It’s a rent freeze fall.
Big Apple apartment building owners are offloading properties at discounted rates up to 90%, as they’re attacked with insurance hikes and “chronic non-payment” of rent, landlord reps warned Thursday.
The dire warning came during a Rent Guidelines Board meeting as its members weigh whether to get behind Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rent freeze for the city’s nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments.
Zohran continues to advocate for a rent freeze despite the buildings heading for financial collapse. Christopher Sadowski
The crisis is most acute in The Bronx. Christopher SadowskiLandlord groups used the meeting to plead for a rent increase, contending that more than 5,000 buildings in the Big Apple are nearing total financial collapse.
“The analogy we use is 100 hard working firefighters trying to put out blazes in 5,000 buildings,” explained Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association.
“It’s not possible… a rent freeze now would not hold the line. It would deepen the problem immediately in the buildings that are already closest to the edge.”
The last-ditch plea came as the board gears up for preliminary vote in May.
Thousands of buildings are in financial distress. Christopher SadowskiBurgos argued the landlords’ financial catastrophe is the worst in the Tremont, Hunts Point, and Fordham neighborhoods of The Bronx–which accounts for over 34% of the city’s dilapidated buildings– and is the only borough where landlords saw negative income across the board.
Small landlords weren’t the only ones under pressure—industry big-wig Related Companies was recently forced to offload its Bronx portfolio – dissolving 2,021 units at a $64 million loss.
The Pinnacle group, which held 93 deteriorating buildings in The Bronx and Brooklyn, also made headlines for ditching its 5,200 unit portfolio – which Mamdani tried and failed to acquire.
The units sold to Summit Properties for $451 million, which fell far short of the group’s $564 million debt.
Still, the RGB report showed landlord income was up 6.2% across the board, but Burgos argued the group was using a “millionaire average” in their calculations.
“If you take one millionaire and average it with minimum wage earners, you will not get a realistic average of wages, and you can’t do that with these buildings either,” he said.
