If you rent in Bushwick, whether the city’s historic rent freeze caps your rent comes down to one question: is your apartment rent-stabilized? On June 25, the city’s Rent Guidelines Board voted 7 to 1 to hold rents at a 0 percent increase for roughly a million rent-stabilized apartments, covering both one-year and two-year leases. The board has never frozen two-year leases before. Open-market units, where a landlord can raise the rent by any amount at renewal, got nothing.
The freeze covers rent-stabilized leases that begin on or after October 1, 2026, and runs through September 30, 2027, according to amNewYork. It delivers on a signature campaign promise from Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “This is a historic victory for New York City tenants,” Mamdani said, pointing to “the first-ever freeze on two-year leases in our city’s history,” ABC7 reported. The board had frozen one-year leases only three times before and had never once frozen a two-year lease.
The freeze covers only rent-stabilized units. If your apartment is on the open market, the freeze does not cover you, there is no legal cap on your renewal, and your landlord can charge whatever the market will bear. The Spanish-language paper El Diario reported that most of the Hispanic New Yorkers who arrived in the city over the past decade rent in exactly that open market, where they have no cap and no protection.
Citywide, the median asking rent reached $3,616 a month in the first quarter of 2026, up 6.2 percent from a year earlier, according to StreetEasy’s quarterly report as cited by El Diario. In Manhattan the median hit $5,125 a month in May 2026, per Corcoran, the first time in the borough’s documented history that the number cleared $5,000. Brooklyn averages about $3,800. For a tenant renewing this summer, El Diario found, the gap between what they pay now and what the market demands can top $1,750 a month, close to $21,000 more a year.
Relief is thin even at those prices. Only 17.8 percent of New York landlords offer any concession, such as a free month or waived fees, against 40 percent in a city like San Jose, California, El Diario reported. Zillow ranked New York the second-hardest rental market in the country in 2026, behind only Providence, Rhode Island. Kara Ng, a senior economist at Zillow, told the paper that in the busiest rental markets “the math is simple: there are more people who want to live there than homes available to rent.” She tied the crunch to construction that skipped the region, saying the country built more new units in 2024 than in any year in half a century, “but that boom skipped practically the entire Northeast.”
The vote was not quiet. Hours before the board met, its property-owner representative, Christina Smyth, resigned in protest, accusing the panel of steering the vote toward a predetermined outcome, amNewYork reported. A remaining owner representative, Maksim Wynn, voted for the freeze anyway, telling the room that “a 0% rent increase on one and two-year leases is in owners’ best interests.” The lone dissent came from Arpit Gupta, a public member reappointed by former Mayor Eric Adams. Mamdani had appointed five of the board’s nine members earlier in the year.
For Bushwick, the freeze splits the block. A renter in a stabilized building will pay the same rent next year that they pay now. The renter next door, in a unit that was deregulated or built for the open market, faces the most expensive renewal of their tenancy with no ceiling to stop it. The same 7-to-1 vote that protects a million households does nothing for the apartment across the hall.
Find out which side of that line your apartment sits on. New York State Homes and Community Renewal lets any tenant request an apartment’s rent history, or a straight answer to “Am I Rent Stabilized,” through its portal at portal.hcr.ny.gov/app/ask; the request is free, and a response is mailed to the apartment within about 20 business days. You can also call 311. If the answer is stabilized, the freeze is yours on any renewal dated October 1 or later. If it is market-rate, El Diario notes the city runs a rental-assistance program through the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and that a renter with a solid payment record holds more leverage to negotiate before a lease lapses than most assume. Knowing before your lease runs out is the difference between the half of this vote that won and the half that got left out.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily image
