The New York City Rent Guidelines Board’s vote last week to freeze rents on about 1 million stabilized units is sparking a lot of opinions from some of the most high-profile people in the country.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on a pledge to “freeze the rent,” called the board’s decision an “historic victory” that will deliver “the relief that working people across our city deserve.” President Donald Trump, in contrast, complained that a two-year cap on rental increases and landlord income will turn “buildings into ghettos and slums.”
But for regular New Yorkers, the vote may call to mind two seemingly simple questions: How do I get one of those rent-stabilized apartments? How do I know if I’m in one now?
The units make up about 40% of the city’s rental housing stock, and finding one can be like a golden ticket to an affordable life in an increasingly unaffordable city.
But tenants with rent-stabilized apartments tend to hold on to them. The rent freeze shows why: Renters are shielded from exorbitant increases and are guaranteed a lease renewal in most cases.
Frozen rent means tenants who sign leases after Oct. 1 will be paying the same price two years after their next leases, even as median market-rate prices soar to record highs — now over $5,000 a month in Manhattan — and other costs increase.
Here’s what to know, and how to find a rent-stabilized apartment.
What is rent-stabilization?
State laws dating back to the 1960s limit rent increases for roughly 950,000 apartments in New York City. The current rules apply to two types of buildings: those with six or more apartments that were constructed before 1974 and other, more recently constructed complexes that receive property tax breaks, city financing or other government subsidies.
But it gets complicated: Not all apartments in those pre-1974 buildings are rent-stabilized because laws in effect from 1994 to 2019 allowed landlords to lift units out of the stabilization system once rents surpassed a specific monthly price.
Other laws that ended in 2019 allowed owners to raise rents by 20% whenever units became vacant and by additional amounts following significant renovations. Those strategies helped landlords reach the “decontrol” threshold and, according to a 2019 report by the nonprofit policy group Community Service Society, convert more than 150,000 apartments to market-rate — meaning owners could charge whatever tenants were willing to pay.
The laws led to a patchwork of stabilized and non-stabilized apartments, often in a single building.
How do I find out if my apartment is rent-stabilized?
Landlords are required to provide special lease riders that inform tenants of their rights under rent stabilization law.
But landlords at times withhold the riders, either because they don’t want tenants to know apartments are stabilized or because they themselves don’t know, said Leah Goodridge, a tenant attorney and former member of the Rent Guidelines Board.
Goodridge recommends that tenants contact the state’s Division of Homes and Community Renewal to request their apartments' rent histories or check on their stabilization status. Renters can submit their requests by mail or through the agency’s online portal.
“They will not give it to you over the phone,” Goodridge said.
That rent history is key, said Allia Mohamed, CEO of the listings site openigloo.
“It is the only single document that can confirm without a shadow of a doubt if you have a rent-stabilized apartment,” Mohamed said.
The history will indicate whether the landlord registered the unit as rent-stabilized with the state or if the rents increased consistent with Rent Guidelines Board decisions. A sudden increase, or a failure to register the apartment, could indicate that an apartment was unlawfully deregulated. City officials recommend calling 311 and asking for the “Tenant Helpline” to make sense of the information.
I signed a new lease before the freeze. What now?
The Rent Guidelines Board decision applies to new one- and two-year leases that tenants sign between Oct. 1 of this year and Sept. 30, 2027. Many tenants have already signed new leases, or will be forced to renew their leases before the freeze takes effect in October.
But Goodridge, the former board member, said most will still qualify for the freeze on their next lease renewals.
She said she advises tenants in those situations to sign a one-year lease at the 3% increase that the board approved last year, then sign a two-year lease when that one ends prior to Sept. 30, 2027.
“That way when you renew, you will still be in that period for the rent freeze,” Goodridge said. “As long as it expires within that window, then your landlord has to offer you a new two-year lease.”
Where are these magical rent-stabilized apartments?
The number of rent-stabilized units varies by neighborhood.
An analysis by NYU’s Furman Center, a housing policy group, found nearly 48,000 rent-stabilized apartments in Washington Heights and Inwood — the highest number in the city. In the Bronx neighborhoods of Kingsbridge and Bedford Park, rent-stabilized apartments account for about three-quarters of the housing stock, the highest concentration citywide.
Low-density neighborhoods, like eastern Queens and most of Staten Island, account for relatively few stabilized units, Furman found.
The city’s Rent Guidelines Board also publishes a list of buildings with at least one rent-stabilized unit. And various online listings sites also note when an apartment is rent-stabilized, or when a building has rent-stabilized units. Openigloo, for example, mapped the buildings with rent-stabilized apartments on its website.
There is one consistent, though still elusive, source of rent-stabilized apartments: the city’s housing lottery. Affordable units included on the city’s Housing Connect lottery system are subject to rent stabilization rules.
Mohamed said it can all get pretty confusing.
“You could live in a stabilized apartment and not know it, and you could tour a stabilized apartment and, and not realize it's stabilized,” Mohamed said.
She encourages tenants to ask their landlord or broker directly whether the apartment is rent-stabilized.
What about landlords? Is there anything they can do to make more money despite the freeze?
Owners of rent-stabilized apartments are furious about the rent freeze, especially for those who already face shrinking profits due to rising expenses like insurance, heating costs and maintenance.
The city and state both offer some relief programs, but there are strings attached and few owners ever apply. Mamdani has proposed a city-backed insurance program to cover some rent-stabilized housing at a lower rate than the private market.
One city program, known as Unlocking Doors, will give landlords $50,000 to renovate vacant apartments if they agree to lease the unit to a family or individual with a rental assistance voucher. But in the first two and half years of the program, just one landlord applied for the money before opting out, Gothamist reported.
The state also allows property owners to apply for a hardship exemption in order to raise rent on stabilized units, if they can demonstrate that their operating expenses equal at least 95% of their rental income. But very few landlords apply for the program.
Kenny Burgos, head of the landlord lobbying group New York Apartment Association, said the Unlocking Doors program doesn’t work because it requires owners to first complete the costly work before applying for reimbursement.
“That’s a huge hurdle to jump over,” Burgos said.
And he said the state’s hardship program has “abysmally low application and approval rate because it is a program in name only.”
“You, as an owner, have to be damn near bankrupt, then withstand two years of bureaucracy to hopefully hear back and qualify for a rent adjustment that barely keeps you above water,” Burgos said.
In some cases, landlords have collected more rent than regulations typically allow by leasing to tenants with government housing vouchers. A 2022 state law allows owners to collect the maximum amount that the voucher will pay, even if their unit is subject to rent stabilization rules.
But New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development suspended the exemption in April, citing a budget crunch.
