Rent Laws’ Impact: Tenant Paradise or Return of the ‘Bronx Is Burning’?

The changes could ripple far beyond the rent-regulated market, said Garrett Derderian, the managing director of market analysis for CORE, a real estate brokerage. Since the new protections will make it more difficult for developers to push up the price of regulated apartments and convert them into market-rate units, tighter supply will mean a price increase for unregulated apartments.

“The people in the middle — below market-rate, but not protected — their rents, percentage wise, will see the greatest increases,” he said.

Rental prices have been climbing since last fall, in part because of weakness in the for-sale market amid a glut of new luxury condos in Manhattan, and recent tax law changes for homeowners, said Jonathan Miller, the president of the real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel.

In the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, where new development is surging, the median asking rent in April was $2,250 a month, up 15 percent from the same period in 2017, according to the listing website StreetEasy.

Rafael Cestero, a former commissioner of the city’s department of Housing Preservation and Development, said many of the new changes were necessary, but he also worried whether lawmakers had struck the right balance.

The new rules are permanent, unlike the former regulations that were subject to renewal every few years. Mr. Cestero questioned whether there would be the political will to readjust incentives if buildings began to fall into disrepair down the road.

“It’s not like we’re going to wake up the next morning and the Bronx will be burning again,” said Mr. Cestero, now the president of the Community Preservation Corporation, a nonprofit affordable housing lender. “We’ll wait and see.”