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Eric Adams may have quit the mayoral race, but we’ll have his rent hikes to remember him by. The final rent-stabilized increases under his administration — 3 percent on one-year leases and 4.5 percent for two-year leases — take effect on Wednesday.
And since it’s Adams’s last go-round, why not ask: Just how much has the rent gone up during his time in office? A new report by the Community Service Society’s housing-policy analyst Samuel Stein found that over the past four years the Rent Guidelines Board has increased rents by a total of 12.6 percent. And how does this compare to his predecessors? The city’s 1 million rent-stabilized apartments saw a 4.6 percent and 2.3 percent total increase in rent over Bill de Blasio’s two terms. (Which includes three years of rent freezes.) Adams’s record is much more in line with Michael Bloomberg’s, whose rent board increased rents by 13.4, 15.6, and 12.5 percent. All told, if a rent-stabilized tenant took one-year increases during all those years, they would have seen a 77 percent jump in their rent. “According to the Fiscal Policy Institute, between 1977 and 2024, RGB rent increases have consistently surpassed the most relevant economic benchmark: the Consumer Price Index minus shelter costs,” per the report.
If you include market-rate apartments, Adams’s tenure has been a period of shattering rent records, bidding wars, and lines outside of crappy apartments. Per Douglas Elliman’s data, from December 2021 to August 2025, the median Manhattan rent rose from $3,475 to $4,600; in Brooklyn from $2,800 to $3,950; and in northwest Queens from $2,825 to $3,775. Yikes.
More than half of city households are considered “rent burdened,” which means they’re giving more than 30 percent of their pretax income to their landlord. That’s not even including utilities, which are way up, too. So good-bye, Eric Adams, the mayor of a city in which you can experience everything from 9/11 to opening a new business to spending most of your salary on rent.