Railing against high rents in New York City has been a mayoral campaign formula for decades.

Amara Mayo’s search for an affordable apartment in New York City is becoming more like a pageant contest than typical house hunting.

The 23-year-old paralegal carefully curated photos of herself to post in Facebook housing groups, where hundreds of thousands of other 20-somethings are vying for leases.

“You throw up six of your best selfies, and you’re just hoping someone will see them and be like: ‘Oh you look friendly, let’s be roommates,’” Mayo said.

New York City’s cutthroat rental market is a big reason why she supports Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor. The struggle to find an affordable place has become a flashpoint in the city’s Democratic primary for mayor.

The 33-year-old state assemblyman and democratic socialist from Queens has made housing a core piece of his agenda, unexpectedly catapulting him toward the front of the race.

Mamdani is pledging to freeze rents on rent-stabilized apartments, invest $70 billion in publicly subsidized housing, open up public land for housing development and more. The agenda, along with promises of free bus rides and government-owned grocery stores, have put him in a dead heat with former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for Tuesday’s primary.

Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in Manhattan.

Railing against high rents in New York City has been a mayoral campaign formula for decades. A former letter carrier ran for mayor in 2005 and for governor in 2010 as the Rent Is Too Damn High party’s candidate. (He didn’t win.)

Yet the housing crisis has hit a new level, even by New York City standards. The city’s vacancy rates recently dropped to a record 1.4%, the lowest since 1968.

The monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment has climbed 17.5% over the past year to $5,560, according to rental-listing site Zumper, the most of any U.S. city.

Cuomo’s housing proposals are focused on boosting development rather than strengthening rent restrictions. That platform helped secure his campaign millions in donations from the real-estate industry, partly by drawing a contrast to Mamdani.

“He’s never built anything,” Cuomo said of his opponent in a recent debate.

But Mamdani’s momentum this year is a sign that renters are even more desperate and are looking for immediate relief in the most expensive and competitive rental market in the city’s history.

“When you have any municipality where its workers can’t afford to live in the city that they work, there’s a real incentive to change leadership,” said Jonathan Miller, chief executive of the New York City real-estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel.

Developers and landlords are critical of Mamdani’s platform. They say that a rent freeze would discourage any new investment or even spending on maintaining existing units. And they are already dealing with the impacts of New York City’s 2019 rent laws, which made it harder to increase prices on the city’s more than one million rent-regulated units.

“Mamdani’s platform would only deepen that crisis,” said Jared Epstein, president of the Manhattan-based developer Aurora Capital Associates.

In the New York rental market, lines for open houses regularly wrap around the block, and it is no longer enough to apply to an apartment with a stable income and strong credit score. Young renters have to get creative.

Amara Mayo

Some like Mayo are curating their personal brands as the perfect roommate to win over complete strangers on social media, Craigslist and Reddit.

Others say they are trying to curry favor with brokers by taking them out for cocktails or slipping them extra cash under the table. Everyone accepts that a large chunk of their entry-level incomes will be spent on rent.

Mayo’s budget of $1,500 and $1,800 a month won’t get her very far in a city where median asking rents have been surging to record levels since February, the middle of what is typically the offseason.

And that was before the FARE Act went into effect on June 11, banning the longstanding practice of brokers charging tenants fees. Rents rose overnight and have continued to climb.

Just over a week since the enactment of the FARE Act, rents are up an additional 16%, according to early data from real-estate analytics firm UrbanDigs. The median asking rent spiked to $6,346 on Sunday, raising the rolling average to $5,599 for the past week.

Young renters desperate for housing are reluctantly swallowing the exorbitant prices. Danylo Korotin, a 28-year-old artist, is prepared to spend about 60% of his income on rent and utilities, double the 30% recommended guideline. Those high costs are partly why he is voting for Mamdani.

“I’m very grateful to even have a chance at a politician who really strives to represent working class New Yorkers,” Korotin said.

Harditya Sarvaiya

Even those willing to pay high rental rates are struggling to find an empty apartment in the first place. When new supply does get added, it often skews luxury because of the high cost of building in the city.

The fierce competition among renters often means that new inventory spends just days or even hours on the market.

The dynamic has left renters like Harditya Sarvaiya, a 26-year-old software engineer, couch-surfing at friends’ apartments. Like many apartment hunters, he spends hours sifting through online rental marketplaces like StreetEasy, Facebook groups and Reddit with little luck. For now, he has settled on a hotel room to ride out the rest of June while he finds more permanent housing.

“A lot of the apartments that I really wanted just got off the market,” he said. “Within a few hours, they were off the market.”

Write to Rebecca Picciotto at [email protected], Maggie Grether at [email protected] and Redmond Bernhold at [email protected]