[testfoobar]

Mamdani's and by extension, his voters', ignorance about the effects of price controls in markets will be an interesting real-time political experiment. When the inevitable unintended outcomes become to emerge who will be blamed?

https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/apart...

https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform

Quoting Paul Krugman (Nobel prize winner and liberal columnist at the NYT).

"The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out -- what yesterday's article oddly described as ''free-market horror stories'' -- and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable."

https://archive.ph/k4h7J#selection-475.0-475.1011

[JumpCrisscross]

> Mamdani's and by extension, his voters', ignorance about the effects of price controls

Mamdani isn’t pitching widespread price controls, but rent control over a small section of New York housing twinned with abundance-style new development.

“In a 2022 paper, the political scientists Anselm Hager, Hanno Hilbig, and Robert Vief used the introduction of a 2019 rent-control law in Berlin to study how access to rent-controlled apartments influenced local attitudes toward housing development. The fact that the new law included an arbitrary cutoff date (it applied only to buildings constructed before January 1, 2014) allowed the authors to create a natural experiment, comparing otherwise-similar tenants in otherwise-similar buildings.

Heading into the experiment, the authors hypothesized that having access to a rent-controlled apartment would keep tenants in their existing units longer and therefore make them more resistant to neighborhood change. Instead, they found the opposite: Residents who lived in rent-controlled apartments were 37 percent more likely to support new local-housing construction than those living in noncontrolled units” [1].

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...

[Workaccount2]

Mamdani will learn that you need to be friends with the people your voters hate to get things done.

Developers are the single most important players in lowering housing costs, but they are part of the "landlord" contingent in voters minds.

If he doesn't learn that, the city is going to be in bad shape. Impossible to get an apartment unless you want to get an illegal sublet at regular old $4500/mo prices.

[nobody9999]

>Mamdani isn’t pitching widespread price controls, but rent control over a small section of New York housing twinned with abundance-style new development

He's not actually pitching any new price controls. He's proposing a temporary rent freeze on rent stabilized (rent control is tiny in comparison and unaffected by this) apartments that are already subject to limits on rent increases.

How do I know this? I live in a a rent stabilized apartment. The rent for which, even though increases are "limited" (usually somewhere around 3-5%) has more than doubled since I moved in.

So no. Mamdani isn't suggesting making any changes to the law as it has existed for at least 50 years, rather he's suggesting stopping rent increases while fast-tracking new housing, which would likely stabilize the housing market.

As an aside, which most folks don't understand, is that the vacancy rate in NYC is ~1.5%. Healthy housing markets have vacancy rates of 4-6%. Like many places in the US (and elsewhere), NYC has a housing shortage. But in NYC, that shortage is much more severe than almost anywhere else in the US.

[testfoobar]

My understanding is that he is proposing a 4 year freeze on about 1 million units.

https://www.curbed.com/article/zohran-mamdani-housing-rent-f... archive: https://archive.ph/hnK4Q

"The 34-year-old democratic socialist’s pledge for a four-year pause on any increases on the city’s 1 million or so stabilized units, effectively giving a reprieve to about 2 million stabilized tenants, was at the center of his campaign"

I'm not directly familiar with Berlin. But this story about shortages is the expected outcome:

https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/germany-must-build-32...

BERLIN, March 20 (Reuters) - Germany, lagging in its building goals to alleviate a housing shortage, needs to construct 320,000 new apartments each year by 2030, a study on Thursday showed.

[arijun]

That article says the main benefit of rent control (besides popularity) is an increase in YIMBY sentiment, but it seems it still has the downsides detractors dislike about it.

It doesn't do much to convince me it isn't a populist campaign promise.

[_coveredInBees]

The Atlantic had a good article on this and how it isn't the doom and gloom you lay out above:

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...

As some of the replies note, it has been rather successful and popular in other cities like Berlin.

[testfoobar]

Rent control is always initially popular with the people who are already in apartments. But it is longer term effects on supply and quality that are corrosive.

An alternative is Austin:

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...

"Austin rents have fallen for nearly two years. Here’s why.

Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.

Surrounding suburbs like Round Rock, Pflugerville and Georgetown, which saw rents grow by double-digit percentages amid the region’s pandemic boom, also have seen declining rents. Rents aren’t falling as quickly as they rose during the pandemic run-up in costs, but there are few places in the Austin region where rents didn’t fall sometime in the last year.

The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market."

[DannyBee]

Also quoting Paul Krugman -

"“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”"

So you know, take what he says with a grain of salt, as with all economists, who pretend to be rigorous when in fact they are anything but.

[testfoobar]

Of course Krugman got that wrong. It is funny.

But economists don't disagree about the effects of price controls. These are easy to observe and model. These concepts are also taught to Economics undergraduates all over the world - often in their first Microeconomics class. They are not controversial.

Here is a Khan Academy video: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...

[misiti3780]

Krugman is an idiot - I cant believe people still give a shit what he says

[codingbot3000]

Good points.

All variants of rent control etc. have been tried in Europe and have miserably failed. Quite the opposite, rents have been rising even more, and new construction has been reduced due to new politically induced risks.

Examples: Berlin, Barcelona

But as Barcelona shows, there is a feedback loop benefiting leftist populist politicians:

Higher rents, lower housing supply -> people frustrated -> leftist populists get more votes -> more stupid regulation -> even higher rents, even lower housing supply -> people more frustrated -> ...

This can go on for at least two electoral cycles.

[jijijijij]

Berlin never really had rent control. It's been a few months before the law was abolished for constitutional technicalities. Everybody knew this was a possibility, so you can't make any conclusions about it. Bringing it up is pure propaganda. Nothing failed economically!

We have a federal law which in theory could slow down price progression, but it is rarely applied. It also doesn't govern newly build apartments, so criticism usually falls short there too...

[schnitzelstoat]

Stockholm too.

But they always think this time it'll be different I guess.

[dyauspitr]

30% of housing in places like Hong Kong are rent controlled. The other 70% or so are strictly not so there’s plenty of incentive for the free market.

[Spooky23]

Fascinating, yet rents have increased faster than inflation even as rent control has waned in NYC.

The problem with citing studies from 1992 is that you’re missing the last 25 years of war inflation hidden through various schemes of quantitative easing and capitalization. We’ve made capital so easy to get everything is fungible and inflates as everyone from families to foreign rich people looking to exfiltrate cash from their country pumps dollars into real estate.

My parents recently passed and we sold their house in Queens for a ridiculous sum - representing a 8% CAGR. Most of that increase in value has been since 2000, and that’s driven by a surplus of capital looking for a return.

[testfoobar]

The underlying cause of runaway asset price inflation is ZIRP and QE. Renters experience it as rent increases outpacing wage increases - this is socially destructive. But neither Mamdani (DSA) or Democrats or Republicans are willing to touch Federal Reserve QE.

Senator Schumer (D-NY) famously said in 2012 to Ben Bernanke (Federal Reserve Chair): 'Get To Work Mr. Chairman' - encouraging him to start Quantitative Easing 3 (QE3) - a program to digitally print $40billion and eventually $85billion per month of "money" and injecting it into the financial system.

[asdaqopqkq]

How does he explain Tokyo then ?

[Dracophoenix]

Lax zoning regulations, relatively cheap labor, low cost of materials, and depreciating home values incentivize building new real estate. That is what separates Tokyo from New York City.

[donohoe]

Or any of these:

- Vienna, Austria: About 60% of residents live in city-subsidized or cooperatively owned housing

- Berlin, Germany: Rent control has been mixed, varies by neighborhood, but seen as working

- Singapore: Not rent control in the classic sense, but government-built housing

- Montreal, Canada: Rent control applies mainly to existing tenant

Not all perfect. There are others. It can work.

[nostrebored]

The city with declining population growth, aggressive rezoning to create supply, that still has 30 yr high rents in 2025?

[Izikiel43]

Check argentina for a relative recent example of what happens when you put and then remove rent control.

Spoiler alert, the economy books and the economists are right

[budududuroiu]

Do those case studies include the case for expropriating landlords that don’t keep their buildings to code?

Massive building sprees don’t bring prices down, they bring favelisation.

If the effect of this policies is that housing prices tumble, and there’s potentially more housing stock on the market for people to buy (and no incentive for buying to let since rent freezes makes it unprofitable), this seems like a good effect

[JumpCrisscross]

> If the effect of this policies is that housing prices tumble

The near-term effect will be a spike in market rates. If Mamdani delivers on new supply, rents should broadly flatten in real terms.

[jasondigitized]

But tariffs across the entire U.S. economy are cool......

[sharts]

Krugman isn't a good source. Textbook economics is wrong because it's made up. The circular logic exists to serve a narrative.

[kelnos]

That quote seems to ignore reality. If we look at San Francisco, where units built before 1980 are not subject to rent control, we find that building new housing has nothing to do with fears that rent control will be extended.

I agree that rents for uncontrolled apartments are high, but if we eliminated rent control for the rest, that wouldn't really fix anything. The formerly-rent-controlled apartments would cost just as much as the post-1979 housing stock.

The only thing that will fix our housing cost problem is a truly radical amount of new construction. Developers would love to build here, but the cost to build here is ridiculously high for policy reasons that have nothing to do with actually building.

If we could build enough housing to satisfy demand, then we might be ok eliminating rent control. Rent control is a response to housing scarcity, not the cause. You'd think economists would understand basic supply and demand.

About the only thing I do agree with is that rent control reduces the quality of available housing. Landlords are less incentivized to fix problems and maintain their buildings when they can't make market rate from their tenants.

[tayo42]

What's an alternative though. It's easy to be critical and not solve people's problems

[johnnyanmac]

Sadly many conservative leaning types simply think "nothing is wrong, this is capitalism. Just get a better job and make more money". While also railing against worker protections and wage increases that would be ensure better jobs.

In other words: they don't care, as long as it doesn't hurt them. The core mentality of NIMBYism.

[fumeux_fume]

> "a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing"

To address quality first, most economists would agree that landlords are incentivized to invest the bare minimum into their property that they can; this is not so much a function of income from rent. If a tenant feels generous and starts paying more for rent, the landlord will not invest more into their unit. So I find the inverse of that to be an assumption that doesn't completely add up.

Saying rent control will affect quantity is completely beside the point. Rent controls are meant to ease the financial burden on the people currently renting in NYC, not a hypothetical newcomer looking for an apartment. Housing is already a huge pain to find for lower-income new yorkers so the threat of a more scarcity doesn't really change the equation for a lot of people.

[colordrops]

As if Cuomo was some economic genius. Look at all his campaign material - they were abject brain dead character smears and racism. If he was truly just trying to win by any means to supposedly save New Yorkers from economic disaster, he was a Machiavellian of the highest degree.

[Spooky23]

He used Orthodox Jewish communities with top down leaders as a core machine style voting bloc. The whole community turns out and did what the head guy says, just like the old Tammany Hall. I’m sure plenty of people “moved” from their upstate town back to Brooklyn. Usually the old style conservative Catholics vote for him too. (Oddly enough as his divorce and “living in sin” was scandalous)

The issue is that the machine stuff only works when nobody is amped up. And his broader audience is both dying off and angry at the Trump nonsense. The population is shifting, and south asian, Middle Eastern and other, less traditionally powerful blocs are voting now and Zohran activated them. That’s why the dog whistles were so important - he needed to get more republicans and Archie bunker types to turn out.

It’s kind of sad, Cuomo with the right people restraining him is a force. But his enemy is himself.

[Ericson2314]

Rent stabilization (NYC jargon) already is here and is a mess. He's probably not about to make it worse.

[EasyMark]

I’m not sure your understand that almost none of his price control “wants” are likely to be enacted. City government is pretty moderate and Mamdani isn’t a dictator

[bix6]

1992 is a long time gone and economists aren’t always right. I don’t know how much worse the housing stock could get so maybe it’s time to try something different.

[Braxton1980]

One of the pieces of evidence you provided is a poll about what people thought the effects were and not the actual effects.

Isn't that odd?

[4ndrewl]

"a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing."

Weirdly you get the same effect without rent control.

[af333fff]

Also quoting Krugman, from today, who no longer writes for the NYT:

"Which party is out of touch, again?

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York, in the face of hysterical opposition from the big money, has grabbed many of the headlines, which I understand — it’s an amazing story. And I wonder what the right-wing tech bros are thinking: If Wall Street couldn’t buy New York, can they really buy America?

I’m seeing some commentators argue that Mamdani will be a problem for Democrats, allowing Republicans to paint them as extremists who are out of touch with America. But Republicans would do that anyway. For what it’s worth, Mamdani may be on the left, but all indications are that he’s a pragmatist who will get along fine with the rest of his party.

Meanwhile, you know which party is out of touch and riddled with extremists? The G.O.P.

If you look at recent Republican campaigns and positioning, it’s striking how much energy they’re putting into issues that just don’t matter much to ordinary Americans. Republicans may be obsessed with trans athletes, but most people aren’t. Polls and yesterday’s elections suggest that rants about the menace of illegal aliens have a lot less traction with the public than G.O.P. apparatchiks imagine — and that Americans don’t like the spectacle of masked ICE agents grabbing people off the street.

And if we’re talking about extremists within the party, well, Democrats have people like Mamdani, a mild-mannered guy who says he’s a socialist but really isn’t. The Republican Party, by contrast, has been largely taken over by outright fascists, and is facing a major outbreak of old-fashioned antisemitism."

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/which-party-is-in-trouble...

[jojobas]

> who will be blamed?

20 bucks says Trump.

[voidhorse]

The literal alternative, which is actually happening right now and not some textbook hypothetical is supply not keeping up anyway and landlords charging however much they want pretty much unbridled, not to mention major companies snapping up real estate and leveraging it as investment collateral rather than treating them and managing them as, you know, housing.

We need a change. We don't need to do rent freezes in a vacuum. Coupled with the right policy supports they can definitely work, and Mamdani's proposed freezes are limited in scope. He is freezing rents only for select controlled units, last I checked.

Before you go spreading the bs propaganda, consider what your fellow citizens actually need to survive and whether or not you want to be viewed as being on the side of a few billionaires or on the side of the vast population that is increasingly becoming impoverished.

[ecshafer]

1. New york city has rent control on 1 million units already

2. New york city has laws making it so you can only increase rent by a small fraction of the investment for renovation taking a large amount of units off the market as its economically infeasible

3. Nyc has a very strict zoning and regulation system that is reducing housing supply

[throwaway3060]

Making it about "sides" is exactly why politics is as toxic as it is today.

Is it inconceivable that one could look at the candidates and, without being a billionaire, decide that Mamdani is not a candidate they want to bet their chips on?

[bdastous]

> He is freezing rents only for select controlled units

45% of apartments in NYC

[tinyhouse]

Actually demand has being going down and rents have been trending down as a result. The main reason is less immigration and international students. I recall years ago every open house I would go to ended up selling above market value for cash from someone from overseas who "invests" their money on the back of locals trying to buy a house to live in for their family. The billionaires were not the ones to blame for this.

[testfoobar]

The underlying cause of impoverishment where inflation of housing, healthcare, and education is outpacing income is an expansionist monetary policy. ZIRP (Zero interest policy) along with QE (quantitative easing) pushed ever increasing amounts of printed money into the system. No one is touching the root cause. Not Mamdani, not Democrats and not Republicans.

https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2010/12/08/13190...

"Jon Stewart Busts Fed Chair Ben Bernanke On 'Printing Money' December 8, 201010:39 AM ET By

Frank James

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is so busted.

Comedy Central host Jon Stewart added his voice to others who caught the central banker contradicting himself over whether or not the Fed is "printing money" through its actions to bolster the economy.

On 60 Minutes this week, when asked by reporter Scott Pelley about the Fed's $600 billion purchase of Treasury bonds that is meant to lower interest rates further, the Fed chair said:

BERNANKE: Well, this fear of inflation, I think is way overstated. We've looked at it very, very carefully. We've analyzed it every which way. One myth that's out there is that what we're doing is printing money. We're not printing money. The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way. ...

Twenty-one months earlier on the same program and to the same reporter, Bernanke said something quite different:

Asked if it's tax money the Fed is spending, Bernanke said, "It's not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It's much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing."

"You've been printing money?" Pelley asked.

"Well, effectively," Bernanke said. "And we need to do that, because our economy is very weak and inflation is very low. When the economy begins to recover, that will be the time that we need to unwind those programs, raise interest rates, reduce the money supply, and make sure that we have a recovery that does not involve inflation." "