Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised to freeze the rent on nearly a million regulated apartments as a signature part of his campaign. “Freeze the rent” became a call-and-response chant during rallies and a pitch his army of canvassers made to voters when knocking on doors.
But his rent-freeze promise rests on the votes of the nine members of the independent Rent Guidelines Board, which is in charge of approving how much regulated rents can increase year to year. Mamdani this year appointed five new members and reappointed one more, giving him a majority of picks on the board.
Their votes, by law, must be informed by the cost of living and conditions of the real estate industry. And New Yorkers got a first look at those factors on Thursday.
Landlords of rent-regulated apartments saw their net operating income rise 6.2% between 2023 and 2024, according to the Rent Guidelines Board’s 2026 income and expense study. It marks the third year of an increase.
In the same period, the study also found that landlords’ rental income grew 4.8% as their total income grew 4.9% and expenses rose 4.2%. Taxes were the largest expense, at more than a quarter of costs.
Rent Guidelines Board member Adán Soltren questions a research staff member during a Lower Manhattan meeting, March 26, 2026. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
“Revenues generally exceed operating costs, generating funds for mortgage payments, improvements and pre-tax profit,” said Brian Hoberman, the Rent Guidelines Board research director.
The key net operating income metric is part of what the members take into account when deciding whether — and how much — to hike rents.
Whether the board moves towards a rent hike — and to what extent — won’t be clear for some time. In May, the board will take a preliminary vote on increases, and the final vote comes in June.
Last year, the board hiked rents 3% for one-year leases and 4.5% for two-year leases — a decision that disappointed both tenants and landlords alike.
Landlord groups and some housing analysts contend rent increases are necessary to keep up with rising costs of maintaining buildings, while tenant and affordable housing advocates point to the need for a rent freeze given how financially squeezed rent-stabilized tenants already are.
Mark Willis, a senior policy fellow at NYU’s Furman Center, said the board faced an “impossible task” to take into account affordability and financial sustainability, while maintaining the current housing stock and its habitability.
“Satisfying both goals is impossible in a world with inflation,” he said. “Not all tenants find their incomes going up at the rate of inflation, yet building operating costs keep going up, sometimes at a rate even faster than inflation.”
Trouble in The Bronx
The RGB’s analysis, which accounted for over 16,600 buildings, showed that income and rental growth varied widely across boroughs and for different building types.
For instance, buildings containing a higher share of stabilized apartments saw smaller increases in their net operating income. And some buildings, especially newer buildings with higher rents, keep a portion of their apartments rent-stabilized in exchange for tax breaks. Those buildings often have market-rate apartments, too, which can skew average income.
Landlord groups called the net operating income figures presented “misleading.”
“This report does not show a healthy rent-stabilized market. It shows huge rent increases for free market units and new developments that get massive tax breaks,” said Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association. “If you take one millionaire and average it with minimum wage earners, you will not get a realistic average of wages, and you can’t do that with these buildings either.”
Notably, while every borough and the vast majority of the city’s neighborhoods saw rising net operating incomes, The Bronx did not. In that borough, the net operating income was down 0.1%, with neighborhoods like Hunts Point and Longwood down as much as 13.1%.
The share of properties with negative net operating incomes fell slightly between 2023 and 2024, from 9.3% to 9.2% citywide — though Manhattan and The Bronx had the highest share of those so-called financially distressed buildings.
Willis, of the Furman Center, raised questions at the meeting about the RGB’s analysis, saying that net operating income numbers shown to the board were “probably much higher than they actually are.”
Rent Burden
Still, tenant groups seized on the rising net operating income figure as evidence a rent-freeze is warranted.
“Landlord incomes continue to rise while tenant wages stay stagnant and the cost of everything from food to transportation keeps going up,” said Sumathy Kumar, director of the New York State Tenant Bloc. “A rent freeze is the common sense first step to making sure that the New Yorkers who keep this city running aren’t priced out of our homes.”
Over 40% of the tenants in rent-stabilized units are already rent-burdened, which means they pay more than a third of their income in rent, Willis said.
Samuel Stein, a housing policy analyst with the Community Service Society, said rent-regulated apartments are “the predominant source of housing for low-income New Yorkers,” as well as for Latino and Black New Yorkers.
A 2023 city survey showed that while the median income of market-rate tenants is nearly $91,000, rent-stabilized tenants have a median income of about $60,000.
Rents collected increased 4.1% across the city between 2023 and 2024, with almost every neighborhood seeing increases. The highest increases were in Midtown, the North Shore of Staten Island, Chelsea, the Financial District, Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Only Brownsville and Ocean Hill in Brooklyn saw declines in collected rents, according to the RGB analysis.
In 2024, the study showed, the average rent of a stabilized apartment was $1,681. At $2,989 monthly, average rents were highest in the “core” of Manhattan — the area south of E. 96th St. and W. 110th St. Staten Island and The Bronx saw the lowest average rents, at just over $1,110.
Emily Eisner, acting executive director and chief economist of the Fiscal Policy Institute, said rent regulation is meant to address a “deep market failure,” — the lack of affordable housing in the market, which gives landlords “too much pricing power.”
“In the long term, we have to solve the scarcity problem,” she said.
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