Can Zohran Mamdani’s rent freeze in NYC actually work?

Photo above - Steinway tower, one of the newest apartment buildings in NYC. It's so tall and skinny because there's not much land left. 2 bedroom rents start at $5,000 a month. Electricity, water, gas and other amenities cost extra. Hey . . . was that thing engineered to withstand hurricanes?

Whew – that WASN’T a close one. Mamdani wins in a landslide. Your new mayor is a 34 year old socialist with a millionaire daddy. Mamdani won on the strength of his signature policy “rent freeze”. How many apartments will this apply to? Guess. Go ahead - I dare you.

Okay it’s 2 MILLION apartments. Now guess how many people live in the 5 boroughs of NYC. In the meantime, I will get back to my rant.

I totally get the allure of voting for a rent freeze. Even though it probably won’t happen, and if they tried it could never work. But as election promises go, it’s a winner. Right up there building a wall and making Mexicans pay for it, and saving planet Earth with massive subsidies to Elon Musk and Tesla.

But I understand the attraction. NYC is soooo expensive. Even if a Mamdani voter only get a 2 or 3 years of frozen rents before their building falls into disrepair and becomes a complete shithole, they will have personally saved thousands. Ka-ching! Now get ready to vote in 2028 for whoever promises to wipe out all your student loans, and freeze grocery prices. Campaign promises don’t have to be rational. Just irresistible, and fit on a bumper sticker.

There’s a link to Fortune magazine below. Since Fortune is automatically dissed as a tool of capitalism, any socialists and communists may want to stop reading now and spare themselves cognitive dissonance. Long story short – there has not been any time or place in history where freezing rents led to more construction, safer communities, and modern amenities like electricity, indoor plumbing, and central heat. If you find such a place, please post it below in your reply. My advice is to avoid wasting time googling the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, the Peoples Republic of China (during the great leap forward), Venezuela, Zimbabwe . . .

Mamdani has a backup plan just in case he never achieves a rent freeze on those 2 million existing apartments. He plans to build 200,000 new affordable apartments. The price tag for city built/subsidized apartments varies depending which Mamdani speech you read. Since the average cost to construct a 2 bedroom apartment in NYC is $400,000, building 200,000 new units could cost $80 billion. The entire budget for NYC in 2024 was only $100 billion or so, so this would require an 80% jump in things like taxes, fees, bridge tolls, red light cams, etc.

Mamdani has not said where the new 200,000 units could be built. However, I’m confident some of the 2 million rent controlled units will eventually be abandoned, or burn down, or collapse from leaky roofs. So those sites are a real possibility in the near future.

I’m just sayin’ . . .



Zohran Mamdani’s signature housing policy is widely loathed by economists. Here’s why | Fortune

NYC Housing Market: Mamdani Proposes Rent Freeze and 200K Affordable Units