When 14-year-old Mehjabin Habib took the microphone at an early June meeting held by New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board in Queens, her legs shook. She was there to give testimony as a rent-stabilized tenant from a largely Bangladeshi neighborhood in Astoria (Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s former New York Assembly district), and she wanted to get it right. Rent-stabilized housing is one of New York’s bright spots in a city otherwise notorious for its sky-high cost of living, but for years, Habib had lost neighbors—and friends—pushed out by increased rents. “I love New York City, and I don’t want to leave,” she said. To Habib, the more than 12 percent increase in rents under former Mayor Eric Adams constituted “a threat to our safety.”
But at the top of her mind was not just the undue budgetary pressures placed on her family, a latent anxiety for parents that children so often absorb. Habib’s community has faced harassment from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; having a home to run to was the “first line of defense” when federal agents came knocking. “As a U.S.-born citizen who comes from an immigrant family, I am still afraid of ICE,” she told the board. “When ICE is detaining any person of color on the street, I fear being outside my home.”
Habib is a youth member of the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, or CAAAV, one of many groups organizing tenants to demand a rent freeze. This Thursday, June 25, New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board will hold its final public meeting and vote to determine whether this cornerstone of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign will become a reality. The RGB regulates annual lease adjustments for rent-stabilized apartments, affecting 2.4 million tenants—arguably the most organized group of voters that helped lift Mamdani into power. A rent freeze was, for many, the campaign promise that elevated him beyond the likes of Andrew Cuomo. Today, however, those I spoke to say freezing the rent is all the more necessary, particularly for a sizable contingent of immigrant tenants facing threats from their landlords by ICE.
The overlap is hardly surprising; working-class New Yorkers, immigrant or not, rely on rent-stabilized housing to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. But immigrant tenants are particularly vulnerable right now, and to some landlords, that added vulnerability is an asset. It’s illegal in New York to retaliate against anyone who reports housing issues. Yet, for decades, the business model many rent-stabilized landlords have followed has relied on pushing longtime tenants out, often through neglect or overt abuse. To Irene Hsu, communications manager at CAAAV, ICE has become another tool in landlords’ tool kits: They “stand to profit from the displacement and deportation of working-class tenants.”
The RGB is a nominally independent body, though it tends to follow the proclivities of whichever mayor is in office. Just before exiting Gracie Mansion, former Mayor Eric Adams attempted to stack the board with pro–real estate members. Ultimately, Mamdani was allowed to choose six board members. Since then, he’s mostly kept mum on the RGB’s work; in early May, after its preliminary vote capping rent increases between 0 percent and 2 percent for one-year leases and between 0 percent and 4 percent for two-year leases, he only said he was “encouraged” to see them “taking seriously the data around affordability, operating expenses, and the pressures facing both tenants and small property owners as it sets this preliminary range.” For Mamdani, this was a notably cautious statement, a far cry from his campaign-trail pronouncements.
His tact is, frankly, necessary, if only to avoid drawing further ire from local real estate groups practically frothing at the mouth over a potential rent freeze. In mid-June, for instance, Gotham Housing Alliance hired 50 or so counterprotesters dressed as zombies outside an RGB hearing, warning that a rent freeze would mean more “zombie” properties—that is, empty buildings due to the landlord’s inability to maintain them.
But as J.W. Mason, an economics professor at John Jay College, recently showed, the “great majority” of residential properties generate income well above their operating costs, even with rents much lower than today’s. Under Mayor Adams, operating incomes actually rose by roughly 30 percent. The problem is that many landlords borrowed too much money at inflated prices, based on the hope that rents would increase faster than they actually have. If landlords are having problems maintaining their buildings, it’s because, by and large, their financial gambles didn’t pan out. “No matter what landlords say, the data supports a rent freeze, and the majority of New Yorkers support a rent freeze,” Sumathy Kumar, executive director of Tenant Bloc, said in a statement to The New Republic. “A blanket rent hike for 2.4 million rent-stabilized tenants would simply reward landlords for long-term neglect.”
For rent-stabilized tenants like Parveg Hasan Dolar—a Bangladeshi immigrant in his early seventies, also a CAAAV organizer living in Astoria—this meant a roughly $400 rent increase within the past four years. Dolar, who worked in a halal cart until he required heart surgery in 2024, isn’t in a position to leverage his finances to own a building, let alone multiple buildings in New York like his landlord. But today, he and his neighbors carry the brunt of the responsibility to bail their landlord out. For his family, this means rationing food to accommodate rent increases; he says the stress of working additional hours to make ends meet is what contributed to his heart condition.
At a New York City Council joint oversight hearing on Housing and Immigration in April, officials heard testimony from tenants threatened with deportation for simply asking their landlord for repairs. One tenant in the Bronx reportedly refused to go to housing court because his landlord said ICE would be there. Since then, there have been multiple cases of management companies posting signs in the lobby encouraging tenants to report immigrants to ICE—“a pretty clear retaliation” against organizers, said Joanne Grell, a tenant organizer in the Bronx working with Community Action for Safe Apartments. But, she added, “the buildings we want to shame are never going to be secret.”
While New York isn’t seeing the kind of ICE occupations witnessed in Chicago or Minneapolis, a recent investigation by The City Reporter, a local nonprofit newsroom, showed street arrests clustered around Canal Street in Manhattan, Sunset Park in Brooklyn, and Corona, Queens: immigrant neighborhoods with a sharp overlap of rent-stabilized apartments. When ICE recently visited Dolar’s building, knocking on the doors of tenant leaders at around 5 a.m., “none of us opened our doors,” he said. But the threat alone was enough to change the feeling in the neighborhood. “People are afraid.”
Tenants in New York have reached a high-water mark of mobilization not seen in decades, but the terrain is shifting. Suddenly, door knocking takes on a different valence: Many working-class immigrant households are no longer opening their doors, for fear of ICE. New York’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development is already making efforts to help immigrants feel safer when answering the door for apartment inspectors. “When I got people to come testify at the RGB,” says Dolar, “I told them we would have marshals there to keep an eye out.… If I ever see cops in the neighborhood, I call my neighbors to see if anything happened.”
All of this combined is “making a crisis for working-class people,” says Dolar. A rent freeze would be “a good first step, but we know it’s not enough. I want to decrease my rent. I pay around $2,200 on rent, and all of that money is for my landlord’s luxury. We, as tenants, need so much more.”
