STORY: PERVEN: "They should make New York City more affordable."

Moreom Perven is a rent-stabilized tenant in Jamaica, Queens who has lived in the same studio apartment since 2000 and she and many others in New York City are hoping that the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, keeps his best-known campaign promise of freezing the rent for about a million regulated apartments.

PERVEN: "We have a new mayor and he also lived in the rent-stabilized apartment. // So, he understands the situation of New York City, how we are suffering, and I expect this time we'll have the good news."

:: May 7, 2026

That promise to freeze the rent cleared an initial hurdle at a raucous meeting last week.

In a provisional vote, barely audible over the chanting and cheering of hundreds of tenants filling the audience, a city housing board agreed to consider freezing the rent for eligible apartments.

DESMOND CADOGAN, NEW YORK RESIDENT, MASSAGE THERAPIST: "I think a rent freeze would be great in this economic environment right now."

ANTHONY GARGIULO, NEW YORK RESIDENT, RETIRED: "Yes, a rent freeze and a rent rollback. How about that too?" 

DESMOND CADOGAN, NEW YORK RESIDENT, MASSAGE THERAPIST: "Definitely."

:: November 4, 2025

MAMDANI: "It is time to finally respond with the urgency that New Yorkers deserve - an urgency that reckons with these same New Yorkers having had to face rent hike after rent hike, year after year."

Mamdani ran for mayor of America's financial capital last year as a democratic socialist, promising to freeze rents and tackle soaring costs of groceries, childcare and other necessities in a city where the median rent for a newly leased apartment is $3,950, according to listings agency StreetEasy.

And that message resonated with hundreds of tenants, waving signs in English, Spanish, Chinese and Bengali, who filled the sidewalk outside the Laguardia Performing Arts Center, where the provisional vote was happening last week.

But in a city of renters, tenants aren't the only ones who can feel the squeeze.

SMALL PROPERTY OWNERS OF NEW YORK (SPONY), PROPERTY OWNER, ILAN RABINOVICH: "We understand that tenants are struggling, just like owners are struggling, and we think that's a place for the city and the state to step in with assistance programs, and cost control programs, and things that will make it possible in the future to not raise rents."

A final vote in June by the city's Rent Guidelines Board will ultimately determine how much landlords can raise the rent for tenants of rent-stabilized apartments.

It's a decision tenants like Perven will be watching closely:

PERVEN: "We are living paycheck to paycheck. We don't have money. And on that, on top of it, if the rent increases, I don't know how I'm going to survive."