Starting today, Oct. 1, something unprecedented happens in this city: tenants in rent-stabilized apartments will sign a one- or two-year lease renewal with no rent increase. Nothing. Marking the first time in history for a two-year lease. Roughly one million apartments, almost 2.5 million people.
This is not a “rent holiday.” A freeze means no increase; rent is not canceled. Tenants still owe every month. A tenant cannot decide to unilaterally withhold rent. This policy doesn’t do that, and treating it that way is a good way to end up in housing court. If a building is organizing a rent strike over documented conditions, that is a different, collective, legally distinct fight. Fight on. Get a tenant lawyer. But that is not the Oct. 1 freeze.
Under the last administration, rent-stabilized tenants saw four years of increases — 12%. The former mayor tried to lock in Rent Guidelines Board appointees, but tenants organized for years. That mayor, when given a choice between tenants and landlords, chose landlords every year.
This administration made a different choice. In its first six months, the city financed more than 12,000 affordable homes, most of which were for households earning less than half the AMI. It launched an affordable housing plan with reforms aimed at cutting years off red tape.
The administration has gone after bad landlords: forcing repairs across a bankrupt portfolio; a multimillion-dollar settlement over thousands of violations; and a nuisance abatement judgment. The city held its first-ever “Rental Ripoff” hearings and took testimony from more than 1,600 tenants. That is an administration that showed up to fight.
A freeze stops rent from climbing higher. It does not lower a single bill that is already too high. That is the next fight.
Statewide, we need the Rent Emergency Stabilization for Tenants Act, letting all municipalities opt into rent regulation without running an expensive vacancy study. We can use eviction rates and overcrowding data instead. Rent stabilization effectively stops at the five boroughs. Other cities have tried to opt in, but the real estate industry sued. The REST Act gives tenants protection statewide.
In New York City, we have to move from freeze to rollback. A freeze locks in today’s rent. A rollback asks the harder question: why should today’s rent be the floor when landlord net operating income on stabilized buildings has climbed for decades? Real rent relief frees up a family’s budget for groceries, a rainy-day fund, and a vacation. It is the next thing the same coalition will organize around.
And there is unfinished business before the City Council. We need CityFHEPS reform — fixing and expanding the voucher program so it actually works for homeless and precariously housed New Yorkers — but it still has not crossed the finish line. Voucher holders are disproportionately rent-stabilized tenants and formerly homeless families. Leaving CityFHEPS half-fixed leaves a hole in the safety net that a rent freeze does not touch.
Landlord groups and some economists say a freeze, on top of rising insurance, fuel, and labor costs, will starve smaller buildings of maintenance money and accelerate the deterioration this policy is supposed to prevent. But that is not an argument for stopping the freeze. It’s an argument for pairing rent relief with real accountability on the ownership side.
The freeze proved City Hall will use the tools it has. It was the opening bell. It was not the final whistle. New Yorkers who have called this city home for generations deserve to see this fight through to the end, and I plan to be there for it.
Gordon is the executive director of the Met Council on Housing.