Mamdani Antoinette: NYC Mayor Celebrates Rent Freeze with Cake

[mystery-ak]

Mamdani Antoinette: NYC Mayor Celebrates Rent Freeze with Cake

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani touted the fulfillment of one of his campaign promises Friday after the Independent Rent Guidelines Board approved a rent freeze, saying more than two million New Yorkers living in rent-stabilized apartments will have their rent frozen next year.

“New York, the Independent Rent Guidelines Board just froze the rent,” Mamdani said in an announcement video. “That means if you’re one of the more than two million New Yorkers who lives in a rent stabilized apartment, your rent is going to be frozen next year.” The video included both English and Spanish closed captions, and showed Mamdani opening a freezer to grab a chocolate popsicle as he discussed the freeze.

Mamdani later posted photos from a celebration of the rent announcement with the caption, “Serving up a rent freeze.” The images showed him cutting a cake decorated with blue icing and the words “Happy Rent Freeze!” before serving slices to and speaking with attendees.

Breitbart News’s Business Digest described Mamdani’s victory in November as driven in part by an affordability-focused platform, noting that he won more than one million votes, the highest total for any New York City mayoral candidate since 1969, while drawing support from both gentrified Brooklyn neighborhoods and working-class Black and Latino neighborhoods. The Business Digest said Mamdani’s platform, including rent freezes, free child care, and expanded public services, spoke to voters facing “different versions of the same crisis.”

Mamdani’s own housing situation has drawn scrutiny. In December 2025, the New York Post reported that after Mamdani said he was giving up his rent-stabilized Astoria apartment for Gracie Mansion, the next tenant would pay $3,100 per month, about $800 more than the roughly $2,300 Mamdani paid. The report said Mamdani had been receiving a preferential rent below the maximum allowed by law.

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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/06/26/mamdani-antoinette-nyc-mayor-celebrates-rent-freeze-with-cake/

[mountaineer]

Paula Pant
@AffordAnything
There's no freeze on property tax.   

There's no freeze on the wages paid to landscapers, plumbers, electricians, drywallers, flooring installers.   

There's no freeze on the cost of lumber, copper, baseboard, quarter rounds, flashing, siding, window treatments.   

There's no freeze on the wages paid to janitors or porters.   

There's no freeze on utilities -- on electric, gas, water, sewer (building-paid utilities in hallways, lobbies, maintenance corridors; most buildings pay water and sewer for tenants).

There are currently 57,421 units sitting vacant in NYC because it's more cost-effective to leave them empty than it is to rent them out.

If you're wondering: "How that could be possible? Wouldn't making anything be better than making nothing?" --  the answer is no, because of the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act.

The HSTPA mandated a certain level of renovation for a vacant unit, but did not allow landlords to raise the rent enough to be able to recoup those costs.

If a long-term tenant moves out after decades, the apartment often requires $50,000 to $100,000 in lead abatement, new wiring, plumbing, and structural renovations.

Because the law heavily restricts how much of that cost can be passed to the next tenant.

The HSPTA eliminated the "vacancy bonus" (which allowed automatic 20% rent increases when a tenant left) and heavily capped Individual Apartment Improvements (IAIs).

This means landlords who want a renovation loan would be rejected by a bank, because the landlord would not be able to show that they could repay that loan.

Landlords who pay out-of-pocket would end up losing money, underperforming even what they could get by putting their money in a U.S. Treasury or gov't bond.

Therefore, it's more cost-effective to just leave the unit vacant.

That's why we have 57,421 vacant units across New York right now.

That number is about to get much worse.
9:40 AM · Jun 27, 2026

[mountaineer]

Bill Ackman
@BillAckman
Imagine your family worked for a generation to save enough money to buy a brownstone occupied with rent stabilized tenants on the Upper West Side. The family financed the purchase with a mortgage from a bank based on the premise that rents and cash flow would at least keep pace with inflation so you could pay interest and principal on the mortgage and hopefully have some cash flow left as a return on your investment.

While you had rent stabilized tenants, you were led to believe that the NYC Rent Guidelines Board would be required to adjudicate rental increases each year by taking a measure of the inflation of costs to own and operate a building and setting rental increases appropriately.

You believed the RGB would do its job as the board is comprised of two representatives each for landlords and tenants and five independent representatives that represent the general public.

Now, a new mayor @NYCMayor Mamdani is elected on the promise of freezing rents. There are about two million rent stabilized renters that benefit if rents are frozen so by promising frozen rents the new candidate for mayor buys votes and wins the election.

The new mayor achieves his objective by stacking the RGB with directors who do not follow their obligations and simply vote for a rent freeze as a preordained conclusion as evidenced by the statements of an RGB director who resigned in protest for this very reason.

Meanwhile, inflation in NYC is rampant in utilities, real estate taxes, insurance, repairs and maintenance, etc. and now your rents are frozen. Real estate is a high operating leverage business which means that frozen rents and inflating expenses will cause property cash flows to plummet and your after debt service cash flow to go negative.

I expect therefore there will be hundreds if not thousands of small NYC property owners who are now or will shortly be underwater on their mortgages, and without any cash flow to maintain their assets.

If you remember the images of the South Bronx burning in the mid 1970s, you can viscerally understand what is happening to small NYC real estate owners.

While the rent freeze appears to be short-term good news (long term  it will lead to poorly maintained apartments) for 2 million NYC renters, it is bad news for the 2 million or more renters in the 1 million market rate apartments in the City because a landlord-hostile market is not likely to add meaningfully more supply and market rents will likely continue to escalate at a high rate.

All of this seems quite unfair and wrong unless I missing something?  Why am I wrong?

For disclosure: I do not own any NYC rental apartments.
9:39 AM · Jun 28, 2026

[Kamaji]

Right back to the 1970s