The decade of regulation: How New York City’s housing policies fueled rental inflation

Over the past decade, New York City’s housing market has undergone a wave of intervention unmatched in its modern history. Between 2015 and 2024, policymakers enacted or expanded at least six major measures intended to protect tenants and restrain rent growth, ranging from city-level rent freezes to eviction moratoria. Each initiative was politically popular and framed as a temporary response to economic pressure. Yet taken together, these measures fundamentally reshaped the rental ecosystem by capping revenues, raising compliance costs, and embedding new procedural asymmetries between tenants and property owners. The paradoxical result is that New York’s rental market has become more expensive. As NYC has elected Zohran Mamdani, an advocate for more interventions into the housing market, as the city’s next mayor, these policies need to be reviewed.

As Figure 1 shows, median rents in Manhattan have risen between 21% and 25% across neighborhoods since 2015.

Figure 1. Median monthly rent in Manhattan by area, 2015-2024

While the degree of regulation varied by year and policy, a review of the decade reveals that new rules were introduced almost continuously. This accumulation of regulation, without corresponding expansion of supply, created mounting pressure on the city’s housing stock.

The following overview of the city’s regulatory efforts demonstrates the sheer breadth and frequency of intervention, which, rather than counteracting, fostered record rent increases.

The rent freezes of 2015, 2016, and 2020

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the Rent Guidelines Board froze one-year stabilized rents in 2015 and 2016, and repeated the move in 2020 during the pandemic. For tenants in rent-stabilized units, which make up roughly half of the city’s rental housing stock, the freezes produced an immediate and tangible benefit: monthly costs stopped rising even as the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the standard measure of consumer inflation, increased by more than 25% between 2013 and 2023. For landlords, particularly small property owners operating older buildings, the freeze widened the gap between operating expenses (such as taxes, insurance, and fuel) and allowable rents. Over time, the inability to adjust rents for inflation erodes net operating income, often leading landlords to defer maintenance. From an economic theory perspective, these freezes functioned as binding price ceilings, protecting existing tenants in the short run but discouraging investment in rental properties and reducing landlords’ incentives to keep stabilized units in active use. That left fewer homes available, so more people had to compete for the unregulated, “market-rate” apartments, the ones not covered by rent limits, driving those rents even higher.

Universal right to counsel (2017, expanded 2021)

The 2017 Universal Access to Legal Services Law, commonly known as the Right-to-Counsel (RTC) program, made New York the first city in the nation to guarantee free legal representation for low-income tenants facing eviction. The Office of Civil Justice was tasked with implementation, and by 2021, the City Council accelerated full citywide coverage. From a tenant-protection standpoint, RTC represented an important procedural safeguard: tenants who might previously have defaulted gained access to counsel capable of delaying or dismissing cases. But there is an asymmetry built into the program, because landlords receive no equivalent guarantee of counsel. Most must pay for private attorneys or attempt to navigate a more complex housing-court system alone.

This imbalance has distributional and behavioral consequences. Extended case duration and higher transaction costs reduce the expected value of owning or managing rental property, particularly for small landlords whose margins are already thin. In practice, delays and uncertainty in enforcement alter the risk calculus for landlords, further discouraging them from doing business. To offset potential nonpayment or extended proceedings, many respond by tightening screening, increasing deposits, or setting higher initial rents—choices that ultimately make housing less accessible to lower-income tenants. As tenants continued to be priced out of the market, the City instituted even more regulatory constraints in 2019.

The 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA)

The 2019 HSTPA represented the most comprehensive overhaul of New York’s rent laws in decades. It ended vacancy decontrol, repealed vacancy and longevity bonuses, and sharply limited the rent increases allowed for individual apartment improvements (IAIs) and major capital improvements (MCIs). For tenants, the reform meant near-total security from deregulation and reduced exposure to sudden rent hikes. For landlords, it eliminated the few mechanisms that had previously enabled them to recover upgrade costs or increase rents after turnover.

Columbia Business School found that HSTPA led to a dramatic increase in deferred maintenance and a surge in “warehoused” apartments, units kept offline because the cost of code-compliant renovation exceeded the potential rental revenue. By 2023, as many as 60,000 rent-stabilized units—roughly 5% of the city’s stabilized stock—were estimated to be empty because landlords couldn’t afford to put them on the market. Making matters worse for maintenance of heavily stabilized buildings, refinancing also became more difficult, as lenders re-priced risk to account for capped future income. While HSTPA locked in tenant stability, it reduced long-term housing quality and made it harder for small landlords to sell, refinance, or reinvest in their properties. For renters, that meant fewer livable, affordable units coming back on the market and longer waits for repairs or vacancies to open up.

The pandemic moratoria and emergency aid (2020–2022)

The COVID-19 pandemic emergency forged a new layer of intervention: eviction moratoria and large-scale rent-relief transfers. The Tenant Safe Harbor Act and subsequent state measures froze most evictions through January 15, 2022. The goal was public-health protection, not market management, but the consequences spilled over. For tenants, the moratorium ensured stability during crisis conditions. For landlords, especially those ineligible for relief or delayed in reimbursement from state rent-assistance programs, it meant months or even years of arrears without recourse. Once again, the policy transferred risk to property owners, and that risk was later reflected in prices. With lenders viewing rent collection as uncertain, financing for new or rehabilitated projects tightened. The moratorium period also created a backlog of housing court cases and set a precedent for political intervention in private contracts. The temporary protection raised the perceived long-term regulatory risk of being a housing provider in NYC.

The NYCHA case dismissals (2022)

In 2022, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), the city’s public housing authority and its largest landlord, voluntarily dismissed over 31,000 non-payment cases from housing court. While framed as an administrative efficiency measure, the decision carried symbolic weight. When the largest public landlord deprioritizes enforcement, it reinforces the expectation that rent obligations are negotiable. For private landlords, this shift in norms translated into further uncertainty about judicial consistency and the hierarchy of property rights. The broader message that non-payment would not necessarily trigger removal contributed to the “moral hazard” environment. In economic terms, weakening the enforcement mechanism of contracts undermines the credibility of future rent agreements and raises risk premiums citywide.

The 2024 Good Cause Eviction Law

The state of New York passed the Good Cause Eviction law in 2024. The law applied to NYC automatically and allowed municipalities to opt in, extending rent-increase limits and eviction protections to properties that did not have a rental cap or eviction protection. The statute presumes any increase above the lesser of 10% or 5% plus CPI to be “unreasonable,” barring eviction unless justified by tenant behavior, while prohibiting non-renewals absent specific “good cause.”

The law carves out exemptions, which include owner-occupied buildings, new construction, high-rent units, and very small portfolios; however, it still covers a vast share of the city’s private rental stock. For tenants, the measure offers stronger renewal rights and predictability. For landlords, it effectively extends rent caps to previously unregulated units and adds litigation risk over what constitutes a reasonable increase. From an economic standpoint, Good Cause embeds rent control logic into the broader market: because landlords cannot fully adjust rents to inflation or risk, in the long term, they could compensate by screening more aggressively, favoring high-income tenants, or converting units out of the long-term rental market altogether.

The broader market outcome

According to the New York City Comptroller’s Spotlight on New York City’s Rental Housing Market (2024), rent burdens now exceed historic levels even as turnover and vacancy rates remain near record lows. The effects of price ceilings, procedural asymmetries, and compliance risk are choking the housing supply. When investment slows and existing housing stock deteriorates, scarcity drives prices upward in the unregulated segment. Understanding how persistent regulatory layering has driven rental inflation in NYC is critical to forging solutions that restore the rental market, benefiting both renters and landlords.

To address New York City’s housing crisis, policymakers must acknowledge that making renting property a poor investment leads to fewer rental units available. To restore the rental market, they must shift from reactive restrictions to structural solutions that expand choice and restore investment incentives.

As previously highlighted, HSTPA should be recalibrated to allow owners to recover renovation and operating costs. Additionally, restoring vacancy and improvement allowances would help return thousands of warehoused units to the market and slow the deterioration of the city’s rent-stabilized stock.

NYC must also modernize its zoning and permitting system. Decades of exclusionary zoning, height caps, and lengthy approvals have made it extraordinarily difficult to add new housing, even in high-demand areas. Streamlining approvals, easing density restrictions, and legalizing a broader mix of multifamily and accessory units would allow supply to respond to demand—reducing the pressure that drives rents upward citywide.

Finally, NYC should strengthen and better target its housing voucher programs like Section 8. Vouchers can deliver direct, flexible assistance to renters without distorting price signals or discouraging investment. A robust, adequately funded voucher system would protect vulnerable tenants while preserving a functioning private rental market. Sustainable affordability cannot be legislated through freezes or caps; it must be built. A reformed HSTPA, a more flexible zoning framework, and a well-functioning voucher program would do more to stabilize rents and expand opportunity than another decade of politically popular but economically counterproductive regulations.

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Source: https://reason.org/commentary/the-decade-of-regulation-how-new-york-citys-housing-policies-fueled-rental-inflation/