When Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor of New York City, he made one promise unmistakably clear: he would freeze the rent. Now that campaign tentpole is poised to collide with the complex economic factors exacerbating the Big Apple’s housing affordability crisis.
As his administration begins to take shape, that pledge, rooted in a democratic socialist vision of housing as a human right, is likely to be the first major political test for Mamdani. Supporters say it is an urgent lifeline for tenants battered by inflation and record rents. Critics warn it could destabilize the city’s fragile housing ecosystem, deepen building distress, and accelerate an exodus of small property owners.
"I have people walking away. I have two people selling their buildings right now. I have more people selling the buildings and leaving for Texas and Florida," Humberto Lopes, founder of the Gotham Housing Alliance, told Fox News Digital.
"People already came to me, and I have their buildings on the market already. Since January, my business in the real estate, I'm a licensed corporate broker, has doubled in the number of buildings we are selling."
Lopes’ interview, among others, is part of Fox News Digital’s "The Rise of Socialism" series, which examines how socialist ideas and policies are increasingly shaping political debates and public policy in major cities across the United States.
Roughly one million apartments in New York City are rent-stabilized. A rent freeze would apply only to those units, holding annual increases at zero down from 3% for at least a year.
Tenant advocates argue the move is overdue. Median rents in Manhattan hover around $5,000 per month, a figure that Carlina Rivera, president and CEO of the New York State Association for Affordable Housing (NYSAFAH), concedes is "absurd" and increasingly unsustainable for working- and middle-class residents.
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Rivera supports voucher programs, such as CityFHEPS, which moved approximately 30,000 families from shelters into stable housing last year. About 135,000 New Yorkers rely on rental vouchers to remain in their homes. Even so, affordability pressures persist across boroughs.
Mamdani has framed the rent freeze as part of a broader affordability agenda that includes strengthening tenant protections, preventing homelessness, and accelerating housing production on vacant city-owned lots. His administration has signaled support for cutting red tape in environmental review and permitting processes, changes developers say could reduce costs by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per project.
But landlords and property owners argue the freeze targets only part of the market while ignoring underlying financial realities.
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"It’s impossible to freeze rents when expenses to operate housing continue to rise," said Ann Korchak, board president of the Small Property Owners of New York (SPONY), in an interview with Fox News Digital. "Revenue, which is rent in housing, needs to rise to cover rising expenses."
Across interviews with housing providers, from nonprofit developers to small "mom-and-pop" landlords, a consistent theme has emerged: Operating costs are climbing rapidly.
Insurance premiums for residential properties have risen dramatically since 2019, in some cases more than doubling. Utility costs remain elevated. Property taxes — which often make up 40% to 50% of some small owners’ rent rolls — have increased steadily for years.
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Lopes says property taxes on some buildings are projected to rise between 15% and 40% this year. He revealed that one of his buildings' tax bills will jump from $68,000 to nearly $100,000 while allowable rent increases remain capped at a fraction of that yearly jump.
"Where do you think that money’s going to come from?" Lopes asked.
Landlord groups argue that freezing stabilized rents doesn’t eliminate costs, it redistributes them. In mixed buildings, they say, commercial tenants or market-rate renters may shoulder a greater burden. In others, maintenance and capital upgrades may be deferred.
"If you freeze the rent-stabilized housing," Korchak said, "the commercial rents are going to have to continue to go up to make up for that shortfall, or the free-market tenants will have to pay higher rents."
Affordable housing developers express similar concerns. Rivera said operational stress in rent-stabilized buildings is no longer anecdotal.
"The data is out there as to how people are really struggling," Rivera said. "Operational costs are up in the double digits. And that would be hard for anybody to maintain."
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Rivera supports tenant protections and acknowledges affordability challenges but warns that layering on a rent freeze and higher property taxes could risk foreclosures or bankruptcies, a worst-case scenario she says would be "bad for the city, bad for business."
Mamdani and his allies frequently describe housing as a human right. Critics counter that in New York’s current system, housing is also overwhelmingly a private enterprise.
"When people say housing is a human right," Korchak said, "the reality is most housing in New York is provided by private owners. We are supporting the city through the property tax collection attached to every rental building."
Property taxes fund schools, police, fire departments, and hospitals. If large swaths of housing were converted to social or nonprofit models, owners argue, the city would lose significant tax revenue unless replacement funding were found.
Jan Lee, a third-generation Chinatown property owner, fears what he sees as increasing hostility toward private ownership.
"If we keep pushing small property owners over this cliff, and we don’t give them the tools that they need to maintain their units, we’re just going to leave New York City," Lee said. "And tenants will be left with a 1-800 number to a corporate entity."
Lee and others also reject rhetoric that characterizes landlords as exploitative, arguing that many are immigrants or children of immigrants who built intergenerational wealth through property ownership.
"I fear that a lot of the rhetoric that was out of the campaign trail to get votes is actually going to solidify and calcify into something that will reflect true socialism, true socialist views toward housing," he said.
"I think when you start to lump all of us together. And say that we're all the bad thing that's keeping people out of housing, that's racist. I think that saying that [people's] history should be denied and that everything about home ownership is related to White superiority, [that's] racist. You know, this denies the history of how New York City was built. And I, for one, don't agree with it," Lee continued, referencing comments made by Cea Weaver, Mamdani’s new director of the city Office to Protect Tenants.
Weaver and the mayor's office did not return Fox News Digital's request for comment.
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Those deeply embedded in New York City’s housing hub argue the current system has failed tenants for decades. They point to chronic underbuilding, restrictive zoning, and the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which strengthened rent regulations but, critics say, also limited incentives to renovate vacant stabilized units.
Tenant groups contend that rent stabilization has kept millions housed and that without intervention, market forces alone would push rents even higher.
Any conversation about socialism and housing in New York inevitably turns to NYCHA, the New York City Housing Authority, which houses nearly 400,000 residents. Long plagued by underfunding and deteriorating conditions, NYCHA stands as both a testament to large-scale public housing and a warning about chronic neglect.
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Rivera argues NYCHA should be treated like other essential infrastructure, akin to the MTA or public hospitals, with sustained investment and conversation rather than episodic crisis management.
"When you see the bad landlords in New York City and the conditions of some of these units, you certainly want to hold them accountable," she said. "When you look at NYCHA, who's the biggest landlord and arguably really responsible for some of the worst conditions, it's a really hard line to walk as to how do you hold an agency accountable in which the government is in charge of when there's also been decades of neglect."
Mamdani has signaled support for stronger public investment and faster housing production, including building on vacant city lots and streamlining bureaucratic processes. But even ambitious construction timelines would take years to materially increase supply.
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New York’s housing crisis was decades in the making. Vacancy rates hover near historic lows. Homelessness remains elevated. Insurance and construction costs are rising nationally. And political polarization has hardened.
A rent freeze may offer immediate relief to stabilized tenants. But its long-term impact will depend on whether it is accompanied by property-tax relief, subsidy expansion, faster production, or deeper structural changes.
For now, the city stands at a crossroads.
To Mamdani’s supporters, this moment represents a long-overdue correction. To critics, it risks repeating the fiscal and housing distress of the 1970s, when disinvestment and abandonment scarred neighborhoods across the five boroughs.
The outcome may determine not only whether New York becomes more affordable, but also what kind of city it chooses to be: one driven primarily by market incentives, or one increasingly shaped by a socialist vision of housing as a public good.
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