Ann Korchak’s family has been in the New York City rental business for 80 years.
Their story began with her husband’s 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 10-unit apartment buildings on the Upper West Side.
She’s far from the image of a faceless, corporate landlord. Her operation is deeply personal—she has family members living as tenants in her buildings and takes pride in maintaining the properties.
“We’re not faceless, absentee owners,” she explains. “People know that there’s a lot of attention being paid to the building.”
As the president of Small Property Owners of New York (SPONY), Korchak represents owners of roughly 7,000 units across the city, most of which are 100% rent stabilized. She notes that her family’s story is common among her members, some of whom even live in their buildings alongside their tenants.
It’s exactly these small-scale housing providers, she argues, who have been hit hardest by a collision of rising property taxes, soaring insurance premiums, and rent regulations that limit how much revenue can rise to keep pace with expenses.
And while landlords have become easy villains in a city where nearly half of rent-stabilized tenants are rent-burdened, Korchak warns that piling more pressure on small owners could backfire on the very renters the system is meant to protect.
The squeeze: A trifecta of rising costs
On paper, New York City’s rent-stabilized buildings might not look like they are in crisis.
The most recent Income and Expense Study from the New York City Rent Guidelines Board found that net operating income, or NOI—the revenue left after operating expenses are deducted from rent—for the average rent-stabilized unit was $688 per month.
At first glance, that suggests landlords still have a meaningful cushion.
But Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com®, says NOI doesn’t capture the full financial picture.
“NOI represents day-to-day cash flows of running an apartment building, but it doesn’t tell the whole story,” Berner says. “Positive NOI growth is one of the signs that landlords are healthy, but there could be more issues behind the scenes.”
For small property owners, those behind-the-scenes issues can be enough to wipe out what looks like profit on a spreadsheet.
“Seventy-five to 80% of the rent roll is gone just paying your property taxes, your insurance, your utilities and the water and sewer,” Korchak tells Realtor.com®. “There really isn’t much wiggle room.”
And that margin is getting thinner.
Korchak says her property tax bill was about $33,000 per building 20 years ago. Today, it’s approaching $100,000. Had that bill merely tracked inflation, it would be just under $55,000.
Insurance has also become another major pressure point.
“There’s no question that insurance costs and premiums have risen quite a bit over the last five years,” says Benjamin Flavin, a partner at Braverman Greenspun, who represents co-ops, condominiums, and tenant associations in New York City.
New York University’s Furman Center found that insurance costs rose 150% for many older rent-stabilized buildings between 2019 and 2025. The New York Housing Conference has also found that the average cost to insure an affordable apartment more than doubled.
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.
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.
The new city-backed proposal: Hope or fantasy?
Insurance is one piece of the affordability crisis that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is now trying to address.
His new city-backed insurance program aims to reduce premiums by 20% to 30% for up to 100,000 affordable and rent-stabilized housing units by 2030.
“We cannot take on the housing crisis without confronting one of the fastest-growing costs facing New Yorkers: insurance,” Mamdani said. “That’s why we’re creating the first city-backed insurance program—to 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.”
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.
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—to name a few.
Flavin says the city may end up shifting the cost of insurance rather than reducing the underlying risk.
“Premiums aren’t becoming lower. They’re just being subsidized,” Flavin says. “And subsidy is political. It doesn’t necessarily address a long-term problem.”
Korchak points to a similar concern after the announcement.
“Does the pilot include a proportional number of small rent-stabilized property owners, the city’s 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?”
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.
Those pressures may still force a hard choice for landlords, Flavin says.
“When 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,” he explains. “I think the cost-benefit analysis often makes more sense to leave the apartments vacant.”
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.
Korchak’s 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.
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.
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?
Korchak sees the current environment as part of a broader shift away from small private ownership and toward a more socialized model of housing—one she argues has already struggled in New York, pointing to the capital needs and empty units in the city’s public housing system.
Her fear is that small owners will be squeezed out long before the city solves the affordability crisis it is trying to fix.
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’s rent-stabilized housing stock for generations.
