Mayor Zohran Mamdani has declared the rent freeze “a historic victory” that provides “the relief that working people across our city deserve.”

In reality, a large number of those tenants could actually well afford to pay more.

Ironically, they also tend to get the biggest savings.

And the fact that they have a sweet deal pushes up prices for those facing today’s non-regulated rental market.

Here’s the key: The Mamdani initiative has frozen the rent for all 960,000 rent-stabilized tenants, but Census records show 30% of them earn $100,000 or more; that’s 288,000 affluent households enjoying the rent freeze.

There’s no requirement to be poor to score a rent-regulated apartment, a fact Mamdani, who lived in a rent-regulated unit before moving into Gracie Mansion, conveniently overlooks.

So affluent households in the city’s top neighborhoods have benefited from rent regulation for decades while newcomers to the city crowd into small apartments and face high market-rate rents.

Note, too, that those $100,000-plus households are raking in more than the citywide $85,000 median income for all households, whether homeowners or renters, including those in market-rate apartments.

One might ask how many of them earn even more than that. But the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, which conducts its own housing research and which just approved the rent freeze, isn’t curious about such questions.

In its 2025 Income and Affordability study, part of the basis for deciding on rent increases, the RGB masks the number of high-income rent-stabilized tenants by citing only a single gross figure: “For all rent stabilized tenants, the median household income was $60,000”

The board prefers such questions as how many rent-stabilized tenants are still paying off student loans — a core Mamdani voting group.

But there’s good reason to believe the extent of rent subsidies for the rich are even more significant in well-off neighborhoods such as the Upper West and Upper East Sides.

It’s been a while since anyone looked at such questions but when New York University’s Furman Center on Real Estate at NYU reviewed regulated units in top Manhattan neighborhoods below 96th Street back in 2013, the results were eye-popping.

Sure enough, the median income of rent-stabilized households in those areas was higher than that of market-rate tenants in all of New York City except for eight neighborhoods outside of the core of Manhattan.

In other words, median-income tenants in rent-stabilized units in much of Manhattan were likely paying lower rents even though their incomes were higher than that of median-income tenants in non-stabilized units.  

What’s more, these well-off households stayed in their apartments a long time, even if their kids moved out, leaving them empty bedrooms. 

Below 96th Street, 35% of stabilized households lived in the same unit for over 20 years, compared with just 2.7% of market-rate households, Furman found.

Such “slow turnover” leads to “inefficient use of the city’s housing supply — and overcrowding in other places.”

Only 4% of white city households live in overcrowded apartments, while 10% of Asians do.

White baby boomers on the UWS and UES are aging in place with rent-subsidized good deals, while new immigrants must crowd in.

It’s possible the picture has changed dramatically since that 2013 study — and that rent-regulated apartments below 96th Street are all now occupied by low-income households.

But the Housing and Vacancy Survey stopped asking about rent-stabilized tenant incomes by neighborhood, and the Rent Guidelines Board has not been interested enough to do its own research.

But that 30% of rent-stabilized tenants who earn more than $100,000 live somewhere — and it’s not likely in the South Bronx.

Keep in mind owners of regulated buildings have zero incentive to rent to the poor; if one is going to receive a below-market rent, better to make sure the tenant earns enough to pay at least that much.

The number of wealthy tenants whose landlords are forced to subsidize them should be a priority for the Rent Guidelines Board when it undertakes its next annual “income and affordability” study.

But the Census finding about $100,000-plus rent-stabilized households already makes clear that the situation needs reform.

The rent freeze should not apply to high-income households. Period.

Those earning, let’s say, more than $200,000 a year with assets of more than $2 million should not qualify for the rent freeze.

Instead, their rents should increase either with the rate of inflation or the Consumer Price Index, which reflects the expense cost for property owners.

Mamdani delights in calling out those who’ve committed the sin of becoming wealthy.

But his rent freeze helps more of them than anyone else. It’s the precise opposite of the kind of socialism he promises.

Howard Husock is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The Projects: A New History of Public Housing.”