Mayoral Hopefuls Debate a Rent Freeze, And What Else Happened This Week in Housing

The three candidates running for New York City mayor faced off in their first general election debate Thursday night. Here’s what they said about rents for stabilized tenants, building affordable housing, and how they’d respond to homeless New Yorkers in the subway.  

The three candidates running for New York City mayor faced off in their first general election debate Thursday night, where the conversation ranged from policing, the Israel-Gaza conflict, and how each would stand up to President Donald Trump. 

The mayoral hopefuls—Democratic nominee and Queens Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani; former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent; and Guardian Angels founder and Republican Curtis Sliwa—also touched on their plans to address housing and homelessness.

Here’s a recap of who said what on housing: 

Cuomo and Mamdani sparred, once again, over the idea of a rent freeze

Mamdani reiterated his central campaign platform: to appoint a Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) that would freeze rent for the city’s roughly 2 million rent-stabilized tenants, all four years he’s in office. 

While housing and tenant advocates cheer the plan, landlord groups say it would make it harder for property owners to keep up with repairs in aging buildings, particularly in properties where the majority of units are regulated. 

Critics also say it would undermine the independence of the RBG, which meets each spring to deliberate on the economic conditions both landlords and tenants are facing before it sets rent changes for the upcoming year. 

 “How can you promise a rent freeze today before ever seeing that data next year?” moderator and Politico editor Sally Goldenberg asked the assemblymember. 

“What I am speaking about is actually reflecting the needs of these New Yorkers and the state of the market today,” Mamdani responded. “These are New Yorkers who have a median household income of $60,000. We do not need to be pushing them further out of the city. We need to keep them in their homes.”

He pointed to stats from this year’s RGB which found the net operating income for owners of buildings with rent stabilized units increased an average of 12 percent. The board still voted for a 3 percent rent hike, the fourth increase under Mayor Eric Adams (who is not seeking re-election). 

“I’ve seen the data year after year of the fact that salaries are stagnating, costs are up. New Yorkers can’t actually afford their apartments,” Mamdani said, adding that his administration would focus on aiding landlords by tackling the high costs of insurance, property taxes and water bills. 

The conversation then touched on former Gov. Cuomo’s proposed “Zohran’s Law”—a dig at his opponent, who lives in a regulated apartment in Astoria—which would require households moving into stabilized units to pay 30 percent or more of their income on rent (which critics say meets the definition of being rent-burdened).

“He has a rent stabilized apartment that a poor person’s supposed to have,” Cuomo said of Mamdani, who pays $2,300 a month for the unit he shares with his wife (Sliwa pays $3,900 for his housing, and Cuomo $7,800). “Those are the precious units and we should keep them for the most rent-burdened.”

Cuomo again criticized Mamdani’s rent freeze platform. “Freeze the rent only postpones the rent, because then you have to have an increase to cover the costs, otherwise the building is going to go bankrupt,” he said.

Filling the housing shortage

Sliwa is a vocal opponent to Mayor Adams’ City of Yes changes, which he said will “destroy residential neighborhoods.”

The plan, which lawmakers approved last year, overhauled the city’s zoning rules to make it easier to build more housing citywide—including in outer borough neighborhoods where some residents are resistant to added density. 

The Republican candidate wants to focus instead on converting existing office buildings into housing, and filling empty units. “We have 6,000 available apartments that a mayor controls in NYCHA and have been empty for years. That you address number one,” Sliwa said. 

“We have 25 Empire State buildings-worth of commercial space that will never be occupied for office space. We should be converting them into affordable apartments,” he added. “You don’t need to go into the outer boroughs.”

Cuomo, whose platform calls for building or preserving 500,000 apartments over the next 10 years, touted his past work with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Clinton administration. “I was the HUD secretary. I built affordable housing all across this nation. I built affordable housing in this city when I was in my 20s. I know how to get it done,” he said. “I will get it done.”

Mamdani mentioned his plan to build “200,000 truly affordable homes” over a decade. The Democratic Socialist has yet to publicly weigh in on the series of proposals that will appear on the ballot next month, which aim to speed up new housing construction by changing how the city approves certain projects—in part by scaling back the City Council’s role in the process. 

While he didn’t reference the ballot questions directly in Thursday’s debate, he did say he wants to cut the amount of time it takes to build. 

“I’m going to make it easier for the private sector to build housing in this city because what we see today—it’s not labor, it’s not materials, it’s the wait that is often costing so many so much to actually build the housing we need in this city.”

Subway homelessness and mental health

Cuomo and Sliwa criticized Mamdani’s proposal to have social workers, rather than police, respond to 911 calls for mental health emergencies on the subways.

Sliwa called for more cops. Cuomo called for teams of both mental health professionals and cops. The two criticized Mamdani’s approach as impractical, and questioned if it would reduce subway violence.

Mamdani said that under his plan, 911 operators would decide whether there was a threat of violence in sending social workers or cops, an approach he said has worked in other cities.

Sliwa and Mamdani also hit back at Cuomo, pointing to actions when he was governor that they said worsened the crisis. “Andrew, you closed the mental health beds that were taking care of them,” said Silwa.

“As the governor he cut funding for the Advantage [voucher] program which was putting New Yorkers who had otherwise been in shelters, otherwise been homeless, into apartments,” added Mamdani.

Advantage was a housing subsidy for low-income New Yorkers launched in 2007, funded by both the city and the state, with Albany footing about a third of the bill, City Limits reported at the time. But when Cuomo cut the state’s share of funding in 2011, city officials shut it down, which advocates say attributed to a spike in the homeless population after. 

“He’s talking about a program 14 years ago that was a pilot program that had a work requirement. It was very controversial,” Cuomo countered during Thursday’s debate, saying that during his time in office, he “funded the homeless budget larger than any governor in history.”

The last day to register to vote in the general election is Oct. 25. Election Day is Nov. 4.

Here’s what else happened this week in housing—

ICYMI, from City Limits:

• New York joined California and several cities in banning property owners or managers from using software that relies on private information to set rent prices, which critics say is inflating the cost of housing.
• More than two decades after the controversial Atlantic Yards project was announced, it’s still yet to deliver on all the affordable housing it promised. A new development team is now taking the reins; will things be different this time?
• Project-Based Rental Assistance helps 100,000 New Yorkers afford rent. But the program is rife with issues. Here’s more about the program, and how to get help if you live in one of its buildings.

ICYMI, from other local newsrooms:

• What the next mayor can learn from the rezoning of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, two decades ago, via Gothamist.
• Federal immigration agents targeted migrants for arrests outside a city shelter in Manhattan Thursday, according to The City.
• Eric Adams’ administration has landmarked fewer buildings than his mayoral predecessors, City and State reports.