2.4 Million Rent-Stabilized Tenants Would Benefit from a Rent Freeze
The RGB has a Mandate to Freeze the Rent
NEW YORK – Today at the Rent Guidelines Board Meeting, tenant advocates gave testimony from the real experts on NYC’s housing crisis: its tenants. Tenant advocates provided official testimony calling for a two-year rent freeze. Sumathy Kumar (NYS Tenant Bloc Executive Director), Julie Xu (Senior Chinatown Tenants Union Organizer for CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities), and Elisa Martinez (Community Organizer at Housing Conservation Coordinators) spoke to why the RBG must freeze the rent for both one and two year leases.
“Tenants are facing more than just an affordability crisis, we have been hit with a crisis of ICE deportations, wartime inflation, and austerity cuts to our social safety net. This crisis is unprecedented and calls for a proportional response: A freeze on rent for both one and two year leases,” said Sumathy Kumar, NYS Tenant Bloc Executive Director.
“Working class and immigrant neighborhoods like Chinatown remain home to working class immigrants because of Rent Stabilization. It is a matter of life or death for people to remain in the communities that speak their language, sell affordable groceries, provide medical and legal services in language. We must use Rent Stabilization for what it was meant for: to protect our communities, our people, and our city,” said Julie Xu, lead organizer of Chinatown Tenants Union at CAAAV.
“My own apartment has housed generations of my family members, and now I share the apartment with my brother who was recently diagnosed with MS,” said Elisa Martinez, a rent stabilized tenant in Washington Heights, Community Organizer at Housing Conservation Coordinators (HCC), and a member of the NYS Tenant Bloc. “Our bathroom ceiling has collapsed multiple times—our landlord claims to have fixed it, only for it to happen again. My family has complained about this same issue for decades. As long-term tenants, we know that our landlords have neglected our homes for years, even when they raised our rents.”
Key arguments from their testimony:
- A rent freeze has broad support. Last spring, Tenant Bloc collected 20,000 signatures from rent-stabilized tenants across the city, pledging to vote for a mayor who would call for a rent freeze. This fall, more than one million New Yorkers voted for Zohran Mamdani, whose top promise was that rent freeze. A rent freeze has a one million person mandate, and 78% of New Yorkers support it.
- The data supports a rent freeze. According to the Rent Guidelines Board’s own reports, landlord profits were up 6% last year; over the past three years, net operating incomes have risen by nearly 30%, and rents in rent-stabilized housing went up nearly 13% under the Adams administration. A 2025 survey showed that half of rent stabilized tenants are struggling to make ends meet, and two-thirds lacked emergency savings. An analysis from the Community Service Society shows a rent freeze would save New Yorkers up to $7 billion — an average of nearly $600 per month.
- The Rent Guidelines Board must not punish tenants for their landlord’s poor business decisions. Speculation — not the operating costs of the buildings, or the rents tenants pay, or rent-stabilization itself — is the main source of financial distress in rent-stabilized housing. A small number of landlords who get outsized press took out enormous debts, betting on making housing more expensive and tenants’ lives more miserable. There are other ways the city can support landlords who are truly struggling besides handing down rent hikes to tenants who can’t afford them.
Additional background
More than half (51.6%) of NYC tenant households are rent burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on rent, and 28.8% are severely rent-burdened, with 50% or more of their income going to rent. Bronx tenants in particular are facing lower inflation-adjusted wages and income but the borough’s rents are rising at the fastest rate. According to a recent RGB report, there was a 9.7% increase in residential evictions across NYC in 2025.
Housing costs are the #1 driver of inflation and people’s biggest expense each month. 37% of very low-income NYC households live in rent stabilization – three times more than live in public or subsidized housing.
According to a 2023 analysis from the Community Service Society, most tenants saw no improvement to their building or apartment, despite rent increases. Housing distress is not limited to rent regulated tenants. 65% of New York City tenants experienced a housing quality issue in the past three years.
Data from the 2026 Income and Affordability Study shows that real (inflation-adjusted) wages are declining in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Rents are rising fastest in the Bronx, where wages are lowest and the poverty and unemployment rates are the highest. Additionally, data presented to the RBG from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development found 89% of pre-1974 properties that were 100% rent stabilized had positive Net Operating Income, and the average income for that subset was 1.74x the cost of expenses.
