On the evening of June 25, minutes after New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board voted to freeze the rent for a million rent-stabilized apartments across the five boroughs, I caught up with a tenant I know named Josie Wells. Standing outside the auditorium in East Harlem where the vote had just occurred, we spoke about the implications of the freeze for her own apartment, which she rented from the real-estate group Pinnacle until the company filed for bankruptcy and put over five thousand of its units—including her own—up for auction. After Pinnacle filed, Josie helped build the Union of Pinnacle Tenants, which has continued to organize even as a new landlord has taken over some properties.
“I don’t know if it’s gonna change my life,” she told me, a paper kazoo in one hand and a slice of pizza in another. “My rent is so high, there’s utilities, food prices,” she went on. “So, yeah, it’s huge, it’s huge, it’s huge…and it’s just a breather.” After weeks of speaking with tenants in rent-stabilized units across the city, I had heard enough to recognize her measured debrief not as critique but as agitation toward what else might be possible for a tenant movement adjusting to formal power, under a mayor who has promised “a city we can afford.”
The day before the vote, I had met Mrs. Liu on a bench across from a skate park outside her building in Chinatown. Since 2004 Mrs. Liu has been a member of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, an organization of working-class Asian immigrants in Manhattan and western Queens, which co-chaired this year’s rent freeze campaign. She has lived in this twenty-unit building since 1996, when she moved to the neighborhood and started work at a garment factory; it has been sold to new owners six or seven times since she and her family arrived.
She took me up to her apartment, which has two small bedrooms and not a lot of natural light. Five family members share the cramped space, sleeping on small cots. The kitchen is also the living room, and the kitchen sink is also the bathroom sink. Laundry hangs to dry in the corner, between a stack of tupperware and a shelf with pill bottles and collagen peptide powder. In a tank on a small table where they eat, the family keeps six koi fish as pets. Above the table Mrs. Liu maintains a small shrine featuring two framed Buddhist images, candles, and fresh apples. A postcard from Niagara Falls is pasted on the wall over the door.
Mrs. Liu’s rent is already frozen, thanks to a program called the Senior Citizen Rent Increase Exemption (SCRIE), which allows applications from tenants sixty-two and over with a household income under $50,000. Even so, this year she attended the Rent Guidelines Board’s hearings in Manhattan and testified, as she has every year since 2011, as part of the citywide effort to freeze the rent for all stabilized tenants. “It’s for the young ones… People of the past helped us, and now it’s our turn,” she told me. “I see young people, even gentrifiers in the neighborhood, struggling…. They’re working, but it’s not easy for them.”
“So often we’ve discussed politics as if it is an intellectual debate,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said this past April at an event marking his first hundred days in office. “And for working people, there is very little time for that kind of a debate. Working people want to know: what will you deliver? How will you make it easier to afford rent on the first of the month?”
On the campaign trail, as I wrote in these pages last summer, Mamdani found his way alongside working-class tenants with whom he had already been collaborating for years: in addition to universal child care and free buses, the rent freeze became one of the three central components of his affordability agenda. Those tenants, through organizations like CAAAV, meanwhile, had spent those years sharpening their analysis of how the real-estate industry drives returns to investors at the expense of the nearly 70 percent of New Yorkers who rent their homes. They resolved that they needed a mayor who would champion the tenants who lived on the wrong side of these profit motives, and they came to see organized tenants as a potential electoral bloc that could make it happen.
When Mamdani shocked the Democratic establishment in the primary and then handily defeated the disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo in November, that bet started paying off. But there’s campaigning and then there’s governing. Delivering a rent freeze wasn’t going to be straightforward.
The rent can only be frozen by a vote of the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB), an independent body that, once appointed by the mayor, can technically decide whatever it wants. To maintain a balance, two spots are reserved for tenant representatives and two for owner representatives, with the remaining five for “public” representatives who are required to have at least five years of experience in finance, economics, or housing. In one of his first viral campaign videos Mamdani, noting that eight of Mayor Eric Adams’s nine appointees to the board had finished their terms, promised to replace them with representatives “who understand that landlords are doing just fine.”
In the months that followed, that claim would be hotly contested. New York’s landlords have pushed for steady rent hikes, insisting that, without them, owners would not make enough money to keep up with building maintenance. Earlier this year in Phenomenal World, J.W. Mason, a John Jay College economics professor, analyzed landlords’ monthly average gross income and operating costs and found that this assertion was mostly wrong: the “great majority” of residential properties make much more than landlords spend on them. Between 2021 and 2024 landlords’ net operating incomes rose by 30 percent. (For the small minority of buildings where this is not the case, Mayor Mamdani has proposed a city-backed insurance fund to combat soaring premiums and promoted a state hardship program for capital expenses.)
There is indeed a crisis brewing in the political economy of housing, both in New York and across the country—but as Mason and others have argued, it has less to do with straight-up operating costs and more to do with debt. Landlords are overleveraged, many having gambled with Covid-era low interest loans, borrowing to finance the rehabilitation of their current properties and the acquisition of new ones. Now, years on, they are struggling to pay those loans back under very different economic conditions, leading to what the researchers Ruthy Gourevitch and Jacob Udell have assessed as “escalating financial distress” in the multifamily rental market. Nationwide, as Gourevitch and Udell wrote in a policy brief in November, loan delinquencies “have nearly doubled in just the last year,” recently reaching their highest rate in a decade.
If New York City building owners might not do “just fine” under the rent freeze, in other words, it is generally not because their buildings cost too much to run but because, per Mason, “they borrowed too much to buy buildings at inflated prices, based on an expectation that rents would rise faster than they actually did.” Their gamble only made sense, and their deals only “penciled,” because they believed they could rely on passing ever-increasing burdens to their tenants. But tenants are already squeezed, and they can hardly be expected to mitigate the risks embedded in their landlords’ business models. The bind facing overleveraged owners is real—but it is not for tenants to solve.
Adams oversaw rent increases every year, for a cumulative increase of more than 12 percent during his time in office, and as his term came to an end he worked to entrench the RGB responsible for those hikes. On December 18, 2025, with two weeks left in office, he announced four appointments and reappointments: a finance professor, a landlord attorney, and a Merrill Lynch executive, plus one tenant lawyer.
Still not sworn in, Mamdani was undeterred. “We will use all the tools at our disposal to deliver [the rent freeze],” his team said in a statement, “and last-minute appointments do not change these facts.” Sumathy Kumar, executive director of the New York State Tenant Bloc, a coalition of tenant organizations throughout the state, shared the mayor’s certitude: “We are getting our rent freeze.”
In the end Adams’s last-ditch attempts to scuttle Mamdani’s plans failed, seemingly not due to any illicit pressure campaign but due to the strength of the electoral mandate: few board appointees, it turned out, wanted to be on the wrong side of the popular incoming administration. Twelve hours before Adams was set to leave office, the Merrill Lynch executive—who might have been a crucial vote against the freeze—withdrew. Adams tried to replace him, but the replacement declined the appointment. Once Mamdani was sworn in, he got to make six appointments to the board.
But that was still no guarantee. The mayor’s role was done, and in the following months the administration proceeded with caution to avoid breaking rules that prohibit it from interfering with the work of the independent agency. But City Hall did take the opportunity to launch a flagship civic education experiment. On April 29, flanked by Tascha Van Auken, the commissioner for the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement, and Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, Mamdani announced Organize NYC, a project of Van Auken’s office, which aimed to bring “the people-powered movement that elected Mayor Mamdani to the work of governance.” It would start by hosting trainings across the city to inform tenants of their rights and about the RGB process. (I was a presenter at the Chinatown and Harlem events, sharing a basic history of the tenant movement in New York.) He described it as a way to “keep New Yorkers involved in the work of shaping the future of our city.” Hundreds turned up to these evening gatherings in May, mostly held in high school cafeterias. They left with invitations to knock doors with OME to get people out to the RGB’s annual hearings, which had been scheduled for Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn throughout June.
At the same time, organizers outside City Hall turned the RGB hearings into ever more energetic theaters for the tenant struggle, holding rallies and packing the rooms with tenants ready to testify in favor of the freeze. Their efforts more than doubled engagement from previous years; by the date of the final vote the coalition’s members—among them CAAAV, CASA, the Met Council, Housing Organizers for People Empowerment (HOPE), and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America—had organized around 330 testimonies at the hearings and submitted some 700 written and audio statements.
The landlords fought back. Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association—a group that convenes owners and managers of some 500,000 rent-stabilized apartments—had at one point played basketball and smoked hookah with the mayor when they were colleagues in the state assembly. Now he made the rounds on local news and social media, presenting himself as a contrast to Mamdani, repeating the arguments about maintenance costs and peddling anti-freeze hyperbole: “We are on a path to destroy the housing people live in,” he told Curbed. At the Brooklyn RGB hearing, a pro-landlord group called the Gotham Housing Alliance bussed in paid actors dressed as zombies—with raggedy clothes and fake blood—to symbolize the regulated units that, the landlords argued, would be reduced to empty “zombies” if the owners couldn’t afford to maintain them.
The day of the final vote proceeded in dramatic fashion. Just hours before the tenants and board members gathered at El Museo del Barrio in Harlem, Christina Smyth, the landlord attorney Adams had reappointed, resigned from the board, effective immediately, in protest of what she characterized as an illegitimate process. In a three-page letter posted to her LinkedIn, she accused the board of ignoring its own data and made her final case against the freeze, again citing the oft-repeated though imprecise argument about maintenance costs:
Please understand me when I tell you that a freeze does not help the people it claims to protect. It does not lower the cost of running a building. It does not pay for a boiler or a roof or an elevator. It widens the gap between what a building costs to operate and what it is allowed to collect… When these buildings fail, it is not the people who cast these votes who pay the price… It is the family in the building no one is maintaining. They are the ones with the most to lose, and they are the ones I am most worried about.
Smyth’s argument called back to the central debate between the freeze’s supporters and detractors over who ought to bear responsibility for the causes of systemic failure. (In a lawsuit filed in late July, a group of landlords cited her resignation, alleging that the Mamdani-appointed board “made a mockery of its statutory mandate” and had succumbed to political pressure. And yet even the one member of the board who voted against the freeze said during a recent public appearance that he “observed no interference by the administration in individual members’ decisions.”)
From the auditorium stage at the museum, after a few other points of business, the RGB’s chair, Chantella Mitchell, called a vote on the main item: a zero-percent increase for one-year-leases and the city’s first-ever freeze for two-year leases. Five of the members voted in favor before Mitchell turned to Maksim Wynn, the remaining owner representative on the board. Instead of providing an immediate response, he launched into prepared remarks. The audience was raucous—leading chant after chant, completely drowning out Wynn’s commentary, which nevertheless continued for over five minutes. Finally tenants up front shushed the crowd as they realized Wynn was coming to an interesting conclusion, arguing that, with rents too high for people to afford, and rent collection low as a result, a rent freeze was actually in the owners’ interest:
There is a subset of the rent-stabilized stock that is in real distress, but the underlying causes are systemic ones. Those systemic issues need to be addressed, but at this moment the tools this board has are more likely to cause harm to owners rather than help, while the tools that the city and state have will definitively help…. At this moment in time, with the city taking the first steps towards the capital and expense interventions owners need, and the imminent risk of cratering economic occupancy, a zero percent increase on one- and two-year leases is in owners’ best interests.
The crowd quieted just enough to hear his vote, which secured the freeze, and then erupted once more. I sat next to a tenant named Magda, a member of CASA, a Bronx organization that had co-chaired the rent freeze campaign with CAAAV. She wore sunglasses throughout the whole vote, chatting to me about how anxious she was about the rent. When she heard the final count, she jumped to her feet, whipped off her glasses, and FaceTimed a friend, exclaiming with joy. Tenants filed out of the auditorium to the party on the plaza outside the museum, which expanded onto the sidewalk and toward the park across the street and then to a bar a few blocks away. Organizers played “We Are The Champions” from wheeled speakers as Josie, Mrs. Liu, Magda, and hundreds of other tenants celebrated.
When I asked her what got the freeze done this time, Kumar from the Tenant Bloc was straightforward. “This happened because of organized tenants,” she said. “The RGB process always felt like a sham, with board members looking at their phones while tenants poured their hearts out…and two years ago we decided to do things differently.” She was referring to the bloc’s decision to prioritize the mayoral election as an intervention into the rote annual RGB process. “We decided to elect a mayor committed to a freeze, and he appointed a board that actually listened to tenants.”
Mamdani’s politics, which are not just his but those of the movement that shaped him, insist that it is possible to deliver a city we can afford, and more. Breathing room is not nothing; it’s a precondition for what comes next. This is a movement built on challenging not just the high cost of rent but the very notion that tenants’ homes are treated as a vehicle for owners’ money-making. It should come as no surprise, then, that the organizers’ eyes were already trained to further points on the horizon: a rent rollback, a statewide expansion of rent stabilization, and—as a way to address the crisis of overleverage—municipal or tenant buyouts of distressed properties.
Joanne Grell—a rent-stabilized tenant in the Bronx and, like Magda, a member of CASA—grabbed a mic, addressing the group gathered around her during the celebration. She echoed Josie: “New York, I hope you can breathe tonight.” Then her remarks turned to what the movement could do next, from taking over buildings to securing universal rent control. “A rent freeze,” she said, “is not the end of our story. It’s proof of what’s possible… Who here believes that anything is possible?” Hands shot up throughout the crowd.