There are 3.7 million apartments in New York City, and, like families, the good ones are all alike and the bad ones are each unhappy in their own way. They can be sunlit but rat-filled, quiet but small, pet-friendly, too pet-friendly, doormanned, with or without an in-unit washer and dryer, in a great location and actually pretty decent for how much you’re paying, and, maybe most important, rent-stabilized or not. Average rents rose 8.4 per cent in Manhattan in the past year, but rent-regulated apartments, which have their rents set by a board, have risen only nine per cent across the past three years. They might not go up again for a while. Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor—and the increasingly likely winner—has promised, along with free buses and free child care, to freeze the rent on all rent-stabilized apartments, potentially for the length of his mayoral term.

Freezing the rent has been praised by a previous mayor, Bill de Blasio, who oversaw three rent freezes in office, and attacked by the current mayor, Eric Adams, who called Mamdani a “snake-oil salesman.” (Contrary to some misconceptions, the Mamdani policy applies only to rent-regulated apartments.) A few weeks ago, a Twitter account with the technocratic name of Fix the City started running a promoted ad, captioned “Will a rent freeze actually help tenants?” It looked like the platonic ideal of a Vox explainer. Over charts, arrows, and a scrunched-up-paper aesthetic, an informational voice-over outlined how a rent freeze would, if you think about it, be bad, actually. (As it turns out, Fix the City is a pro-Andrew Cuomo super PAC.)

According to New York’s most recent Housing and Vacancy Survey, a comprehensive report that is taken every three years, 26,310 rent-stabilized apartments are sitting vacant. Some are dilapidated and need tens of thousands of dollars in renovations before they can be rented out again. The question is whether freezing the rent would dissuade owners from doing this. Another social-media video, from an account called UrbanExplained, put it this way: imagine a plum, rent-stabilized apartment that needs eighty thousand dollars’ worth of renovations but can only rent out for twelve hundred a month. An owner “wouldn’t make their money back for five to seven years,” it says. “If you don’t give owners a reasonable way to pay back their renovation costs, they just won’t do the renovations.”

How bad could these apartments be? The other day, I met with Irving Lee, a landlord who owns a rent-stabilized building on a prime block in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Lee wore a red polo shirt and an old-school New York Giants cap (repping the baseball team, not the football team). It was a warm summer day; a few streets away, people picked at al-fresco seafood from the buzzy Greek joint Kiki’s, or sipped cocktails in the sun.

Lee and I had other plans. We climbed up four flights of stairs to see a vacant apartment, which he’d assured me was in bad shape. “This requires a lot of work,” he said as he pointed out exposed wires, uneven floors, and various health hazards, like a kind of bizarro open house. The building was constructed in 1910, and the apartment’s most recent tenant, who moved out in 2022, had lived there for forty years. In the middle of the kitchen, there was a freestanding bathtub, painted baby blue; you could almost imagine a tenement-era resident wringing out laundry in it. The living room was windowless; one room was empty, except for a child’s pink scooter that lay abandoned on the floor. “A lot of this is lead,” Lee said, pointing at a wall separating the kitchen and bedroom. He swung open the bathroom door. “There’s no real plumbing other than the toilet. You can’t really wash your hands after you do No. 2. So that’s a problem.” Otherwise, it was nice: east-west-facing, 1.5 beds, top-floor, near bars and shops.

The previous tenant paid nine hundred and three dollars a month. (A steal!) On the free market, the unit could fetch three thousand, easy. (Lee said he had to call it a “de-facto” two-bed, because legally, a living room has to have windows.) But he estimated that it would cost him a hundred and twenty thousand dollars to make the place livable, and, under the current rent-stabilization laws, the most he could charge would be twelve hundred a month—which he said just about covers the operating cost of the apartment but not the renovations.

We continued the tour. “I’ll probably get rid of this,” Lee said, waving at the paint around some windows, “because this is all lead.” Given how much lead he was pointing out, I asked Lee if it was safe for us to even be there. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I think it’s O.K. It’s not really chipped off or anything like that.” He peered at a wall. “I don’t know if you have an actual monitor to see if there’s any dust?” he asked. I told him I didn’t. “This is par for the course for Chinatown tenement buildings,” he said. “There are some buildings that have the toilet in the hallway.” I asked him about the children’s scooter on the ground. “I don’t know how that got there,” he said.

Under current laws, landlords can raise the rent if they make improvements to a vacant apartment, but the amount is capped at fifty thousand dollars, spread out over fifteen years. (Before 2019, a landlord could charge a twenty-per-cent vacancy rise when a tenant moved out, and there was no fifty-thousand-dollar cap.) When I asked Lee why he hadn’t renovated the apartment earlier, he said that it was because of the previous tenant. “You have to put them up—if you take them out to renovate,” he said. But the apartment had now been vacant for three years. Why was it still unrenovated and unrentable? “There’s no incentive economically,” he said. “You lose money.”

Approximately a million apartments in New York are rent-regulated, and living in one is sort of the dream. The rules are often arcane and not necessarily understood by the people who live in these places. (One renter in Harlem recently discovered, after twenty years of paying market rents, that his apartment was rent-stabilized.)

There are two kinds of rent-regulated apartments: rent-controlled and rent-stabilized. The popular conception of a rent-regulated apartment—a walkup in Manhattan, somehow still leasing at decades-old prices—is most likely a rent-controlled one. (On “Sex and the City,” Carrie Bradshaw’s fictional one-bedroom is seven hundred and fifty dollars a month and rent-controlled; in “And Just Like That . . .” the new tenant puts in a dividing wall so she can split it with a roommate.) But rent control was phased out in 1971, and now there are only twenty-four thousand rent-controlled apartments in the city. (These units can be passed down to family members, but generally when a rent-controlled tenant moves out, the apartment becomes rent-stabilized or hits the free market.) Meanwhile, there are 996,600 rent-stabilized apartments, whose rents are dictated by the nine-person Rent Guidelines Board. Under de Blasio, rents were frozen three times, and no single-year increase was above 1.5 per cent; under Adams, they rose 3.25 per cent in 2022, three per cent in 2023, 2.75 per cent in 2024, and will rise three per cent again this year.

Lee’s building has eight apartments that more or less tell the story of rent regulation across the years. One is rent-stabilized but vacant; six are rent-stabilized and occupied; and one, on the second floor, is market rate. That apartment, he told me, used to look like his vacant one—tub in the kitchen, lead in the walls. In 2017, Lee spent more than a hundred thousand dollars to renovate it, which allowed him, under previous laws, to destabilize it. It’s now renting out for thirty-five hundred dollars a month, as a two-bed, to a couple of Wall Street guys who moved from California. (“Very reasonable for Manhattan,” Lee said.) His other rent-stabilized apartments, which are similar in size, go for around a thousand dollars or less. He’s done some minor renovations—“I put the shower, the bathroom, and sink together, nothing dramatic”—but decided to keep them rent-stabilized. Lee opposes Mamdani and the proposed rent freeze, but he said he doesn’t oppose rent-stabilization over all. He was born in New York and grew up in the Two Bridges neighborhood. He told me, “I wanted to keep a lot of the Chinatown tenants, the working families, here.”

Most of the people who own rent-stabilized apartments reserve their ire not for the prospect of another freeze but for a 2019 law called the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act. “Based on the name you would think this sounds great!” Jay Martin, the head of an owners’ group, wrote in 2022. But, he said, “unintended byproducts” have kept apartments vacant or in disrepair. Before 2019, an owner could raise the rent by twenty per cent when a tenant moved out; raise it by a fraction of an uncapped amount, to cover the cost of renovations; and, if the rent hit $2,774, the unit would lose its rent-stabilized status. (This is how Lee turned one of his rent-stabilized apartments into a market-rate one.)

A building manager, who was described to me by one of his friends as “one of the finest people I know,” sent me a fourteen-paragraph e-mail explaining the problems with the H.S.T.P.A. He manages seven rent-stabilized buildings, with between twenty-eight and sixty units apiece, across Brooklyn and the Bronx. “Actually, I believe every multi family over 10+ units should be stabilized,” he wrote. “It gives people a connection to the community where they live and aren’t living in the unknown about prices every lease.”

Before the H.S.T.P.A., which introduced the fifty-thousand-dollar cap on renovations for which a landlord could be reimbursed, landlords had an incentive to invest in their properties—to “beautify the building even at a loss,” the manager said. His company, for example, spent four hundred thousand dollars on brick pointing. But the H.S.T.P.A. “made landlords stop investing and start patching,” he said. “The owners we work with who used to care, stopped caring.”

Tenants’ advocates say that landlords should keep their buildings in good condition, and that it’s possible to do so and still eventually make a profit. One commenter on the UrbanExplained video replied, “Lmao if the owners didn’t wait until the apartment was in shambles they wouldn’t be in these situations.” In his e-mail to me, the building manager seemed to agree: “That’s the nature of investing,” he said, “that 10 years from now there is going to be a return on investment.” A report by the Rent Guidelines Board found that the profit made by rent-stabilized-apartment owners increased by twelve per cent in 2023, and the H.S.T.P.A., which was signed into law by Andrew Cuomo in 2019, was passed in response to reports of abuses of the previously uncapped system.

Lee told me he believes that the rent freeze and H.S.T.P.A. are part of a plot to force small-property owners, like him, to sell their buildings to large developers, on the cheap. “They’re deliberately trying to prevent us from renovating apartments and getting income from it,” he said. Who were “they”? “The Democratic Party implement the laws,” he explained, “but it’s the real-estate establishment—what I define as the ruling class or the ‘deep state’ version of New York City.”

Lee, a former train operator, said he identifies as a leftist. “I consider myself a progressive,” he told me. “I’ve studied enough of the Soviet economy and real revolutionary socialist movements.” When I e-mailed him, I noticed that his profile image appeared to be a photo of a vintage Chinese Communist propaganda poster. “It’s just solidarity,” he said, when I asked him about it later, “with progressive revolutionary struggles.” He paused. “But I do realize that, in terms of small-property owners, which is being a landlord—is it counterintuitive? Is it counter-revolutionary?” He thought for a moment. “I guess not so now because of the fact that, even in China, there are landlords.”

I asked him how he could be a progressive but oppose Mamdani and the rent freeze. “What D.S.A. is pushing, ironically enough, would concentrate the amount of wealth to fewer hands, most of the larger developers,” he said. “If you’re a person of color that owns property, you tend to be small-property owners. Even though the rhetoric is progressive, of freezing the rents, the actual consequences of his policies would concentrate wealth, because it’s the mom-and-pops that are the most vulnerable.”

Can a mayor really freeze the rent? Technically, no: rents are set by the Rent Guidelines Board. But the mayor appoints the board’s nine members, and can choose people who would likely vote to freeze the rent. Leah Goodridge, a former tenants’-rights lawyer, who was appointed to the board by de Blasio during his mayoralty, wrote that a Mamdani rent freeze is “not pie in the sky.” Conversely, Adams said that the current board didn’t listen to him—and raised the rent too much. De Blasio recently said in an interview, “The people named have the power to make their own decisions . . . you do not control them entirely.” Andrew Cuomo tweeted, in response, “I have a major campaign announcement . . . I agree with Bill De Blasio. @ZohranKMamdani’s signature campaign promise . . . can’t actually be enacted.”

Still, even if there were no rent freeze, Lee wouldn’t renovate his ramshackle apartment. “The cost of renovations far exceeds the amount of money you can get back,” he said. “The freeze is just one element,” he added, citing the H.S.T.P.A. as the bigger barrier. (The only mayoral candidate who is running on repealing the H.S.T.P.A. is the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa.)

I asked Lee the big question: If renovating, maintaining, and owning is so difficult, is it even worth being a landlord anymore? “I derive an income off it,” he said. “I’m not one of those distressed property owners. But the reality is that it’s getting much more expensive.”

Unlike some landlords, Lee said, he’s lucky. He owns his building outright; he doesn’t have a mortgage. He’s also amassed a group of stores beneath his apartments that provide stable commercial rents. Lee told me he tried to choose businesses that are resistant to the economic threat of online shopping. He has a restaurant, a gaming café, and a tropical-fish store, filled with bubbling aquarium tanks. “Tropical fish, they’re very perishable,” he told me. “It’s obviously a business that is Amazon-proof, quote unquote.” (The fish store used to be in a different part of Chinatown, but Lee, who was a customer, persuaded them to move into his building. “I said, ‘Look, I can give you a better deal’—I basically poached them.”)

And he’s partly providing for the community. Lee inherited being a landlord. He pointed at his businesses like a proud father: “I want to help. They pay relatively low rent. This is, like, very Asian. You’re not going to get this in midtown.” The finance bros in the market-rate apartment also help subsidize the families in the rent-stabilized apartments above. They include, he said, an accountant, a single mother, and a family of four. “You do run into headaches,” he said of being a building owner. “It’s much more labor. My family members said we should sell and not worry about it. But I’m willing to do the work.” ♦