Rent collections are down in New York — and no one's sure why - POLITICO
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Rent collections are down in New York — and no one's sure why<br>The issue has exposed thorny questions for the city’s affordable housing sector.
At an apartment building in Brooklyn on Jan. 1, 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signs three executive orders to confront the city’s housing crisis: revitalizing the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants and establishing two new task forces to accelerate housing construction, get New Yorkers into homes faster, and increase supply by identifying suitable city-owned properties. | Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office
By Janaki Chadha06/21/2026 10:00 AM EDT
NEW YORK — More tenants living in New York City’s least expensive housing units aren’t paying their rent — a trend that risks further destabilizing the city’s affordable housing market.<br>The uptick in rental delinquency isn’t new. It started six years ago, when the pandemic flung the city’s economy into chaos and plunged low-income New Yorkers into dire financial straits. But even as the city has rebounded, rent collection rates in affordable housing remain short of pre-pandemic levels. As costs balloon, landlords say insufficient rental income is threatening their ability to stay afloat.
The issue has confounded owners and operators of these buildings, many of them nonprofits, which are often celebrated as a model for addressing the extreme dearth of housing options for very low-income people.
But why rent collections remain depressed is a matter of debate, and has exposed thorny questions for a sector that prides itself on housing people on the margins. Are some tenants — in the wake of a years-long pause on evictions and demands to “Cancel Rent” — withholding payments even when they’re able to make them? Or is it simply harder than ever to be poor in one of the nation’s most expensive cities?<br>“There is a subset of people, maybe the smallest subset, who are literally making a choice not to pay rent, and we don’t do well with acknowledging that but there is a subset for whom that is the case,” said Davon Russell, president of WHEDco, a nonprofit housing provider in the South Bronx. Russell says he’s collecting rent from just 75 percent of tenants. “If we’re ultimately caring about keeping people housed, we should just as doggedly talk about the people who are sabotaging that.”<br>Others bristle at the notion that some tenants are not paying rent just because they may be able to get away with it. Indeed, plenty of economic indicators suggest worsening financial duress for people already struggling. Costs are going up faster than wages, and inflation that took hold after the pandemic has proven painfully persistent. Landing a spot in subsidized affordable housing, in other words, hardly means a person won’t still find themselves squeezed.<br>“In some people’s minds, just evoking the words ‘cancel rent’ somehow unlocked in their tenants the idea that they no longer ever had to pay rent again, and I just don’t think that’s true,” said Sam Stein, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society. “People are in legitimately dire straits and they don’t have a choice to make. I don’t think there’s been this mass cultural shift toward flouting the obligation to pay rent.”<br>Whatever the reason, the rent collection conundrum comes as costs like property insurance have skyrocketed for owners, pushing New York’s affordable housing sector to a breaking point as Mayor Zohran Mamdani seeks to expand construction and preservation to a record 400,000 lower-cost units over a decade.<br>“It’s created a lot of real financial upheaval for affordable housing, sort of across the board,” said Patrick Boyle, a senior director for New York at Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit that invests in affordable housing projects.<br>Before Covid, many owners say they consistently pulled in at least 95 percent of their expected rent, which is regarded as the necessary threshold to cover a building’s costs. Last year, rent collections were at about 89 percent, according to Enterprise data on affordable properties it oversees as an asset manager. While that dip may not seem dramatic, these properties operate on tiny margins, leaving little cushion to account for the unexpected drop in revenue.<br>“Even though it seems like a small percentage drop, coupled with those other things, it’s significant,” Boyle said.<br>A broader survey of 428 affordable housing projects conducted by Enterprise and the National Equity Fund, which both serve as intermediaries between developers and federal tax credit investors, found the share of projects with very troubled rent collection rates — defined as less than 80 percent — jumped from 3 percent in 2017 to 11 percent in 2024.<br>Some housing experts say incentives for tenants have shifted in the wake of Covid-era aid and an eviction moratorium that lasted from March 2020 to early 2022. Tenant activists at the time...