Rent Freeze Chaos: NYC Landlords Flee, Tenants Trapped in Decaying Buildings as City Imposes Price Controls
NEW YORK – The dream of affordable housing in New York City has officially become a nightmare, and it’s not the one politicians promised.
For years, activists screamed for a “rent freeze,” a temporary halt to all rent increases across the five boroughs. They got it. And now, the very people they were trying to save are watching the walls literally crumble around them.
The city’s Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) voted last month to freeze rents on all one-year leases for rent-stabilized apartments, marking the first time since the 1940s that such a sweeping, mandatory cap has been imposed amid a housing crisis. At first glance, it sounds like a win for tenants. No more 5% yearly hikes. No more anxiety over renewals. But look closer, and you’re not seeing stability—you’re seeing the slow, rotting collapse of the building next door, the one where the boiler just broke for the third time this winter.
Meet Susan Morelli, a 67-year-old retired schoolteacher living in a rent-stabilized walk-up in Astoria, Queens. Her rent is frozen at $1,850. Her building’s hallway hasn’t been painted since 2019. The lobby smells like mildew and cat urine. The elevator has been “temporarily out of service” for eight months.
“I can’t move,” Susan told me, clutching a bag of groceries while climbing four flights of stairs. “I can’t afford market rate. But I also can’t afford to live like this. The landlord won’t fix anything. He says the city won’t let him raise rent, so why should he spend money?”
She’s not wrong.
The rent freeze was sold as a lifeline for the working class, a shield against Wall Street landlords and speculative greed. But in reality, it’s become a loaded gun pointed at the very tenants it was meant to protect. Here’s what the progressive policy wonks don’t tell you: when you freeze revenue, you freeze maintenance. You freeze repairs. You freeze the incentive to keep a building habitable.
Landlords are not non-profits. They are businesses. And when a business sees its income capped, it cuts costs. The first thing to go? The super. The second? The boiler maintenance contract. The third? The roof repair that’s been leaking for two years.
“We’re seeing a mass exodus of small- and medium-sized landlords,” says Jacob Rosenberg, a real estate attorney who represents mom-and-pop building owners across Brooklyn and Queens. “They can’t break even. Property taxes are up 15%. Insurance is through the roof. Wages for supers and plumbers have doubled. But they can’t raise rent one cent. So they just walk away. They stop paying the mortgage. They stop paying the water bill. The city takes the building. And then the tenants are left in a city-owned death trap.”
The numbers confirm the panic. According to data from the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), the number of buildings entering “distressed” status—meaning they are at risk of foreclosure or abandonment—has jumped 34% since the freeze was implemented. In 2023 alone, over 1,200 rent-stabilized buildings were flagged for “significant code violations,” including lead paint, mold, and broken heat. That’s a 50% increase from 2019.
Meanwhile, the city’s homeless shelter population has hit a record 120,000 people—including families who were evicted from rent-stabilized units not because they couldn’t pay the frozen rent, but because the building was condemned.
The irony is breathtaking. The rent freeze was designed to keep people in their homes. It’s doing the opposite.
“We’re creating a two-tier system,” explains Dr. Harold Finkelstein, an urban policy professor at Columbia University. “The lucky few who live in well-managed, large corporate buildings with deep pockets will keep their frozen rent and, eventually, their heat. But the average New Yorker in a smaller building? They’re in a race to the bottom. The freeze has turned their landlord into a ghost. And when the landlord ghosts, the building dies.”
In Washington Heights, a group of tenants recently staged a protest—not against their landlord, but against the city. They held signs reading: “We Want Rent Hikes! Fix Our Building!” Their landlord, a family-run operation for 40 years, had stopped all repairs. The elevator hasn’t worked in six months. The front door is broken. The hallway lights are out. The landlord says he’s losing $50,000 a year on the building and can’t afford to fix anything.
“I’d rather pay $100 more a month and have a working elevator than save $100 and climb 10 flights with my baby,” said Maria Ortiz, a 34-year-old nurse who lives on the eighth floor. “The freeze was supposed to help us. It’s killing us.”
The political class is scrambling. Mayor Eric Adams has tried to walk a tightrope, supporting the freeze publicly while privately urging the RGB to allow “modest increases” for buildings that meet certain repair benchmarks. But the progressive bloc on the City Council has blocked any such carve-outs, arguing that “any increase is an attack on tenants.”
“They’re living in a fantasy world,” says Rosenberg. “They think landlords are Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold coins. These are people who own one or two buildings, who refinanced their homes to buy them. They’re not rich. They’re just trying to pay the bills. And now they’re trapped.”
The freeze has also created a bizarre black market. Tenants in rent-stabilized units are now subletting apartments illegally for double the frozen rent, pocketing the difference. Landlords are “encouraging” tenants to move out by refusing repairs, then flipping the unit to market rate. The city’s enforcement arm is overwhelmed.
Meanwhile, the construction of new rental housing has ground to a halt. Why build new apartments if you
Final Thoughts
As a veteran observer of New York's housing wars, the latest rent freeze feels less like a victory for tenants and more like a political band-aid that fails to address the arterial wound of a broken housing market. While freezing rents provides immediate, necessary relief for millions in rent-stabilized units, it simultaneously starves small landlords of the capital needed for basic maintenance, accelerating the decay of the very buildings tenants rely on. Ultimately, this policy is a masterclass in kicking the can down the block—unless the city pairs these freezes with a massive, unapologetic surge in affordable housing construction, we’re simply freezing people in place as the buildings rot around them.