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vdnkh | 3 months ago
You're not as informed as you think you are, probably because you're not an NYC resident and have no actual stake in this election. We successfully passed 3 ballot proposals that reduce regulation and review time for building certain housing units. Mamdani voted for all 3 also. More deregulation is needed and expected under Mamdani - not to the tune of enriching developers, but for building actual affordable units.
Side rant: A lot of people on HN talk about building more supply. And we do - if you've lived in NYC for an appreciable amount of time, you'll know how different LIC, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Downtown BK, and Gowanus (among others) look like after 10 years of intense development. Despite receiving tax breaks (421a), most units are not affordable. They're also incredibly cheaply built and generally unpleasant places to live, chock full of excessive amenities that drive up the rent. There's a balance here between freeing developers and allowing them to run buckwild with "affordable" 5k/mo studios. It's easy to quote Paul Krugman on HN about supply side housing and rent regulation but there's more to the story here than just "build more".
screye|3 months ago
I know that Mamdani is more than the 4 policies he's championed as part of his social media campaign. But, he has championed those 4 policies a disproportionate amount - free buses, free childcare, freeze rent, raise taxes. A man must be judged by what he says. I judge him by what he says the loudest.
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For your side rant, I don't agree. New builds in gentrified neighborhoods aren't perfect, but they're significantly better than the brick kilns that came before them. I've crashed at friends houses in Gowanus before the gentrification boom, and it was miserable.
Williamsburg & Bushwick should be seen as a triumph. It went from a dilapidated industrial zone where my friends dad 'got beat up by gang members when he was growing up' and now it is the thriving center of the American hipster movement. Domino Park is triumph. It is noticeably better maintained than parks elsewhere in NYC, and that's thanks to the public-private partnerships.
New build units aren't affordable because those are the only new builds coming up. When supply is low, there is no govt intervention that can give a good outcome to the majority. If those builds hadn't come up, prices would've gone up further in other places or worse, people would have moved out of the city. It's a math problem. People need homes. There aren't enough homes.
That's the whole point of abundance.
There is no such thing as an affordable & scarce resource. It doesn't matter is the scarcity comes from over-regulation or impractical building costs. You can artificially make it affordable by rationing it to the lucky few. But, its limited availability means that a small group gets all the benefits (see classical rent control in NYC) while the majority in the same socio-economic class is left subsidizing their life style.
I can give real examples.
Take Chicago for instance. New affordable housing is more expensive than market rate housing due to over-regulation. [1]
Take Austin. It reduced regulation and zoning rules. Rents went down. [2]
Take Amsterdam, Rent control has taken a bulk of apartments off the housing market, making new builds eye-wateringly expensive. [3]
[1] https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/07/28/why-is-it-so-expensi...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
[3] https://archive.is/2DpZZ
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I concede that Mamdani may still endorse a de-regulatory policies. However, the left has historically leaned pro-regulation. I will maintain this prior until proven wrong. I desperately want to be proven wrong, because I want to continue living in NYC. If Mamdani had gone around saying Rezone, Deregulate and Build, then I would have expressed confidence. But he has been quite evasive about these policies when asked by various interviewers over hours of listening to him.