The Democratic nominee for New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is promising to freeze rents on stabilized apartments — and he wants to mandate that all city apartments are kept frosty, too.

The 33-year-old Democratic Socialist state assemblyman’s housing plan includes a provision to “force landlords to take extreme heat seriously” by requiring them to maintain indoor building temperatures at less than 78 degrees Fahrenheit when the temperature outside rises above 82 degrees. This is effectively a mandate that landlords install central air or air conditioning in all city apartments.

“New Yorkers are at risk of extreme heat as our planet warms. We will update the Housing Maintenance Code to meet the needs of the city in 2025 and make it a Class C violation to fail to provide adequately cool apartments during the summer months,” the Mamdani housing plan says. “We will also install heat sensors in buildings with repeated heat violations.”

Mr. Mamdani’s supporters say requiring air conditioning, just as the city mandates landlords provide access to heat in winter, is a human rights and health and safety issue. Mr. Mamdani’s cooling mandate is vague but is almost directly lifted — down to the temperature limits — from a bill that failed to pass the City Council last year. The bill would have mandated landlords to pay for and install central air or air conditioning units in all apartments, pay for the electricity to run central air and possibly window units, and fine landlords up to $1,250 a day for noncompliance.

Critics say an air conditioning mandate will exacerbate climate change, stress the city’s power grid, and place an enormous cost on landlords to retrofit their buildings and pay for the electricity to maintain a constant 78 degrees — all while facing a freeze on rents for stabilized apartments, which make up 44 percent of the rental market.

These critics say the result will not be the “affordable city” of Mr. Mamdani’s utopian promises, but rather a rise in rents on non-stabilized apartments to offset the costs.

“They’re just not living in reality and what the costs are to maintain these apartments,” the chief executive of the New York Apartment Association, Kenny Burgos, tells The New York Sun. His organization represents landlords of multi-tenant housing built before 1974, much of which is stabilized apartments. He says this mandate will require “substantial renovations” from landlords.

“The non-stabilized unit is essentially subsidizing their stabilized neighbor. The costs cannot be wished away,” Mr. Burgos says.

The 2024 air conditioner bill failed to pass the majority Democratic city council in large part because mandating air conditioning would conflict with Local Law 97, a climate change provision that limits the level of greenhouse gases a building can emit. 

Stress on the city’s power grid was another major concern. During this month’s heat wave, city officials asked residents to turn off lights in unoccupied rooms. Imagine if every apartment had an air conditioner running, and at the expense of someone else no less. Does anyone ration AC use in a hotel room?

A senior researcher, Sarah Parker, at the City’s Independent Budget Office testified that the bill would likely lead to rent increases. A 2023 Housing Vacancy Survey found that 89 percent of rental apartments in the city have at least one air conditioner. This is a high number, though the survey found that more than 20 percent of these households do not use their air conditioners because of the high cost of electricity.

Ms. Parker testified that the cost to run an energy efficient air conditioner for 12 hours a day is roughly $130 per month, while the cost could be as high as $500 for outdated, inefficient, or larger models. As tenant-owned air conditioners break or need repair, landlords would be required to fix or replace them. There are also issues with how apartment electricity would be metered if the landlord was required to pay for cooling through a window unit.

“Economic theory suggests that some or all the cost to purchase and install the air conditioner would be passed on to the tenant in the form of rent increases,” Ms. Parker said.

Mr. Mamdani’s air conditioner mandate is just one of many far-left proposals that will require legislative approval to be put into effect. Combined with a freeze on stabilized rents, landlords of buildings with stabilized units say this could bankrupt them. They say increasing city regulations and rising costs for insurance, water and sewer, and property taxes are making it economically unfeasible to own buildings with stabilized units, many of which run at a loss. There are between 26,000 and 60,000 vacant stabilized apartments that landlords are declining to put on the market because they run at a loss or need substantial repairs.

In a city where the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $5,400, it’s difficult to coalesce support behind landlords. Mr. Mamdani effectively campaigned on taxing the rich to pay for city-owned grocery stores, free buses, and a rent freeze. His housing plan includes a “zero-tolerance for negligent landlords” section that advocates for “publicly stewarding buildings in disrepair.”

“Take a look at NYCHA, the New York City Housing Authority. It’s the rat and crime infested worst agency,” the president of Empire State Properties, Suzanne Miller, tells the Sun. “Government doesn’t do a good job. They never have,” she says of property management.

Mr. Burgos has a more dire warning. “The city’s number one source of funding is property taxes. So if you bankrupt your number one source of revenue, how do you expect to function as a city?”