Adams Warns Mamdani’s Rent Freeze May Backfire, Eyes Last-Minute Shakeup at Rent Board

New York’s perennial tug-of-war over rent policy and homelessness underscores the challenge of balancing idealism and economic reality in America’s largest city.

In late June, as humidity clung to Manhattan and the city’s ever-impatient commuter class eyed relief, a more intractable strain surfaced in City Hall. Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, seldom shy about his opinions, publicly chided his successor, Zohran Mamdani, for advancing a rent freeze on more than a million rent-regulated apartments and proposing to end the city’s robust camp sweeps targeting the homeless. “Idealism collides with realism when you have to govern a city and provide for working-class people,” Adams told WABC’s “Cats Roundtable,” his tone part corrective, part reproachful.

The mayoral handoff hardly marks an end to the city’s perennial debate over homelessness and affordability; if anything, Mamdani’s arrival promises to intensify it. The mayor-elect, a self-identified democratic socialist who made housing justice the center of his campaign, claims he can sway the Rent Guidelines Board—a nine-member panel that sets allowable increases for rent-regulated units—to back his rent freeze. He has expressed confidence that “political will” will deliver results where past progressive efforts fizzled.

It is a wager fraught with both promise and peril. New York is home to some 2.2 million rent-regulated apartments, more than any other city in America. A freeze on rent hikes, Mamdani and his allies argue, is urgently needed to staunch the city’s ongoing affordability crisis, which has put tenants—particularly those of lower and moderate incomes—under increasing duress. Yet for the landlords who own most of these properties, many of whom are mom-and-pop outfits rather than Wall Street barons, stagnant rents threaten insolvency as property taxes, insurance, maintenance and utilities continue their inexorable climb.

Critics of the freeze, Adams chief among them, point to cascading risk: as regulated units falter financially, landlords may compensate by ratcheting rates in the city’s already punishing market-rate sector—perhaps nudging the monthly rent for an unregulated two-bedroom in Brooklyn or Queens beyond reach for even relatively affluent professionals. “Who’s going to pay the increases in taxes? Who’s going to pay the increases in repairs?” Adams asked, voicing the central concern that such policies could inadvertently make New York “less affordable for working class residents.”

New York’s housing pain, it must be said, is not evenly distributed. The median rent on a rent-stabilized apartment stands at a modest $1,500 per month, far below the $3,500 median for market-rate units, according to annual data published by city housing agencies. Some 60% of regulated tenants are low-income by federal standards, but a nontrivial share sit higher on the income ladder. Owners, meanwhile, operate on puny margins—accounts from the Community Housing Improvement Program put annual profit rates for small landlords at 3–5%. The city has not seen a rent freeze on stabilized apartments since the early days of the pandemic, when COVID-19’s economic pall demanded drastic measures.

Adams, never one to miss a procedural maneuver, reportedly plans to replace six members of the Rent Guidelines Board before leaving office, stymying Mamdani’s ability to stack the board with allies. Whether this gambit proves decisive or merely delays an inevitable battle remains unclear. In theory, the board is independent, but in practice, mayoral machinations have long influenced its tenor.

Complicating matters is Mamdani’s other banner promise: a sharp end to the practice of clearing homeless encampments from city sidewalks and parks. Under Adams, sweeps increased dramatically, with the city’s Department of Homeless Services removing more than 2,000 encampments in 2023 alone—a figure nonetheless dwarfed by the scope of visible street homelessness in places such as Los Angeles or San Francisco. Adams argues New York’s sweeps were “humane,” insisting they connected people to shelters and prevented cities’ common dystopian spectacle—open-air drug use, untreated mental illness, sidewalks used as toilets. Mamdani’s camp counters the sweeps are largely performative and push the homeless from one borough to another, without creating real permanent housing.

This spat over sweeps and rent, in miniature, distills the city’s split-screen version of progressivism and pragmatism. For tenants, Mamdani’s plan—however quixotic—signals an era of greater protections, but brings uncertainties about building quality if owners’ income is frozen. For owners, especially in Black and immigrant outer-borough communities, it portends a squeeze, possibly pushing some out of the market altogether. For the city’s 60,000-odd shelter residents and the thousands on its streets, the imminent end to encampment sweeps could alter daily existence—if, and only if, paired with a substantive uptick in supportive housing.

A city caught between Stockholm and San Francisco

The local fight echoes far beyond Fifth Avenue. Cities from Stockholm to Berlin have wrestled with the economic distortions of aggressive rent regulation; most have discovered it buys temporary calm but festers supply-side dysfunction. For every tale of a grateful tenant, there is one of a would-be landlord unable to recoup investments, or of buildings quietly declining as maintenance budgets vanish. San Francisco’s battles over homelessness offer a cautionary tableau—the city’s tent cities now more permanent than provisional, its attempts at solutions mired in cost and bureaucracy.

And yet, New York’s housing crisis resists simple solutions, not least because of constraints imposed by history, local law and the market’s scale. National campaigns to build more housing—be it social, supportive or straightforwardly private—move at a torpid pace; upzoning remains politically fraught. City Hall all too often must choose from a shrinking menu of imperfect options, partial fixes, and stop-gap freezes. That Mamdani feels compelled to try something bold is perhaps less an indictment of his idealism than a grim reflection of fifty years of incremental drift.

As ever, what matters most is execution. In the absence of federal intervention, any rent freeze must be paired with targeted funding for housing repairs and bolstered support for small-scale owners. Ending encampment sweeps without standing up real alternatives risks simply shifting the city’s most vulnerable out of sight, not out of poverty. Blunt-force policy may satisfy one constituency but rarely produces long-term health for a city that claims, with some justification, to be the world’s capital.

We reckon that New York’s social contract requires a harder, data-driven look at trade-offs before embracing sunny bromides or blanket freezes. Rhetoric about “humane” policy or “working class defence” must give way to the dry arithmetic of budgets and buildings, if only to ensure neither idealists nor pragmatists are left cleaning up a mess of unintended consequences. The city that never sleeps deserves a housing politics that does not slumber either.

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