By Jack Stone, managing director, Greysteel In the last week of June, two things happened in the American multifamily market that belong side by side: New York froze rents, and the Dallas Fed confirmed that Texas is drowning in apartments. One of those scenarios involves a market correcting itself. The other is a market being told to stop. In New York, the Rent Guidelines Board voted seven to one to freeze rents on roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, including zero percent on one- and two-year leases, the first two-year freeze in the board’s history. That action impacts about a quarter of all housing inventory in the city and roughly 40 percent of its rental units. In Texas, markets have kept doing what they’ve been doing for two years: bleeding. Both states are wrestling with the same underlying problem. Rents got too high for many people to afford. The difference is what each one decided to do about it, and that difference is the whole story. Texas is in pain, and the pain is honest. The Dallas Fed put numbers to it this spring. A pandemic-era construction boom, cheap money and aggressive bank lending dumped a historic wave of units onto …
