New York City voted Wednesday to increase rents for approximately 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, as residents struggle to find affordable homes, landlords grapple with rising maintenance costs and the city faces record homelessness.
The Rent Guidelines Board voted 5-4 in favor of a 3 percent increase on one-year leases. Two-year leases will see a staggered increase of 2.75 percent for the first year and 3.2 percent for the second year. The increase comes into effect from Oct. 1.
The city also increased rents last year. The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan as of May was $5,400, up about 8 percent from a year ago, according to Douglas Elliman, a real estate brokerage. The vast majority of rent-stabilized tenants pay significantly less than median rent.
Mayor Eric Adams (D), who appoints the board and whose successful 2021 election campaign was financially supported by many landlords, said in a statement that the board had done “critically important and extremely difficult work protecting tenants from unsustainable rent increases, while also ensuring small property owners have the necessary resources to maintain their buildings and preserve high-quality, affordable homes.”
New York is predominantly a renter city, and almost 2.3 million housing units there are renter-occupied, according to the board’s 2021 housing survey.
Tenants and housing activists gathered ahead of the vote in opposition, holding up posters with slogans such as the “Rent is too damn high” and “0 percent.” About half of the city’s households were burdened by housing costs, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on shelter, a recent report found.
“This city is a 70 percent-plus tenant city,” New York City Council member Chi Ossé (D), who represents a district in Brooklyn, said at a demonstration. The rent increase is a “life-or-death sentence” for every New Yorker in a rent-stabilized apartment, he said.
Many landlords argued that a small or nonexistent increase in rents would create an insolvency crisis for rent-stabilized buildings. “The math requires adequate rent adjustments to keep the city’s affordable-housing stock from plunging into an insolvency crisis,” wrote two members of the Rent Stabilization Association, a group representing landlords, in a New York Post opinion piece on Tuesday.
New York has for decades struggled to create affordable housing units for its residents. The latest increase comes after prices in the greater New York area rose by 6.1 percent last year, the highest rate in about 40 years. A decline in the average inflation-adjusted wage has upped the cost of living significantly.
(c) 2023, The Washington Post · Niha Masih
