. And it wasn't just some obscure language on his campaign website. It was him, personally, saying it directly to the camera in ads like this one. This was his #1 campaign promise: "As mayor, I'll freeze the rent every year that I'm in office. That's a guarantee," he lied.
It seems what Mamdani was counting on is the fact that the Rent Guidelines Board may not be quite as independent as it's supposed to be. The fact that Mamdani recently appointed six of its nine members may eventually result in him getting his way. But it's noteworthy that even as he appointed those new members to the board, he stopped talking about the rent freeze he'd promised to get himself elected. [emphasis added]
During the 2025 race, Mamdani spoke so often about his rent freeze pledge that supporters were accustomed to chanting “freeze” whenever he uttered the word “rent” at campaign rallies.
But in Wednesday’s press release announcing the RGB appointments, Mamdani did not explicitly mention his freeze promise.
“The board will take a clear-eyed look at the complex housing landscape and the realities facing our city’s two million rent-stabilized tenants, and help us move closer to a fairer, more affordable New York,” Mamdani’s statement said. “At a moment when so many families are struggling to stay in their homes, this work could not be more important.”
The omission of the pledge from the press release comes as landlord groups have signaled they are likely to try to challenge any freeze enacted by Mamdani’s RGB in court...
Asked why Mamdani didn’t mention his freeze proposal in Wednesday’s release, his spokesperson Dora Pekec said, “The Rent Guidelines Board is an independent body.”
It's funny how he never said that during his campaign.
Mamdani isn't dumb. He knew all along he had no right to promise a rent freeze and he knows that repeating that promise now could really come back to bite him in court if the outcome is challenged. So now he's pretending his hands are off the decision even as he does everything he can to sway it.
The remaining problem he has is that the vote of the Rent Guidelines Board is supposed to be based on facts not socialist vibes. And the facts aren't completely favorable to freezing the rent.
At the Rent Guidelines Board’s first hearing of the Mamdani administration, board members reviewed findings of a new report on landlord finances revealing an overall increase in revenue. The nine-member panel will consider the data, and other economic analyses, before voting in June on whether to raise rents, or to fulfill Mamdani’s campaign promise of freezing the rent.
The report showed landlords’ “net operating income” — which measures revenue minus mortgage payments — spiked by an average of 6.2% overall in 2024, with even larger increases in Staten Island and so-called “core” Manhattan south of 96th Street. It marks the third straight increase in net operating income, though lower than last year’s 12.1% jump...
But those overall returns were not evenly distributed — a point that landlord and real estate groups were quick to point out.
Owners of older buildings where all apartments are rent-stabilized made far more modest profits on average compared to those with a mix of stabilized and market-rate units. And unlike other boroughs, net operating income actually decreased slightly in the Bronx.
In fact, in some parts of the Bronx and Queens the NOI was negative last year, meaning landlords aren't able to cover expenses. And that's especially true in apartments that are rent subsidized. In fact, the data shows that the higher the percentage of a building is rent stabilized, the lower the NOI. The danger is that you could be setting up a situation where some landlords, unable to cover costs, may choose to walk away from their properties.
Rafael Cestero, the chief executive of the Community Preservation Corporation, a nonprofit that lends money to owners of older rent-stabilized buildings, said the broad 12 percent increase masked “really deep distress” in lower-income neighborhoods...
The nonprofit has roughly 600 loans out covering some 22,500 units. Mr. Cestero said that in 2023, the most recent year for which data was available, the N.O.I. couldn’t cover the debt for some 28 percent of the loans, according to a survey of its portfolio. Mr. Cestero said that number was typically around 10 percent.
He said the worry was that these buildings would deteriorate, or ultimately be abandoned by landlords, as they were in the ’70s.
“We’re dangerously close to a situation where we have an unsustainable rent-regulated housing stock except for the buildings that are the nicest buildings owned by the institutional owners,” he said.
This is the sort of blindingly obvious conclusion that only a socialist could ignore. If you refuse to let landlords break even and promise to keep this going for the next four years, the result is going to be deteriorating buildings and landlords who abandon property. You can't have it both ways.
Again, Mamdani isn't dumb and he probably knows that, eventually, all of this will make the housing situation worse. But he'll be out of office by then and it will be someone else's problem. His job for now is just to keep smiling.
