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How Mamdani’s Rent Guidelines Board is cooking the numbers to set up his rent freeze

The city’s Rent Guidelines Board won’t decide this year’s rent hikes for regulated apartments until June, but its staff is already cooking the stats to “justify” Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s promised rent freeze.

The board’s recently released 2026 Income and Expense study claims landlords’ Net Operating Income for buildings with rent-stabilized units rose 6.2%. Tenants’ advocates say that justifies a rent freeze.

Don’t buy it: That 6.2% figure tells you a lot less than you think about landlords’ ability to pay their bills.

For starters, adjusted for inflation, the number drops to just 2.2%.

And it’s merely a year-over-year comparison of building owners’ income after subtracting expenses like taxes, utilities, maintenance, insurance, etc.

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So if an owner loses money one year, but sees his income rise a bit, enabling him to lose less the next year, that could show up as “increase” — even though he’s still losing money.

What’s more, it’s an aggregate figure for all buildings with at least one rent-stabilized unit, even though some have market-rate units whose rent hikes pump up the average, distorting the picture.

For buildings with more than 50% of their units rent-stabilized, the “increase” in Net Operating Income was just 4%; for those with 100% stabilized units, it was just 2.4%.

Nor does the figure distinguish between new buildings and old ones that need major repairs.

That’s key, since the NOI doesn’t account for the cost of capital improvements or debt service.

The citywide NOI also conflates buildings in “core Manhattan,” where inflation-adjusted growth was 10%, with the entire rest of the city, where it was just 0.9%.

In The Bronx, net income actually fell — by 0.1%.

Here’s the real story: Numerous residential buildings in the city have been losing money, thanks largely to rent freezes or too-small increases, averaging less than 1%, under Mayor Bill de Blasio and insufficient hikes to make up for it under Mayor Eric Adams.

In particular, rent-stabilized buildings built before 1974 are in shabby shape and need major, costly repairs and upgrades.

On top of that, the city’s climate law, Local Law 97, requires pricey changes to meet emissions standards.

Meanwhile, genius progressives in Albany made it impossible for landlords to pass on the costs of those upgrades to tenants.

Tens of thousands of “zombie” apartments are now being warehoused because landlords can’t afford to bring them up to code and recoup their outlays via rent.

No matter: The Rent Guidelines Board — six of whose nine members were appointed by Mamdani — doesn’t actually care about the facts.

Expect it to do socialist Mamdani’s bidding and ram through a rent freeze.

Also when it does, expect more apartments to degrade, buildings to go belly-up and tenants to suffer.

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