NYC rent board dissenter warns Mamdani-backed freeze could hurt affordable housing over time: 'Slow burn'

Arpit Gupta, the only member of New York City's Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) to vote against the rent freeze, told Fox News Digital the policy could gradually push older rent-stabilized buildings into disrepair by depriving landlords of revenue needed for capital improvements.

Gupta is also worried that the freeze, a central campaign promise from Mayor Zohran Mamdani, could make it more difficult for landlords to pay their bills.

"It's a little bit of a slow burn," said Gupta, an associate finance professor at New York University’s business school. "The risk is that the buildings do go under more distress. There are a variety of responses. One is...deferred maintenance, which will worsen the physical conditions of buildings."

He continued: "There are other avenues of distress, like going behind on mortgage payments, insurance payments, eventually property taxes, which leaves the property to be transferred in ownership to a bank or to the city, possibly for a tax lien sale."

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RGB Chair Chantella Mitchell, whom Mamdani appointed in February, acknowledged in her statement following the June 25 vote that landlords are facing soaring property tax and insurance costs but argued that most "remain able to meet rising costs."

Gupta, first appointed to the board by former Mayor Eric Adams in 2022, does not dispute Mitchell's claim that many landlords are doing fine.

Rather, he argues that the financial strain on the city's rent-stabilized housing stock is not the same all around, with older buildings that rely almost entirely on regulated rents facing a much greater burden than newer, mixed-income properties.

The board under Mamdani went further than it did under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose administration froze rents three times — in 2015, 2016 and 2020 — but only for one-year leases. The current freeze will affect roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments and applies to one- and two-year leases that run from Oct. 1, 2026, to Sept. 30, 2027.

As a result, landlords could, in the longest possible case, have to wait until late September 2029 before they can legally raise rents.

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Gupta considers the blanket rent freeze a blunt tool that doesn't adequately address the affordability crisis. Instead, he favors targeting aid to struggling tenants while allowing financially-strained buildings to continue raising rents.

"About 30% of the tenants in rent-stabilized housing make six figures or more. At the same time, many individuals in market-rate housing are below the poverty line," Gupta said. "So, to have a system that provides so many benefits for one sector of the housing stock while completely leaving out the market-rate tenants — whose rents might actually go up because of the dynamics of freezing one part of the housing stock — means that we have an incompletely targeted program."

New York City already has programs that freeze rents for qualifying senior citizens and disabled individuals. Gupta said these programs should be expanded to low-income residents more broadly, rather than limiting relief to rent-stabilized tenants.

Another worry Gupta has is that the rent freeze will incentivize landlords to leave units vacant.

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In early June, Gothamist reported that more than 57,000 stabilized apartments were vacant in April 2025. At the time, state housing officials said this number did not offer a complete picture, since some of the units included in the count were in the process of getting new tenants.

But Gupta argued that some of those apartments are being left vacant because owners cannot recover the cost of rehabilitating them before re-renting them, a problem he believes will be exacerbated by the rent freeze.

Many landlords point to the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act as the main catalyst for falling revenues. The law eliminated the so-called "vacancy bonus," which allowed owners of stabilized units to raise the rent by up to 20% after a tenant left. Landlords say the change made it harder to recoup the cost of renovating apartments before renting them to a new tenant.

Gupta told Fox News Digital he sees where Mitchell and his colleagues are coming from and acknowledged that many tenants are seriously struggling to pay their rent, despite the board’s past efforts to ease affordability pressures.

"In the five years I’ve been on this board… we have set rents below our estimate of building cost increases, we have set rents below CPI, and we've even set rents below wage growth in the city," Gupta said.

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Despite that, the city's spending on one-shot deals to cover tenants' back rent more than quintupled between 2022 and 2025, rising from $102 million to $555.8 million, according to the rental board’s income and affordability study.

The same study found that last year, 62% of evictions occurred in buildings with rent-stabilized units, a key data point the board used to bolster its case for a rent freeze.

While Gupta disagrees with the board's policy choice, he rejected the notion that the outcome was pre-ordained after Mamdani reshaped the municipal body. The mayor appointed six of the nine members of the board in February, and all of his picks voted for the rent freeze.

"From my understanding, the administration did not direct or try to influence the vote directly," Gupta said. "My fellow board members tell me that they were independently appointed."

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"What I also hear from board members who joined is that in the vetting process, as they were entering the board, they weren't asked or pressured on their position on the rent freeze," Gupta said.

Gupta’s view is not shared by Christina Smyth, another Adams appointee who resigned from the board shortly before the vote. In an open letter posted to social media, she said the board was "rebuilt," was no longer a "fact-finding body" and that it was "required to deliver a rent freeze."

Going forward, Gupta’s main concern is that the rent freeze will be extended far beyond what he believes is reasonable, given that Mamdani promised that he would "freeze the rent every year I’m in office."

"I've had many discussions with other members of the board, and I've asked, ‘if you vote for the rent freeze now, what are the conditions under which you would vote for rental increases?’" he said.

Up to this point, he said he has not gotten a clear answer on that question, with some board members telling him they need to wait for future data to make an informed decision.

"I'm not sure whether all the board members believe that's the future, or if maybe the future is just more freezes. Freeze after freeze for four years, as Mamdani campaigned on. That's a very different picture."

Fox News Digital asked Mitchell whether she viewed the rent freeze as a temporary measure and about concerns that it could worsen the financial condition of some rent stabilized buildings. She declined to comment beyond the statement she issued following the vote.