Freeze the rent!
May Day, 2025. Find a rally near you.
Here in New York I will be at Foley Square with thousands of others protesting the Trump regime.
It starts a 5pm.
Last night hundreds protested the city’s Rent Stabilization Board as they voted to raise the rents of the one million residents of rent stabilized units by as much as 7%.
Do the members of the board live in New York?
Last night's preliminary vote is just the beginning," Joanna Grell, a rent-stabilized tenant in the Bronx and cochair of Housing Justice for All's Freeze the Rent campaign said, "We'll be organizing from now until the final vote in June, and all the way to the ballot box!"
Freezing the rent has become an issue in our current mayoral race.
Zohran Mamdani, who is polling second behind the sexual predator Andrew Cuomo, was the first to call for a rent freeze.
Mamdani was at last night’s protest at the RGB meeting in Brooklyn.
"No matter the final decision that this board takes, they will be increasing the rent," Mamdani said at a rally outside of the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in Queens. "And when they increase the rent, they push New Yorkers out of their homes…If we are serious about tackling homelessness, if we are serious about tackling the housing crisis, then there is only one answer that we have to lead with, and that is freezing the rent."
Brooklyn State Senator Zellnor Myrie and Queens State Senator Jessica Ramos, have also publicly backed a rent freeze.
Comptroller Brad Lander first said he wanted to "see the data" before making a call on the policy, then announced his support for a rent freeze ("Took him long enough," said Grell.)
Democratic frontrunner Andrew Cuomo has yet to make a statement on the RGB vote, probably because he doesn’t want to piss off his big real estate developers who fund his campaign.
The RGB's 2025 income and affordability study found that for New York City tenants, wages are down, unemployment and eviction rates are up, and the cost of living is on the rise; meanwhile, the most recent income and expense report from the RGB, released in March, found that from 2022 to 2023, owners of rent-stabilized housing in the city saw their net operating income increase by 12 percent.
Freeze the rent.