Three months into his term, Mayor Mamdani appears likely to secure a rent freeze for roughly 2 million tenants in rent-stabilized apartments, with a key vote expected in June. The harder part is everything else. There is little sign that City Hall has made real progress on changing the property tax system, even though it is the city’s largest revenue source and one of the biggest expenses facing residential landlords, many of whom now say they are heading toward financial collapse.
“It was a lot of campaign rhetoric,” said Jay Martin, executive vice president of the New York Apartment Association. “The reality when you get into office is much different.”
A consensus that stops at the starting line
The odd thing about New York’s property tax system is that almost everyone agrees it needs work. Homeowners, tenant advocates, budget analysts, civil rights groups, left-leaning Democrats and even Trump-aligned Republicans have all argued, in one form or another, that the current structure is broken. Many also say it helps reinforce racial inequities.
Renters, who make up about two-thirds of city residents, also have a stake in the issue. A new report from the Community Service Society, a progressive research group that supports both a rent freeze and property tax reform, says renters understand that higher property tax costs feed into higher rents. Those same renters helped power Mamdani’s victory in a city where wealthier homeowners usually have more political pull. Democracy remains a marvelous system when it agrees with your polling memo.
But broad agreement is not the same thing as a solution. Reducing taxes for one group almost certainly means raising them for another, or shrinking total property tax revenue at a time when the city already faces a $5.4 billion budget gap. The specific inequity Mamdani has pointed to, the higher burden placed on apartment buildings compared with other homes, is among the most difficult to untangle. If landlords pay less, someone or something else has to make up the difference. Homeowners? Commercial properties? Utilities? No one has volunteered enthusiastically.
“It’s one of those things where, when you push one button, two other buttons light up,” said Democratic state Sen. Andrew Gounardes of Brooklyn, who supports reform.
City Hall says it is committed to overhauling the system, but any major change would need Albany’s approval. So far, the administration has not shared bill language with state lawmakers, saying only that it would do so “soon.”
“As Mayor Mamdani has said, our property tax system isn’t just outdated - it’s fundamentally broken and deeply inequitable,” mayoral spokesperson Joe Calvello said in a statement. “For too long, it has shifted the burden onto working families and tenants while protecting entrenched interests.”
He added: “That’s why our administration will be working closely with our allies to advance a comprehensive package of reforms that will finally deliver a fair, transparent system - one that treats tenants and property owners with the dignity and equity they deserve.”
Built for a different city
The stakes go well beyond rent-stabilized buildings and the coming rent board vote. The current system also makes new rental development more expensive and more complicated, which is awkward timing for a city in the middle of a severe housing shortage. New York’s rental vacancy rate is just 1.4 percent, and some estimates say the city needs as many as 500,000 new homes over the next decade to keep up with demand.
According to a survey by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, New York City has one of the largest property tax gaps in the country between owner-occupied homes and apartment buildings. In practical terms, properties with similar market values can end up with wildly different tax bills. Subtle, elegant, and completely unhelpful.
A striking example comes from southern Brooklyn. A 42-unit rental building in Bay Ridge and a six-bedroom mansion in nearby Dyker Heights sold for about the same amount in recent years, $3.2 million, according to a 2025 report from the Community Service Society.
The two properties also cover roughly the same amount of land and were assigned similar market values by the Department of Finance, with the apartment building valued at $2.9 million and the mansion at $2.4 million. Yet the rental building’s tax bill came to $150,700, more than six times the mansion’s.
The current tax system dates to 1981, when New York’s real estate market looked very different. In the years after the 1970s fiscal crisis, homeowners were leaving the city, condos were much less common, and the later housing crunch driven by population growth had not yet arrived.
“It was built for a different time completely,” said Iziah Thompson, a senior policy analyst at CSS. “It’s just obviously not built for a place that has a housing crisis, an affordability crisis.”
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio also promised to fix the system during his 2013 campaign. He did not get far beyond appointing a commission to study the issue, and its recommendations did not arrive until his final week in office.
That work came while the city was still defending a lawsuit from a coalition called Tax Equity Now New York, which includes developers, civil rights groups and homeowners. The group says the system is unconstitutional and argues the city could reduce inequities through administrative changes if it wanted to. One of its main complaints is that city assessment practices help leave some expensive properties, including condos on Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row, undervalued and undertaxed.
Eric Adams made his own modest attempt at reform last year, but according to New York Focus he could not find a state lawmaker willing to sponsor the effort. His proposal was narrow and would not have covered rental buildings.
Earlier this year, budget director Sherif Soliman said the Mamdani administration would build its reform plan from the recommendations of de Blasio’s commission. That blueprint, however, was mostly focused on fairness between different types of homeowners, including one-to-three-family houses, condos and co-ops. It offered little that would materially ease the burden on rental buildings.
Part of the problem was that de Blasio required his commission to find a fix that would not reduce total property tax revenue.
“[If] you’re going to bring down property taxes for rental properties, how are you going to offset that revenue? We didn’t have a ready solution on that,” said James Parrott, a member of the commission and an economist at The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs.
Thompson argues that Mamdani’s coalition, which ran heavily through renter-majority neighborhoods, creates room to rethink the system in a way that helps tenants. Parrott says he long believed meaningful property tax reform would only happen under a lame-duck mayor with little political incentive to avoid the fight, until Mamdani came along.
A bad budget moment for a very hard fix
Even if the politics are inching in the right direction, the finances are not. Mamdani still has to figure out how to close a $5.4 billion budget gap before the next fiscal year begins on July 1.
“The conventional wisdom is that the time when property tax reform is most likely is when you have a strong economy and revenues are growing strongly, so you have the opportunity to combine the reform with a tax deduction,” said Ana Champeny, vice president of research at the Citizens Budget Commission. “We’re not at that point right now.”
Any broad reform package would also need approval from the governor and the state Legislature. Mamdani is already asking Albany for help on another major priority, a tax increase on the city’s wealthiest residents. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a more moderate Democrat, has so far resisted that request, despite what the mayor describes as a strong working relationship with her.
Mamdani has also floated, as leverage, the possibility of raising property taxes on everyone to help cover the city’s budget shortfall if he does not get state approval for the higher taxes on the rich. That threat, for now, appears to have been set aside.
There is still one unresolved question that makes the politics even murkier: how much of any property tax cut for rental buildings would actually reach tenants, especially those in market-rate apartments. De Blasio’s commission tried to get a better answer by convening expert panels, but the testimony did not produce clear evidence on how much of the tax burden renters really absorb.
So a reform plan would not only have to survive Albany and the budget fight. It would also have to deliver benefits that ordinary voters could actually see, which is usually the part that separates a reform effort from a seminar.
Meanwhile, landlords with rent-stabilized buildings say the current system is already pushing them into the red. The looming rent freeze would need approval from the Rent Guidelines Board, a nine-member panel that is now mostly made up of Mamdani appointees. The board began its annual process last week and is expected to cast a final vote in June.
Brooklyn landlord Lincoln Eccles, vice president of Small Property Owners of New York, says property taxes are one of the costs weighing down his 14-unit building in Crown Heights, which is mostly rent-stabilized.
“There’s not enough money now to maintain the place,” Eccles said. “The roof leaks, the boiler died - it’s one thing after another and the government is squeezing us.”
