Will Zahran Mamdani’s rent freeze keep rent-stabilized apartments empty?

The previous tenant paid nine hundred and three dollars a month. (Theft!) In the free market, a unit could fetch three grand, easily. (He told me he had to call it a “fait accompli” with two beds, because legally, the living room must have windows.) But he estimated that making the place livable would cost him $120,000, and under current rent stabilization laws, the most he could charge was $120,000 a month — which he said roughly covers the costs of running the apartment but not the renovations.

We continued the tour. “Maybe I’ll get rid of this, because this is all lead,” he told me, waving paint around some windows. Given the amount of progress he was indicating, I asked Lee if it was safe for us to be there. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I think it’s okay, it’s not really choppy or anything like that.” He looked at the wall. “I don’t know if you have an actual monitoring device to see if there’s any dust?” he asked. I told him I didn’t. “This is par for the course for residential buildings in Chinatown,” he said. “There are some buildings that have a toilet in the lobby.” I asked him about the kids’ scooter on the floor. “I don’t know how it got there,” he said.

Under current laws, landlords can raise the rent if they make improvements to a vacant apartment, but the amount is capped at fifty thousand dollars, spread over fifteen years. (Before 2019, a landlord could charge a 20 percent increase in vacancy when a tenant moved out, and there was no $50,000 cap.) When I asked Lee why he hadn’t renovated the apartment earlier, he said it was because of the previous tenant. “You have to put it in its place if you take it out for renovation,” he said. But the apartment has now been vacant for three years. Why was it still non-renewable and non-rentable? “There is no economic incentive,” he said. “You’re losing money.”

Nearly a million apartments in New York are rent-regulated, and living in one of them is kind of a dream. The rules are often vague and not necessarily understood by people living in these places. (One of the tenants in Harlem Recently discovered(After twenty years of paying market rents, his apartment was rent stabilized.)

There are two types of rent-controlled apartments: rent-controlled apartments and rent-fixed apartments. The common concept of a rent-regulated apartment — an apartment in Manhattan, somehow still renting at old prices — is probably rent-controlled. (In “Sex and the City,” Carrie Bradshaw’s fictional one-bedroom costs seven hundred and fifty dollars a month and is rent controlled; in “And Just Like That…” the new tenant puts up a dividing wall so she can split it with her roommate.) But rent control was phased out in 1971, and now there are only twenty-four thousand apartments controlled Rent in the city. (These units can be transferred to family members, but generally when a rent-controlled tenant leaves, the apartment becomes rent-stabilized or hits the free market.) Meanwhile, there are 996,600 rent-stabilized apartments, whose rents are dictated by the nine-person Rent Guidelines Board. Under de Blasio, rents were frozen three times, and the increase in one year did not exceed 1.5%; Under Adams, they rose 3.25 percent in 2022, three percent in 2023, 2.75 percent in 2024, and will rise three percent again this year.

The Lee Building contains eight apartments that more or less tell the story of rent regulation over the years. One is rent-stabilized but vacant; Six of them are rent stable and occupied; And the one on the second floor is market price. He told me it looked like his own vacant apartment: a bathtub in the kitchen, lead in the walls. In 2017, Lee spent more than a hundred thousand dollars to renovate it, which, under previous laws, allowed him to destabilize it. It is now rented for $3,500 a month, as two beds, to two Wall Street guys who have moved from California. (“Pretty reasonable for Manhattan,” he told me.) His other rent-stabilized apartments, which are similar in size, are worth about $1,000 or less. He did some minor renovations — “I put the shower, bath and sink together, and nothing was exciting” — but decided to keep the rent stable. Lee Mamdani opposes the proposed rent freeze, but said he does not oppose rent stabilization at all. He was born in New York and grew up in the Al-Jisrain neighborhood. “I wanted to keep a lot of the Chinatown renters, the working families, here,” Lee said.