{"id":730874,"date":"2026-06-28T10:53:44","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T10:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/730874\/"},"modified":"2026-06-28T10:53:44","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T10:53:44","slug":"nycs-market-rate-tenants-getting-stuck-with-mamdanis-rent-freeze-bill-board-member","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/730874\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC’s market rate tenants getting stuck with Mamdani’s rent-freeze bill: board member"},"content":{"rendered":"

New Yorkers living in the city\u2019s 1.1 million market-rate apartments are about to get stuck with the bill for the city\u2019s rent freeze<\/a>, according to the only member of New York City\u2019s Rent Guidelines Board who is an economist and voted \u201cno\u201d on the freeze.<\/p>\n

Arpit Gupta, who was appointed to the board by former Mayor Eric Adams, said landlords will likely jack up rents on market-rate units, as the rent-stabilized market stalls with tenants incentivized to stay put and owners forced to pull vacant units off the market.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think of this as trying to breathe with one lung,\u201d said Gupta, an economist and associated professor of finance at New York University\u2019s Stern School of Business.<\/p>\n

The RGB approved\u00a0Mamdani\u2019s key campaign promise to \u201cfreeze the rent\u201d for two-years by a 7-1 vote Thursday. Kevin C. Downs for NY Post<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have one half of the housing market now that\u2019s just going to be frozen in place, so all the demand has to be accommodated by just the market-rate units, so I expect upward pressure on rents to those.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0RGB approved Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s key campaign promise to \u201cfreeze the rent\u201d for two-years Thursday by a 7-1 vote \u2014 in a move that saw Christina Smyth, one of the board\u2019s two landlord representatives, resign in protest hours before the vote, slamming the whole thing as \u201ctheater.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe hearings, the reports, the public comment, the data. None of it was ever going to change the result,\u201d Smyth lambasted.<\/p>\n

Roughly 1.3 million rental units out of the city\u2019s 2.3 million are outside the rent-stabilized system, including some 1.1 million market rate units, the most common type of rental, representing 48% of units, according to the RGB\u2019s 2026 Housing Supply Report<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Gupta is the RGB\u2019s only economist and was the lone dissenting vote.
\n NYU<\/p>\n

There are 960,700 rent-stabilized units across the five boroughs according to the same report, but a staggering 57,000 of them are sitting vacant. That\u2019s up a record 9,000 since last year, according to a state\u2019s Division of Homes and Community Renewal letter sent to the RGB earlier this month.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s worse is as many as 30% of rent-stabilized tenants earn six figures, according to the income data in NYC\u2019s Housing and Vacancy Survey<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Until recently that included Mamdani himself, who lived in a $2,300 Astoria pad<\/a> despite making $142,000 as a state assemblyman and his family wealth<\/a>, before he moved into Gracie Mansion in January.<\/p>\n

Mamdani himself lived in a rent-stabilized apartment despite making $142,000 as a state assemblyman. Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cThe key thing is the rent stabilized stock is not income restricted or targeted in any way,\u201d said Gupta. \u201cMany people in market-rate housing are quite poor\u2026and they\u2019ll face upward pressure on their rents and many poor individuals will suffer as a consequence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gupta also predicts the freeze will leave even more coveted rent-stabilized apartments gathering dust instead of housing New Yorkers. Already, 10% of those buildings are losing money instead of making it \u2013 with thousands of units facing foreclosure<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe cost of rehabilitating a vacant unit can be quite high, and now owners might not perceive any legal way of recouping the revenue for the rehabilitation costs from a new tenancy,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

There were 960,700 rent-stabilized units according to the RGB\u2019s 2026 report, but of those 57,000 sit vacant. Christopher Sadowski for NY Post<\/p>\n

Gupta said the other members of the board voted yes \u2014 despite the sobering data \u2014 because they assume taxpayers will ultimately foot the bill under the socialist mayor.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey believe that more city resources can and will go towards the funding of these buildings.\u201c<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New Yorkers living in the city\u2019s 1.1 million market-rate apartments are about to get stuck with the bill…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":730875,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,18290,5871,1999,3,85735,23098,314769,23099,21,19,22,20,25,194,24],"class_list":["post-730874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-board","tag-metro","tag-new-york-city","tag-news","tag-nyu","tag-rent","tag-rent-stabilization","tag-rentals","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-us-news","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=730874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/730875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=730874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=730874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=730874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}