Cuomo wants to lock ‘wealthy’ out of NYC rent-stabilized apartments. How would that work?

Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo is resuscitating his moribund mayoral campaign with a catty new social media presence and a populist housing policy proposal favored by opponents of rent regulations: kick the “wealthy” out of rent-stabilized apartments.

Cuomo put both to useful effect this past weekend when he called on Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani to give up his $2,300-a-month rent-stabilized apartment so that a homeless family could move in. After the post went viral, Cuomo doubled down by proposing a new regulation on rent-regulated apartments that would prohibit landlords from leasing their vacant units to “the wealthy” and instead require them to find tenants for whom the rent equals at least 30% of their income.

He dubbed the proposal “Zohran’s law” in a social media post and called Mamdani — who said he would give up the unit if elected mayor — “disgusting” in one of numerous replies to other commenters.

Mamdani on Monday told reporters that Cuomo “had many years to implement any one of these kinds of critiques into policy” during his decade as governor, since the state sets and oversees the city’s rent regulations. In 2019, Cuomo eliminated another form of means-testing when he signed a law that prohibited landlords from deregulating apartments if tenant earnings topped a certain amount.

Mamdani added that every tenant should have the stability that rent regulations help ensure, like lease renewals and protection from exorbitant increases. Mamdani earns $142,000 a year as a state assemblymember and has said he got the apartment when he was making $47,000.

“What Andrew Cuomo is proposing … is in many ways reflective of the fact that I live rent-free in his head,” Mamdani clapped back.

Whether or not you like the concept of means-testing rent-stabilized apartments, housing experts say it would create a bureaucratic nightmare for an already strained state housing agency that oversees a system with roughly 1 million apartments, ranging from low-cost units in century-old Bronx buildings to pricey pads in brand new luxury high-rises in Midtown Manhattan.

“The idea of suddenly having to take in income information and verify incomes every single year, they just aren’t going to be able to do that,” said Oksana Mironova, a housing policy analyst with the Community Service Society, which supports rent regulations.

It isn’t just tenant advocates who criticize the idea.

A 2021 report from New York University’s Furman Center found “means testing rent-regulated housing would be highly burdensome and potentially counterproductive” by further reducing the amount of housing available for low-income tenants and displacing people who earn just above the income threshold.

Furman Center Faculty Co-Director Vicki Been, a former city housing commissioner who has criticized the state’s current rent laws, said most tenants living in rent-stabilized apartments are already considered low-income.

Those households have a median income of $60,000 per year, according to city data. In contrast, the citywide median income is about $76,500, according to U.S. Census data.

“The best data that we have available indicates that the vast majority of people in rent-stabilized apartments are lower-income people,” Been said. “Are there high-income people living in rent-stabilized apartments? Yes. But is it worth it to try to ferret them out or will it do more harm than good? Does it spawn abuses by landlords?”

A spokesperson for the state’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal declined to comment.

Cuomo’s viral posts, devoid of detail, nevertheless touched off a boisterous debate, with responses breaking along ideological lines.

Opponents of rent stabilization laws showed enthusiastic support. Those who say Mamdani’s brand of democratic socialism will destroy New York City also cheered Cuomo on.

Tenant advocates and progressive elected officials disagreed. Comptroller Brad Lander, a Mamdani ally who ran in the Democratic primary for mayor, said Cuomo was trying to distract from his own record on housing affordability and pointed to data showing that New York City lost more than 96,000 rent-stabilized units during Cuomo’s decade-plus tenure as governor.

New York’s current rent stabilization rules were enacted in 1974 and apply to apartments in buildings with six or more units built before that year, as well as new apartments in buildings that receive tax breaks or other subsidies.

Means-testing the units isn’t a new idea.

From 1994 to 2019, state law allowed New York City landlords to remove their units from the rent-stabilization system once a lease expired if the people living there earned more than $200,000 a year.

While landlords took more than 170,000 apartments out of rent stabilization during that period, Rent Guidelines Board data shows they rarely used the high-income tool to do it.

Landlords deregulated just 6,662 units through “high-income deregulation.” That number equates to roughly 0.6% of the 1 million or so rent-regulated apartments left in New York City.

It was Cuomo who killed most forms of deregulation with a stroke of the pen when he begrudgingly signed a package of laws shoring up protections for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments in 2019.

Those laws have faced daily criticism from rent-stabilized landlords, including groups who tried to bring the measures to the U.S. Supreme Court. So far, however, the city’s biggest rent-stabilized landlord lobbying group, the New York Apartment Association, hasn’t quite rallied around Cuomo’s latest proposal.

NYAA Executive Director Kenny Burgos said wealthier New Yorkers “don’t need to occupy low-rent, stabilized apartments,” but he said there were bigger problems facing landlords, like Mamdani’s plan to appoint Rent Guidelines Board members who would freeze rent if elected mayor.

Burgos cited data on the number of apartments in buildings whose owners face mounting debts and say they can’t cover their rising expenses at current rent levels.

“Maybe we should consider a more nuanced policy than a blanket rent freeze,” Burgos said

His lobbying group, which represents the owners of tens of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments, has also urged state lawmakers to reinstate a rule that allowed owners to increase rents after rehabilitating vacant apartments.

Others say New York City already has specific affordable housing programs for low- and middle-income renters, based on annual earnings. There just aren’t enough of them, said Allia Mohamed, CEO of the rental listings and ratings platform openigloo. She called the means-testing discussion a waste of time.

“I think this whole conversation about means-testing is a distraction around the bigger structural issue, which is that we have to build more affordable housing that is actually affordable,” Mohamed said. “The housing crisis is not going to be solved if middle-income and high-income people start giving up their apartments.”

Additional reporting by Liz Kim.

The headline for this story was changed to clarify Cuomo's position. He wants to keep higher-income earners from renting rent-stabilized apartments.