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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 t

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/apartment-hunting/housing-types/ https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/apart... https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform 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 https://archive.ph/k4h7J#selection-475.0-475.1011

asdaqopqkq 11mo ago
How does he explain Tokyo then ?
- donohoe 11mo ago
  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.
  - tsvetkov 11mo ago
    Have you lived in one of those rent controlled “paradises”? In Europe, yes, there are sizeable populations living in subsidized housing, and often there are restrictions on rent increases, but new tenants pay way higher prices and have to compete for every available unit with dozens of other potential tenants. New tenants frantically overbidding each other, while old tenants pay pennies compared to today’s market prices, mmm, what a life. “it can work” in some way of course. People are surprisingly adaptable to living in semi-dysfunctional environments. But it reality the only thing that truly works is building a lot of housing.
    - dmbche 11mo ago
      Not something I've seen in montreal
    - kelnos 11mo ago
      > new tenants pay way higher prices and have to compete for every available unit with dozens of other potential tenants. Rent control isn't the cause of that, though, it's lack of housing supply to meet demand. If there was no rent control, competition would be just as fierce, and prices still high.
      - MrMember 11mo ago
        They are not independent. Rent control discourages housing development.
  - jandrewrogers 11mo ago
    The housing situation in Vienna has benefited significantly from massive population decline. As much as the population has grown in recent years, it is only now approaching the population it had a century ago. Some genuinely lovely so-called “rust-belt” cities in the US have enjoyed a cheap housing renaissance on the back of historical population decline that is driving population increase now.
- Dracophoenix 11mo ago
  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.
  - ryan_lane 11mo ago
    There's also (relatively) strong renter protections, including effectively frozen rent. Yes, it's possible to increase rent, but only if the surrounding areas prices have increased, and even then the renter has to agree or it otherwise goes to court and the court tends to not side with landlords. > and depreciating home values incentivize building new real estate Yes and no. Most housing in Tokyo is apartment complexes and/or condos, which do not depreciate very much (and in fact in the past few years have appreciated by ~30%). Standalone houses depreciate, but the land appreciates. That leads to new construction for those properties, which often then turn into apartment complexes. Basically, it's a matter of mostly becoming more dense over time, while also restricting price increases of rents.
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    I don't think it's any of that. Or at least those sre all second order efdects. It's a much more conformist, homogenized culture so there's less resistance in implementing policy on general. Also, housing isn't an "asset" the way it is in the US. You simply don't place as much value on your house over there, so there's less resistance to renovating or outright demolishing houses every few decades. Americans would instead see money going down the drain.
- nostrebored 11mo ago
  The city with declining population growth, aggressive rezoning to create supply, that still has 30 yr high rents in 2025?
budududuroiu 11mo ago
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
- ecshafer 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - budududuroiu 11mo ago
    Keeping a building rentable is a pretty reasonable criteria for… renting.
    - ecshafer 11mo ago
      Except NYC has laws making it difficult to do. A 2019 law they passed limits the amount a unit can have its rent increased in the case of a capital improvement at a small fraction of the capital cost. Now that interest rates are higher land lords are forced to keep units vacant, since theyll lose money taking a loan to get units up to code.
      - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
        > 2019 law they passed limits the amount a unit can have its rent increased in the case of a capital improvement at a small fraction of the capital cost Source? This sounds like it only applies to stabilised apartments. > Now that interest rates are higher land lords are forced to keep units vacant Rental vacancies are similar to what they were in 2019 [1]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYRVAC
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
  > 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.
voidhorse 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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
  - voidhorse 11mo ago
    Two of these things are orthogonal to freezes on rent controlled units, so I don't understand your point here. I agree that 3. Is a problem. I'm not convinced mamadani is against reconsidering zoning and regulation to increase supply. Nothing I've heard suggest he would be.
  - FireBeyond 11mo ago
    No it doesn't. There are about 25,000 rent-controlled units, less than 1% of units in the City. You are thinking of rent stabilization, but that's not close to the same thing.
    - WatchDog 11mo ago
      They are both price controls on rent. The eligibility criteria are different, and the terms by which rent may increase are different, but they seem pretty close to the same thing to me.
colordrops 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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.
  - woodruffw 11mo ago
    > The population is shifting, and south asian, Middle Eastern and other, less traditionally powerful blocs are voting now and Zohran activated them I voted for Zohran, but it’s worth noting that the demographic story isn’t all that clear: current counts show him losing to Cuomo in the Eastern Queens neighborhoods where those groups are significantly represented. Mamdani’s core voting base is “classic” NYC liberal: West side Manhattan, Northern Brooklyn, and Western Queens. That’s a relatively pasty set of areas, at least by NYC standards :-) (The story with the Orthodox is also more nuanced: many of the sects like him, at least among the candidates. They like him because he’s made the right political noises around educational freedom re: yeshivas, and they absolutely despise Cuomo for his handling of COVID.)
dyauspitr 11mo ago
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.
DannyBee 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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/microeconomics/consumer-producer-surplus/deadweight-loss-tutorial/v/rent-control-dead-weight-cost https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...
  - kelnos 11mo ago
    I feel like economists (as the Krugman quote above seems to illustrate) don't consider the real world. Price controls aren't necessary when there's abundance. When housing supply meets (or slightly exceeds) demand, landlords don't jack up rents every year and displace tenants. When it doesn't, and can't, what do we do to keep people from losing their homes? (And don't give me the usual drivel about how people who are renting should be expected to assume they'll be kicked out all the time. Compassion, please. These are humans we're talking about.)
    - samdoesnothing 11mo ago
      Isn't the obvious solution to build more houses (apartments, flats, whatever)? Like, isn't it incredibly obvious that there is actually a simple solution to this problem - build more so that there is an abundance of choice? How people come to the conclusion that in a densely populated and highly desirable area, the solution isn't building more capacity but rather to artificially cap prices? It's like a database server running out of memory and the proposed solution isn't to increase memory, but rather just reject new entries into the DB because it's full.
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> 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-housing-rent-control/684790/ https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...
- testfoobar 11mo ago
  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-freeze-mayoral-election-win.html https://www.curbed.com/article/zohran-mamdani-housing-rent-f... archive: https://archive.ph/hnK4Q 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-320000-apartments-yearly-meet-housing-demand-study-shows-2025-03-20/ 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.
  - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
Braxton1980 11mo ago
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?
_coveredInBees 11mo ago
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-housing-rent-control/684790/ 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 11mo ago
  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-falling/ 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."
  - bsder 11mo ago
    Extra supply is helping, but I would argue back-to-office and layoffs are the primary culprit. You're not competing with 4+ techbros to an apartment in downtown Austin anymore. Anecdotally, the local tech meetups are WAY off in participation since about June. About 1/3 of the people who used to regularly attend have completely left the city.
  - kelnos 11mo ago
Spooky23 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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.
  - raincom 11mo ago
    Democrats want higher wages for workers instead of reducing the cost of living (rent, insurance, etc).
    - Workaccount2 11mo ago
      Which is a total exercise in futility. The way you fix housing is by building new housing, and letting old housing become the affordable housing.
      - monocasa 11mo ago
        You can also build affordable housing directly. We powered the post war period with a huge supply of starter homes. Other countries have also directly attacked homelessness by simply building enough public housing such that anyone who wants a roof over their head can have one regardless of their ability to pay for it.
jojobas 11mo ago
> who will be blamed? 20 bucks says Trump.
bix6 11mo ago
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.
tayo42 11mo ago
What's an alternative though. It's easy to be critical and not solve people's problems
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  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.
  - testfoobar 11mo ago
    Something is observably wrong. The ratio of rent to income has drastically changed against workers - this is destructive to society. But the cause is deeper than rent price controls, minimum wage and worker protections. After the 2008 financial crisis, western central banks digitally printed trillions of dollars (Quantitative Easing) to refloat our financial system. The collapse of 2008 was itself the result of perverse incentives leading to banks stuffed with bad mortgages due to speculative housing manias after the collapse of the Dotcom bubble and 9/11. The response of flooding the financial system with trillions of printed money after 2008 for years was a political choice - supported by Democrats, Republicans and President Obama. Wealth inequality is the result. It cannot be fixed at a local level through local policies. It cannot be fixed by Congress through policy or tax tweaks. It is a problem with the financial plumbing itself.
    - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
      I don't disagree with anything you said here. But sadly we all have to play with the cards we dealt. Mamdami can't force the Central Bank to QT anymore than Trump wants to QE us into hyperinflation. And I'm not sure if either would fix what's already broken. The scales and old ways of life are broken. I don't think anyone is interested in throwing it out and starting new, so we need to rebalance with the scale we have. That means readjusting tax brackets, worker wages and hours, and likely bringing down asset prices. Throwing more money into the system clearly broke stuff, so let's at least redistribute what we have if we can't easily take out the money
Ericson2314 11mo ago
Rent stabilization (NYC jargon) already is here and is a mess. He's probably not about to make it worse.
Izikiel43 11mo ago
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
kelnos 11mo ago
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.
4ndrewl 11mo ago
"a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing." Weirdly you get the same effect without rent control.
fumeux_fume 11mo ago
> "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.
codingbot3000 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  Stockholm too. But they always think this time it'll be different I guess.
EasyMark 11mo ago
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
jasondigitized 11mo ago
But tariffs across the entire U.S. economy are cool......
af333fff 11mo ago
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-again https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/which-party-is-in-trouble...
sharts 11mo ago
Krugman isn't a good source. Textbook economics is wrong because it's made up. The circular logic exists to serve a narrative.

asdaqopqkq 11mo ago

How does he explain Tokyo then ?

donohoe 11mo ago
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.
- tsvetkov 11mo ago
  Have you lived in one of those rent controlled “paradises”? In Europe, yes, there are sizeable populations living in subsidized housing, and often there are restrictions on rent increases, but new tenants pay way higher prices and have to compete for every available unit with dozens of other potential tenants. New tenants frantically overbidding each other, while old tenants pay pennies compared to today’s market prices, mmm, what a life. “it can work” in some way of course. People are surprisingly adaptable to living in semi-dysfunctional environments. But it reality the only thing that truly works is building a lot of housing.
  - dmbche 11mo ago
    Not something I've seen in montreal
  - kelnos 11mo ago
    > new tenants pay way higher prices and have to compete for every available unit with dozens of other potential tenants. Rent control isn't the cause of that, though, it's lack of housing supply to meet demand. If there was no rent control, competition would be just as fierce, and prices still high.
    - MrMember 11mo ago
      They are not independent. Rent control discourages housing development.
- jandrewrogers 11mo ago
  The housing situation in Vienna has benefited significantly from massive population decline. As much as the population has grown in recent years, it is only now approaching the population it had a century ago. Some genuinely lovely so-called “rust-belt” cities in the US have enjoyed a cheap housing renaissance on the back of historical population decline that is driving population increase now.
Dracophoenix 11mo ago
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.
- ryan_lane 11mo ago
  There's also (relatively) strong renter protections, including effectively frozen rent. Yes, it's possible to increase rent, but only if the surrounding areas prices have increased, and even then the renter has to agree or it otherwise goes to court and the court tends to not side with landlords. > and depreciating home values incentivize building new real estate Yes and no. Most housing in Tokyo is apartment complexes and/or condos, which do not depreciate very much (and in fact in the past few years have appreciated by ~30%). Standalone houses depreciate, but the land appreciates. That leads to new construction for those properties, which often then turn into apartment complexes. Basically, it's a matter of mostly becoming more dense over time, while also restricting price increases of rents.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  I don't think it's any of that. Or at least those sre all second order efdects. It's a much more conformist, homogenized culture so there's less resistance in implementing policy on general. Also, housing isn't an "asset" the way it is in the US. You simply don't place as much value on your house over there, so there's less resistance to renovating or outright demolishing houses every few decades. Americans would instead see money going down the drain.
nostrebored 11mo ago
The city with declining population growth, aggressive rezoning to create supply, that still has 30 yr high rents in 2025?

budududuroiu 11mo ago

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

ecshafer 11mo ago
[flagged]
- budududuroiu 11mo ago
  Keeping a building rentable is a pretty reasonable criteria for… renting.
  - ecshafer 11mo ago
    Except NYC has laws making it difficult to do. A 2019 law they passed limits the amount a unit can have its rent increased in the case of a capital improvement at a small fraction of the capital cost. Now that interest rates are higher land lords are forced to keep units vacant, since theyll lose money taking a loan to get units up to code.
    - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
      > 2019 law they passed limits the amount a unit can have its rent increased in the case of a capital improvement at a small fraction of the capital cost Source? This sounds like it only applies to stabilised apartments. > Now that interest rates are higher land lords are forced to keep units vacant Rental vacancies are similar to what they were in 2019 [1]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYRVAC
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> 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.

voidhorse 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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
- voidhorse 11mo ago
  Two of these things are orthogonal to freezes on rent controlled units, so I don't understand your point here. I agree that 3. Is a problem. I'm not convinced mamadani is against reconsidering zoning and regulation to increase supply. Nothing I've heard suggest he would be.
- FireBeyond 11mo ago
  No it doesn't. There are about 25,000 rent-controlled units, less than 1% of units in the City. You are thinking of rent stabilization, but that's not close to the same thing.
  - WatchDog 11mo ago
    They are both price controls on rent. The eligibility criteria are different, and the terms by which rent may increase are different, but they seem pretty close to the same thing to me.

colordrops 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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.
- woodruffw 11mo ago
  > The population is shifting, and south asian, Middle Eastern and other, less traditionally powerful blocs are voting now and Zohran activated them I voted for Zohran, but it’s worth noting that the demographic story isn’t all that clear: current counts show him losing to Cuomo in the Eastern Queens neighborhoods where those groups are significantly represented. Mamdani’s core voting base is “classic” NYC liberal: West side Manhattan, Northern Brooklyn, and Western Queens. That’s a relatively pasty set of areas, at least by NYC standards :-) (The story with the Orthodox is also more nuanced: many of the sects like him, at least among the candidates. They like him because he’s made the right political noises around educational freedom re: yeshivas, and they absolutely despise Cuomo for his handling of COVID.)

dyauspitr 11mo ago

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.

DannyBee 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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/microeconomics/consumer-producer-surplus/deadweight-loss-tutorial/v/rent-control-dead-weight-cost https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...
- kelnos 11mo ago
  I feel like economists (as the Krugman quote above seems to illustrate) don't consider the real world. Price controls aren't necessary when there's abundance. When housing supply meets (or slightly exceeds) demand, landlords don't jack up rents every year and displace tenants. When it doesn't, and can't, what do we do to keep people from losing their homes? (And don't give me the usual drivel about how people who are renting should be expected to assume they'll be kicked out all the time. Compassion, please. These are humans we're talking about.)
  - samdoesnothing 11mo ago
    Isn't the obvious solution to build more houses (apartments, flats, whatever)? Like, isn't it incredibly obvious that there is actually a simple solution to this problem - build more so that there is an abundance of choice? How people come to the conclusion that in a densely populated and highly desirable area, the solution isn't building more capacity but rather to artificially cap prices? It's like a database server running out of memory and the proposed solution isn't to increase memory, but rather just reject new entries into the DB because it's full.

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago

> 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-housing-rent-control/684790/ https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...

testfoobar 11mo ago
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-freeze-mayoral-election-win.html https://www.curbed.com/article/zohran-mamdani-housing-rent-f... archive: https://archive.ph/hnK4Q 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-320000-apartments-yearly-meet-housing-demand-study-shows-2025-03-20/ 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.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago

Braxton1980 11mo ago

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?

_coveredInBees 11mo ago

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-housing-rent-control/684790/ 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 11mo ago
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-falling/ 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."
- bsder 11mo ago
  Extra supply is helping, but I would argue back-to-office and layoffs are the primary culprit. You're not competing with 4+ techbros to an apartment in downtown Austin anymore. Anecdotally, the local tech meetups are WAY off in participation since about June. About 1/3 of the people who used to regularly attend have completely left the city.
- kelnos 11mo ago

Spooky23 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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.
- raincom 11mo ago
  Democrats want higher wages for workers instead of reducing the cost of living (rent, insurance, etc).
  - Workaccount2 11mo ago
    Which is a total exercise in futility. The way you fix housing is by building new housing, and letting old housing become the affordable housing.
    - monocasa 11mo ago
      You can also build affordable housing directly. We powered the post war period with a huge supply of starter homes. Other countries have also directly attacked homelessness by simply building enough public housing such that anyone who wants a roof over their head can have one regardless of their ability to pay for it.

jojobas 11mo ago

> who will be blamed? 20 bucks says Trump.

bix6 11mo ago

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.

tayo42 11mo ago

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

johnnyanmac 11mo ago
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.
- testfoobar 11mo ago
  Something is observably wrong. The ratio of rent to income has drastically changed against workers - this is destructive to society. But the cause is deeper than rent price controls, minimum wage and worker protections. After the 2008 financial crisis, western central banks digitally printed trillions of dollars (Quantitative Easing) to refloat our financial system. The collapse of 2008 was itself the result of perverse incentives leading to banks stuffed with bad mortgages due to speculative housing manias after the collapse of the Dotcom bubble and 9/11. The response of flooding the financial system with trillions of printed money after 2008 for years was a political choice - supported by Democrats, Republicans and President Obama. Wealth inequality is the result. It cannot be fixed at a local level through local policies. It cannot be fixed by Congress through policy or tax tweaks. It is a problem with the financial plumbing itself.
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    I don't disagree with anything you said here. But sadly we all have to play with the cards we dealt. Mamdami can't force the Central Bank to QT anymore than Trump wants to QE us into hyperinflation. And I'm not sure if either would fix what's already broken. The scales and old ways of life are broken. I don't think anyone is interested in throwing it out and starting new, so we need to rebalance with the scale we have. That means readjusting tax brackets, worker wages and hours, and likely bringing down asset prices. Throwing more money into the system clearly broke stuff, so let's at least redistribute what we have if we can't easily take out the money

Ericson2314 11mo ago

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

Izikiel43 11mo ago

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

kelnos 11mo ago

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.

4ndrewl 11mo ago

"a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing." Weirdly you get the same effect without rent control.

fumeux_fume 11mo ago

> "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.

codingbot3000 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
Stockholm too. But they always think this time it'll be different I guess.

EasyMark 11mo ago

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

jasondigitized 11mo ago

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

af333fff 11mo ago

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

sharts 11mo ago

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