{"id":901960,"date":"2026-04-28T03:19:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T08:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/28\/a-perfect-storm-of-costs-is-squeezing-nyc-landlords-to-the-brink\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T03:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T08:19:08","slug":"a-perfect-storm-of-costs-is-squeezing-nyc-landlords-to-the-brink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/28\/a-perfect-storm-of-costs-is-squeezing-nyc-landlords-to-the-brink\/","title":{"rendered":"A Perfect Storm of Costs Is Squeezing NYC Landlords to the Brink"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ann Korchak<\/strong>\u2019s family has been in the New York City<\/a> rental business for 80 years<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Their story began with her husband\u2019s parents, who immigrated to the U.S. and worked as rooming house operators before saving enough to purchase their first building in 1941.<\/p>\n

Eventually, the couple took over the business and today, Korchak manages two 10-unit apartment buildings on the Upper West Side<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s far from the image of a faceless, corporate landlord. Her operation is deeply personal\u2014she has family members living as tenants in her buildings and takes pride in maintaining the properties.<\/p>\n

“We\u2019re not faceless, absentee owners,” she explains. “People know that there\u2019s a lot of attention being paid to the building.”<\/p>\n

As the president of Small Property Owners of New York<\/a> (SPONY), Korchak represents owners of roughly 7,000 units across the city, most of which are 100% rent stabilized. She notes that her family\u2019s story is common among her members, some of whom even live in their buildings alongside their tenants.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s exactly these small-scale housing providers, she argues, who have been hit hardest by a collision of rising property taxes<\/a>, soaring insurance premiums<\/a>, and rent regulations<\/a> that limit how much revenue can rise to keep pace with expenses.<\/p>\n

And while landlords have become easy villains in a city where nearly half of rent-stabilized tenants are rent-burdened<\/a>, Korchak warns that piling more pressure on small owners could backfire on the very renters the system is meant to protect.<\/p>\n

The squeeze: A trifecta of rising costs<\/h2>\n

On paper, New York<\/a> City\u2019s rent-stabilized buildings might not look like they are in crisis.<\/p>\n

The most recent Income and Expense Study<\/a> from the New York City Rent Guidelines Board found that net operating income, or NOI\u2014the revenue left after operating expenses are deducted from rent\u2014for the average rent-stabilized unit was $688 per month.<\/p>\n

At first glance, that suggests landlords still have a meaningful cushion.<\/p>\n

But Joel Berner<\/a><\/strong>, senior economist at Realtor.com\u00ae<\/a>, says NOI doesn\u2019t capture the full financial picture.<\/p>\n

\u201cNOI represents day-to-day cash flows of running an apartment building, but it doesn\u2019t tell the whole story,\u201d Berner says. \u201cPositive NOI growth is one of the signs that landlords are healthy, but there could be more issues behind the scenes.\u201d<\/p>\n

For small property owners, those behind-the-scenes issues can be enough to wipe out what looks like profit on a spreadsheet.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeventy-five to 80% of the rent roll is gone just paying your property taxes, your insurance, your utilities and the water and sewer,\u201d Korchak tells Realtor.com\u00ae. \u201cThere really isn\u2019t much wiggle room.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that margin is getting thinner.<\/p>\n

Korchak says her property tax bill was about $33,000 per building 20 years ago. Today, it\u2019s approaching $100,000. Had that bill merely tracked inflation, it would be just under $55,000.<\/p>\n

Insurance has also become another major pressure point.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no question that insurance costs and premiums have risen quite a bit over the last five years,\u201d says Benjamin Flavin<\/strong>, a partner at Braverman Greenspun<\/a>, who represents co-ops, condominiums, and tenant associations in New York City.<\/p>\n

New York University\u2019s Furman Center<\/a> found that insurance costs rose 150% for many older rent-stabilized buildings between 2019 and 2025. The New York Housing Conference<\/a> has also found that the average cost to insure an affordable apartment more than doubled.<\/p>\n

For small owners, those increases are especially difficult to absorb because they operate in a highly regulated market. As taxes, insurance, utilities, water, and sewer costs have climbed, rent increases have remained limited by the Rent Guidelines Board<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since 2019, the board has approved annual increases for rent-stabilized leases ranging from 1.5% to 5.25%, depending on lease length and year. For tenants already stretched thin, those increases are painful. But for small landlords, Korchak argues, they have not been enough to keep up with the cost of operating aging buildings.<\/p>\n

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High-rise towers south of Central Park in New York, home to Billionaires Row, a collection of thin, tall residential buildings with high-priced luxury apartments.<\/span>Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The new city-backed proposal: Hope or fantasy?<\/h2>\n

Insurance is one piece of the affordability crisis that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani<\/strong> is now trying to address.<\/p>\n

His new city-backed insurance program<\/a> aims to reduce premiums by 20% to 30% for up to 100,000 affordable and rent-stabilized housing units by 2030.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot take on the housing crisis without confronting one of the fastest-growing costs facing New Yorkers: insurance,\u201d Mamdani said. \u201cThat\u2019s why we\u2019re creating the first city-backed insurance program\u2014to help New Yorkers stay in their homes, give building owners the support they need to make repairs, and build a city that New Yorkers can actually afford.\u201d<\/p>\n

In theory, the proposal speaks directly to one of the costs small owners say is pushing their buildings to the brink. But Korchak and Flavin are skeptical that lower insurance premiums alone can solve the deeper problem.<\/p>\n

Their concern is that the program may offer relief without addressing why insurance has become so expensive in the first place: aging buildings, rising repair costs, and legal exposure\u2014to name a few.<\/p>\n

Flavin says the city may end up shifting the cost of insurance rather than reducing the underlying risk.<\/p>\n

\u201cPremiums aren\u2019t becoming lower. They\u2019re just being subsidized,\u201d Flavin says. \u201cAnd subsidy is political. It doesn\u2019t necessarily address a long-term problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Korchak points to a similar concern after the announcement.<\/p>\n

“Does the pilot include a proportional number of small rent-stabilized property owners, the city\u2019s backbone of affordable housing?” she asks. “Or is the mayor only interested in helping his friends in the nonprofit housing sector who already receive numerous government subsidies and are exempt from property taxes?”<\/p>\n

Even if premiums come down, Korchak and Flavin say small owners would still face the same basic math: rising property taxes, higher utility costs, water and sewer bills, compliance costs, deferred maintenance, and the expense of bringing older apartments up to modern code.<\/p>\n

Those pressures may still force a hard choice for landlords, Flavin says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen an apartment becomes vacant, for many landlords, the choice is the expense of repairing it or the expense of not repairing and putting a tenant in and suffering those consequences,\u201d he explains. \u201cI think the cost-benefit analysis often makes more sense to leave the apartments vacant.\u201d<\/p>\n

That’s the deeper inventory problem the insurance proposal may not touch. A lower premium can help keep an occupied building afloat, but it does not necessarily make a distressed vacant unit financially viable to repair and return to the market.<\/p>\n

Korchak\u2019s concern is slightly different: She worries the city is treating small owners as a problem to manage rather than as operators of housing the city still depends on.<\/p>\n

She says officials often point to assistance programs that are either unavailable to small rent-stabilized building owners, no longer accepting applicants, limited to different property types, or too uncertain to rely on as a business planning tool. <\/p>\n

To her, the new insurance proposal raises a similar question: Is City Hall is offering real operating relief, or another program that sounds better on paper than it works in practice?<\/p>\n

Korchak sees the current environment as part of a broader shift away from small private ownership and toward a more socialized model of housing\u2014one she argues has already struggled in New York, pointing to the capital needs and empty units in the city\u2019s public housing system.<\/p>\n

Her fear is that small owners will be squeezed out long before the city solves the affordability crisis it is trying to fix.<\/p>\n

As the insurance program takes shape, owners like Korchak say they still need more immediate relief. Without it, they argue, the city risks losing a class of owners who have quietly helped maintain New York\u2019s rent-stabilized housing stock for generations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Allaire Conte is a senior advice writer covering real estate and personal finance trends. She previously served as deputy editor of home services at CNN Underscored Money and was a lead writer at Orchard, where she simplified complex real estate topics for everyday readers. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University and a BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. When she\u2019s not writing about homeownership hurdles and housing market shifts, she\u2019s biking around Brooklyn or baking cakes for her friends.<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Allaire Conte<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ann Korchak\u2019s family has been in the New York City rental business for 80 years. Their story began with her husband\u2019s parents, who immigrated to the U.S. and worked as rooming house operators before saving enough to purchase their first building in 1941. Eventually, the couple took over the business and today, Korchak manages two<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":901961,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1886,2141],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-901960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-perfect","category-storm"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/901961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}