The landlord of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s former Astoria apartment raised the rent 35% after he moved out earlier this year, renovating the kitchen, retiling the bathroom, installing new appliances, and repainting the unit to push the monthly price from $2,300 to $3,100, according to reporting by the New York Post.
The unit, in Astoria’s Princess Martha building, remains rent-stabilized at the new price. The rent freeze Mamdani’s Rent Guidelines Board approved last week applies only to renewal leases for existing tenants. When a tenant vacates, landlords can charge a new renter up to the legal maximum the state allows under rent stabilization, and renovation improvements raise that ceiling further.
Cesar Guevara, the associate broker at BOND New York who leased the unit, told the Wall Street Journal that the landlord pushed the rent as high as possible before the freeze locked in. “We were trying to max out” the rent, Guevara said, according to the Post’s account of the Journal reporting. “The apartment is going to be making a lot more money than when Mamdani was in there.”
The Rent Guidelines Board voted last week to freeze increases on renewal leases for roughly one million rent-stabilized units across the five boroughs, with that freeze taking effect in October. A later vote will determine whether it extends through 2028. Landlords retain several legal paths to raise revenue: updating boilers, windows, or roofs allows them to charge a 2% rent premium citywide, and installing new appliances can justify increases in specific units.
Mamdani and his wife Rama Duwaji lived in the Princess Martha building for many years before he moved into Gracie Mansion after winning the mayoralty. He began renting the one-bedroom in 2018 at a rate below the legal limit, paying around $2,300 a month by the time he left. In a 2019 social media post, he wrote: “Today, our 1 bedroom rent stabilized apartment in Astoria costs us $2000/month. In 1984, this same apartment cost $290.60/month. What is this, if not theft?”
During his mayoral campaign, critics accused Mamdani of occupying an affordable housing unit while drawing a six-figure salary as a Queens assemblyman. He said he was earning about $47,000 a year when he first moved into the unit.
At $3,100, the new rent is still below the current Astoria average. Average rents in the neighborhood have reached roughly $3,390, a 40% jump from 2023, according to RentCafe. The median rent for a one-bedroom across New York City is $4,660, per real-estate data firm Zumper.
Guevara also told the Journal that the landlord did not publicly advertise the vacancy, instead renting it through private channels, a practice that has grown more common since the city last summer banned brokers from automatically charging fees to incoming tenants.
