When faced with Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to freeze the rent on 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, the owners of said apartments countered with a theory that was a little like the Law of Conservation of Mass: Rents are neither created nor destroyed, only rearranged. Their argument was simple — costs are rising for landlords, and if they can’t raise the rents on their stabilized units, then they’ll have to raise them on the market-rate ones. The idea was to divide renters on the proposal: Your neighbor might have their rent frozen, but as a market-rate tenant, you’re the one who will pay for it. “Freezing the rents for some means raising the rents for others,” Kenny Burgos, the head of the New York Apartment Association, an organization of rent-stabilized landlords, said over the summer.

Now, all these months later, Mayor Mamdani seems to have the majority he needs on the Rent Guidelines Board. So what happens next, if close to a million households start paying four years of flat rents? Does the status quo hold, or will it be something closer to “A Tale of Two Apartments”?

The first part of the landlords’ argument is clear — it’s getting more and more expensive to operate a rent-stabilized building. Over the past five years, overall operating costs increased by 28 percent, with the costs of insurance and fuel going up 19 percent and 10 percent, respectively, between 2024 and 2025. Housing analyst Jonathan Miller, who is skeptical of the proposal, says that landlords will likely try to raise market-rate rents to help cover at least some of that rise in costs. “I’m not saying that open-market rents skyrocket, but it does place upward pressure on them,” he explains.

And while freezes under Bill de Blasio in 2015 and 2016 didn’t result in market-price spikes, per Miller’s own data, he cautions against extrapolating too much from that period. (The final rent freeze under the de Blasio administration, in 2020, was mid-pandemic and so not a great point of comparison for much of anything.) Mortgage rates were lower in those years — meaning people at the top of the rental market were mostly free to jump into the buyers’ market when ready. That’s not the case right now, as high........

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