Potential renters who check out New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s rent-stabilized apartment after he heads to Gracie Mansion will be in for some sticker shock, the New York Post is reporting.
The Queens apartment is now being marketed at $800, or 35%, more per month than what the socialist assemblyman paid for it, according to the tabloid.
The Astoria apartment is now commanding $3,100 per month while still falling under rent control, sources told the paper.
According to the Post:
Mamdani — who’ll be moving into Gracie Mansion with his “aloof” artist wife Rama Duwaji sometime after being sworn in Jan. 1 — caught a break during the seven years he’s rented the one-bedroom Astoria pad, paying about $2,300 because his landlord charged him a much lower rate than what was allowed by law.
The son of millionaire award-nominated filmmaker Mira Nair and tenured Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani was getting what’s known as a “preferential rent” — a temporary discounted rate landlords sometimes offer on rent-stabilized apartments to attract tenants in softer markets.
The mayor elect told the newspaper outside his 35th street apartment building last week that he was giving up the rental unit.
One critic claimed Mamdani had been getting the benefits not afforded the average New Yorker, calling him a “nepo baby,” a derogatory term for someone who achieves success due to their famous or influential family.
“Isn’t that just the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York in a nutshell?” New York City Council Minority Leader Joanne Ariola, a Queens Republican, told the Post.
She continued, “A nepo baby leaves his under-market apartment for a mansion, the price gets jacked up for the next guy, and some ill-conceived legislation forces the landlords to make an off-market listing to avoid the fees ‘progressive’ policies shoved down their throats.”
Mamdani ran his mayoral campaign on making life more “affordable” in the Big Apple for average New Yorkers, pledging to freeze rent increases.
Mamdani’s apartment is being leased “off-market,” according to the Post, a practice that has become popular since the city’s new Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses (FARE) Act went into effect in June.
It includes a controversial broker-fee ban, which Mamdani himself lobbied for as a state Assemblyman, but “sent prices through the roof as the fee became baked into rents,” the Post reported.
Off market means it’s not publicly listed but is available through private networks kept by agents and advertised through word of mouth.
An increasing number of brokers have reportedly kept exclusive listings off market as a way to bypass the ban.
While campaigning, Mamdani faced criticism for living in his highly affordable digs while pulling down a $142,000 salary as a Queens assemblyman.
The socialist countered by saying he first moved into the unit in 2018 when he was only earning about $47,000 a year as a foreclosure prevention housing counselor.
“This is exactly what New Yorkers are sick of: politicians who benefit from housing arrangements while pushing policies that make rents higher and listings disappear for everyone else,” Councilman Robert Holden, a conservative Queens Democrat, also told the Post.
He added, “It is always the same story with nepo baby communists backed by trust funds who never pay the price for the policies they impose. If Mamdani’s idea of affordable housing only works for him and no one else, then it is not affordable. It is hypocrisy.”
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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