Early voting to choose New York City’s next mayor is underway. The frontrunner, Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, has made a rent freeze for 1 million rent-stabilized apartments in the city his signature issue.

His opponents — former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa — say it’s a bad idea. But freezing rent isn’t exactly a new idea. The city has done it a couple of times recently.

In New York City, the mayor appoints members of the Rent Guidelines Board. And every year, the RGB decides how much rents on stabilized units increase.

Former chair Rachel Godsil explained the board’s balancing act at a June 2015 meeting: “The purpose of the law and the role of the RGB are to protect tenants from excessively high rents while also ensuring that owners can pay for necessary costs and receive a fair return on their investment.”

That year the balance the RGB struck was a 0% rent increase. The following year, it extended the freeze.

Oksana Mironova is a senior policy analyst with the Community Service Society of New York, an organization that surveys low-income New Yorkers. 

“Usually there's about like 25 to 30% of people who fall behind on the rent,” she said. But during the freeze, “you actually saw … that particular hardship … drop by about eight or nine points, and other hardships as well.”

Tenants reported fewer utility shutoffs and eviction threats, Mironova said.

But landlords of rent-stabilized units found the freeze challenging, according to Small Property Owners of New York board president Ann Korchak. She pointed to RGB data from 2017 showing landlords faced increased costs for insurance, taxes and labor.

“2017, operating expenses increased over 6%, and 4.5% in 2018. So those rent freezes meant that, you know, rent … was not keeping up,” she said.

Korchak co-owns two buildings that include rent stabilized units. She said buildings like hers are old and needed repairs during the freeze.

“If you don't have enough revenue to keep up with your expenses, you know you often are now delaying a repair,” she said.

The RGB froze rents again early in the pandemic, but the nationwide eviction moratorium and assistance programs make it hard to draw lessons from that freeze. Since then, the board has approved increases of between 1.5% and 3.25% annually.

Elsewhere in the country, freezes are relatively rare, said Edward Goetz at the University of Minnesota. But rent regulation may be gaining steam.

St. Paul, Minnesota, put it in place. “And you have it on the ballot in places across the country, in the Midwest and other eastern cities where it hadn't been on the agenda before,” Goetz said.

He said those jurisdictions will be watching how New York balances the needs of tenants and landlords going forward.