Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s former landlord hiked rent on the pol’s previous rent-stabilized apartment in Queens by 35% — an example of the tactics fed-up property managers could use to skirt the city’s new rent-freeze.
NYC’s Rent Guidelines Board voted last week to freeze rent increases on tenant renewals for the city’s 1 million rent-stabilized units starting in October — one of the main planks of Mamdani’s far-left platform.
A later vote will decide whether the freeze lasts through 2028. In the meantime, landlords are moving to get around the policy and hike leases for new tenants of rent-stabilized units to the highest price allowed by the state.
That’s what happened in the prewar Astoria, Queens, building that Mamdani and his wife Rama Duwaji called home for many years — with the socialist “nepo baby” paying just $2,300 for a modest, one-bedroom unit.
After Mamdani vacated the apartment and moved across the East River into Gracie Mansion earlier this year, a new tenant moved into the no-frills unit — coughing up $3,100 per month while the apartment remains rent-stabilized, as The Post reported.
Cesar Guevara, the associate broker at BOND New York who leased the unit, told the Wall Street Journal that Mamdani’s landlord rushed to renovate the unit in order to secure a higher rent from a new tenant.
“The apartment is going to be making a lot more money than when Mamdani was in there,” Guevara said.
Even as the rent-freeze takes hold across the five boroughs, landlords still have some options to secure increases, like updating the boilers, windows or roofs – which allows them to charge a 2% premium – or installing new appliances to raise rents in specific units.
In 2018, when Mamdani moved into Astoria’s Princess Martha building, he clinched a discounted rate below the legal limit because it was a weaker market and less popular neighborhood – though he still complained that his rent was highway robbery.
“Today, our 1 bedroom rent stabilized apartment in Astoria costs us $2000/month. In 1984, this same apartment cost $290.60/month,” Mamdani said in a social media post in 2019. “What is this, if not theft?”
During his mayoral campaign, critics blasted Mamdani for taking up an affordable housing unit while earning a six-figure salary as a Queens assemblyman, accusing him of hypocrisy.
Mamdani argued he was only earning about $47,000 a year when he first moved into the unit.
Average rent in Astoria has hit around $3,390, a whopping 40% jump from 2023, according to RentCafe, while the median rent for a New York City one-bedroom is $4,660, per real-estate data firm Zumper.
After Mamdani moved out of his Queens apartment, his landlord spent thousands of dollars over the course of months to renovate the kitchen, retile the bathroom, install new appliances and paint the place – a mad dash to raise the cap on the unit’s rental price, according to Guevara.
“We were trying to max out” the rent, he told the Journal, adding that he didn’t advertise the unit – instead renting it out to the new tenant privately, an increasingly popular practice since NYC last summer banned brokers from automatically charging fees.
Landlords have blasted the new rent-freeze, complaining that they are already struggling to make money off rent-stabilized units as they face explosive costs, including higher utilities, interest rates and insurance premiums.
Google billionaire Sergey Brin reportedly dumped his stake in a New York real-estate fund for pennies on the dollar as landlord losses pile up, while other wealthy New Yorkers have threatened to pull their investments from the city over Mamdani’s anti-capitalist policies, like his controversial pied-à-terre tax.
Meanwhile, the Democratic socialist’s fervent followers have argued that everyday costs in NYC have grown insurmountable.
Renters in the Big Apple face a cost of living that is over 128% higher than the national average, according to Apartments.com.
