Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in the New York Democratic Mayoral Primary on Tuesday puts the self-proclaimed socialist one step closer to enacting his far-ranging left-wing agenda.
At the top of the candidate’s list, as Reason‘s Liz Wolfe covered this morning, is his call to freeze rents on New York’s roughly one million rent-stabilized housing units.
Relative to free market orthodoxy, a rent freeze is indeed an extreme policy proposal. In New York politics, it’s a solidly mainstream idea.
Mamdani’s socialism has gotten a lot of attention, thanks in no small part to his aggressively charismatic social media presence. But when it comes to housing policy, everyone in New York is effectively a socialist, even the allegedly sane, centrist candidates running against Mamdani.
When then-Mayor Bill de Blasio called for a rent freeze back in April 2020, a loud supporter of the idea was then-Brooklyn Borough President (and current Mayor) Eric Adams, who’ll face off against Mamdani in the general election.
We need a rent freeze.
I am calling on the Rent Guidelines Board to freeze rents for all regulated apartments. I’m also asking the State to allow New Yorkers to pay rent with their security deposit. I want to see them act quickly.
— Mayor Eric Adams (@NYCMayor) April 10, 2020
The city’s mayor-appointed Rent Guidelines Board obliged and voted in June 2020 to cap rent increases through October 2021 on one-year rent-stabilized leases.
Coinciding with that rent freeze was New York’s eviction moratorium, which in effect made paying rent optional by preventing landlords from removing delinquent tenants. The author of that eviction moratorium was then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani’s main—and now defeated—Democratic primary rival.
Both Adams and Cuomo have since come out against the idea of a rent freeze in 2025.
Yet Adams has also criticized the top-line rent increases currently being considered by the Rent Guidelines Board as excessive.
The board voted back in April to back rent increases of between 1.75 percent and 4.75 percent for one-year leases (and 3.75 percent and 7.75 percent for two-year leases). The board will approve a final number next week.
Landlords have been harshly critical of those rent increases, which they say don’t come close to making up for rising operating costs and the mounting maintenance needs of aging rent-stabilized properties.
They say that years of low single-digit allowable rent increases have only compounded the problems created by the state’s 2019 rent law, which eliminated or restricted property owners’ ability to raise rents on vacant apartments or to cover maintenance and renovation costs.
That 2019 law, signed by Cuomo, has been repeatedly challenged in court by property owners who argue that the law’s restrictions on their ability to choose their tenants and remove their property from the rental market amount to an uncompensated physical taking.
(Last year, the Supreme Court declined to hear several of these cases.)
Meanwhile, the 2019 law’s limits on rent increases and elimination of avenues by which landlords could remove units from rent control continue to push more and more rental properties into insolvency.
As Eric Kober noted in City Journal earlier in the campaign, none of the Democratic or independent candidates are contemplating serious reform of New York’s rent stabilization law.
Mamdani’s proposed rent freeze would certainly aggravate the problems of New York’s rental housing stock. But it’s not a radical departure from the current system.
New York politicians of all stripes are on board with capping rents and regulating rental housing into the ground. Mamdani is just a little more openly enthusiastic about the idea.
