Mamdani's Rent Freeze BACKFIRES On 1 MILLION Apartments As 57,000 Sit EMPTY

[00:00:00]Somewhere in Brooklyn tonight, there's a one-bedroom apartment with the lights off. Not empty for a week, empty for years. The kitchen works, the radiators work. The rent on paper is around $800 a month, which in this city sounds like a typo. And almost nobody is allowed to live there. Not because the landlord is holding out for someone richer, but because of a math problem the state wrote into law and nobody in charge wants to say the number out loud. Here's the number they will say, 1 million.

[00:00:26]That's roughly how many rent-stabilized apartments just had their rent frozen solid [music] for 2 years by New York's Rent Guidelines Board. A 7-1 vote that Mayor Eric L. Adams called a historic victory. Freeze the rent, it was a promise that got him elected. And 6 months into his term, a board he'd stacked with six of its nine members delivered it. Here's the number they won't say, 57,000.

[00:00:50]That's how many rent-stabilized apartments were already sitting empty before this freeze ever passed, dark registered vacant with the state. In the middle of the worst housing shortage the city has seen in a generation. 1 million apartments getting cheaper on paper, 57,000 of them already gone dark. And there's one number in this whole story that just doesn't add up. And it's not the one in the headline. So, let me show you how an $800 apartment turns into a locked door, [music] and why the people who froze the rent were handed a warning they decided not to read. So, here's what happened to that apartment. 10-15 years ago, a family lived there on a subsidized lease.

[00:01:30]Paying rent that crept up a few percent a year. Then they moved out. And the day they handed back the keys, that unit walked into a trap that got built in Albany in June of 2019.

[00:01:42]Before 2019, a stabilized tenant left, the landlord could raise the rent up 20% if he got renovated the place, fold the part of the cost back into a legal rent over time. It wasn't a jackpot, but it was enough. The fixing up a beat-up old decades apartment and putting it back on the market actually made sense. The Housing Stability and the Tenant Protection Act rewrote the rules. It killed the vacancy increase and it capped when an owner can recover for renovating an empty unit at a level one landlord attorney laid out in plain numbers, about $83 a month and only for 15 years.

[00:02:19]Sit with that because this is the whole ballgame. Say a unit lived in since the '90s needs $100,000 of work to be legal and livable again. New wiring, new plumbing, lead abatement, the works.

[00:02:33]Under the current law, the most you can charge to recover that is roughly $83 a month. Run that with me. 83 a month is about a $1,000 a year so on a $100,000 job, that's 100 years to break even.

[00:02:47]Except the law only lets you collect for 15. So, what do you get? You get back 15 grand, eat the other 85,000, the rent still couldn't rise after that because nobody spends 85,000 to lose money. So, the doors stay shut, the lights stay off, and a livable home becomes a locked room. Now, multiply that one locked room by a whole city.

[00:03:10]You get a number the state put in writing this spring, a number and a letter that I promise you at that celebration no one read that out loud.

[00:03:18]The letter came from the state's Division of Home and Community Renewal and it hit the Rent Guideline Board's desk in the first week of June. The number inside, 57,421 rent-stabilized apartments registered vacant, up 8,000 in a single year with the largest increases in Brooklyn and Queens. The exact boroughs were working families getting priced out fastest.

[00:03:42]And I want to be straight with you because the other side has a fair point.

[00:03:45]I'm not going to bury it. That 57,000 is not 57,000 homes deliberately hoarded.

[00:03:52]The state said so directly. A vacant registration doesn't tell you why the apartment is empty. Some are between tenants. Some are brand new units not leased. The tenant advocates put the real warehousing number far lower. The city's own survey counted around 26,000 held off the market. But a separate budget office analysis counting units empty 2 years running came up with about 13,000 and one. Legal Aid attorney called the true figure very, very small.

[00:04:21]So take the low number, take 13,000 in a city where families sleep in shelters every single night. 13,000 livable apartments sit behind locked doors because the math says reopening them is a loss. That's the floor problem. The ceiling is 57,000. So which number do you even argue about? And here's the part that tells you they knew. The morning of the final vote, before the single ballot was cast, the of the board's own members quit. She was an owner representative and she was on her way out. She said the board had stopped being a fact-finding body and that it starts with an answer and a vibe codes its way back. Her words, not mine. She said this year's outcome had been declined a year earlier on a campaign trail. The vibe came first, but the math never quite showed up. And the state jumping on all of this is about to matter more than anything anyone said in that room. June 25th, El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, hundreds of tenants packed the hall chanting, blowing whistles, holding signs with the line that won the election, freeze the rent. And they were about to get it. The board has nine members, six of them I'm Donny appointees. When the vote landed, it was 7 to 1. The single no came from one academic economist on the board and NYU professor. Everyone else fell in line. Well, watch the vote that actually tells the story. One of the yes votes came from an owner representative, a landlord seat on the board, who first read a statement arguing the city should be lowering owners costs, not freezing their revenue, and he laid out the whole case against the freeze. Then he vowed and voted for it anyway. He read the warning label out loud and then he drank it. Now, look at the reality under the celebration. According to the NYU Furman Center, roughly one in 10 rent-stabilized buildings is already running at a loss, operating costs higher than the rent coming in. Not slightly in tight underwater. Now, freeze the rent under those buildings for 2 years while the insurance, fuel, taxes, labor keep climbing. And ask yourself, what gives? Something has to give and it's never the mortgage. It's the boiler that doesn't get replaced.

[00:06:30]It's the roof that waits. It's the repair that becomes a code violation that becomes another apartment nobody can afford to reopen. And no, I'm not going to tell you every landlord is broke because that's a lie, too. Plenty of owners did just fine the last 4 years. Net income actually rose. Our rents went up. Anyone telling you a story where they're victims, all victims, is working you. But the buildings that were already underwater, for them, a 2-year freeze isn't a relief. It's a countdown. For the tenant, the freeze is worth real money.

[00:06:59]Call it $30 a month, a week of groceries of a family of four. In my house, that matters. But the same $30 times every unit in the building was the money that fixed the boiler. And the most damning verdict on all of it did not come from a Republican. It came from a man whose old business card said the White House, Jason Furman, chief economist for President Obama, a Democrat, who ran the numbers for a Democratic White House.

[00:07:24]And Furman has said flatly that rent control is about as disgraceful as any economic policy in the toolkit. Remember who's saying that. And he's not alone.

[00:07:34]And this is the part that should stop you cold. When the leading economists gets pulled on rent control, they don't split down the middle the way they do on almost everything else. In one major survey of top economists, about 81% agreed rent control reduces the quantity and quality of available housing. 2% disagreed. Two. Two.

[00:07:56]When did you see the last field agree on anything 98 to two? Go back decades and the polls keep landing in the same place. A Swedish economist, who called himself a socialist, once said rent control was one of the surest ways to wreck a city short of dropping bombs on it. This is not a Republican talking point. This is the closest thing the entire field of economics has to a settled verdict and it crosses every political line. And we can watch it play out. It already ran. When San Francisco expanded rent control, standard economists tracked the buildings and found landlords pulled 15% of rental housing off the market by converting, selling, or redeveloping it into anything. The rules didn't touch. The protected tenants who stayed did better, but supply shrank and the citywide rents rose about 5% for everyone still looking. The exact people the policy was built to help got harder a city to find apartment in. So, line it up. The renovation trap that strands empty units. 57,000 dark apartments. One in 10 buildings underwater. An owner rep who warned against the freezing voted for it. And a wall of economists left to right saying this ends one way. That's the pattern and it doesn't stay up town in a museum theater. Shows up as your grown kid who can't find a first apartment. Your super who stops coming around. Your building quietly gets worse while your rent politely stays the same. The bill doesn't get canceled. It gets mailed to you later. It turns out the whole thing was hiding in one day no one wanted to say. So, go back to that number nobody at the party would say. 57,000 empty apartments. But, here's the detail they really don't want sitting next to that.

[00:09:37]The count was taken on April 1st, 2025, more than a year before the freeze, months before Mumdani ever raised his hand to an appointment, a single person to that board. Those 57,000 apartments just didn't go dark because of a freeze.

[00:09:51]Well, they went dark because of the idea underneath the freeze, that you can order a price to hold still and a supply behind that, it will just stay put and take. The emptying was already happening. The trap was already sprung.

[00:10:05]And on June 25th, in front of a cheering room, people in charge looked at 57,000 locked doors, looked at their own members warning them, looked at a wall of economists from their own side, chose to pour two more years of same thing on top of 10 minutes ago you knew a headline. Rent froze, tenants win. Now you know the story. You know the freeze is real, the relief today and a repair bill tomorrow. You know the 57,000 came first, was a warning about, and you know more than this than an anchor who read it off a card. The disaster was never the freeze standing by itself. Disaster is 57,000 dark apartments in a housing shortage. A city that looked at the warning label and stepped on the gas. Someone in Brooklyn tonight, that one-bedroom is still dark. $800 a month, nobody home, nobody allowed in it. In 2 years there will be more like it. Count on it. More of these are coming and if you live in a city like mine, you're going to want to be subscribed before the next one lands.

[00:11:02]Do me a favor down in the comments though.

[00:11:04]Tell me the number in this story that got you. For me, it's the date.