His untested policies won’t faze the wealthy, but ordinary New Yorkers will take the hit.
New York’s business executives and wealthy residents are scrambling to convince likely mayor Zohran Mamdani to be just a little nice to them next year. But if elected, Mamdani won’t carry out most of his government experiments on them—rather, his agenda would disproportionately affect middle-class and poorer New Yorkers, who may not be aware of the cascading potential consequences of these policies.
Take Mamdani’s proposed rent freeze. Here is all the candidate has to say about it in his platform, despite its being listed as his first goal: “Zohran will immediately freeze the rent for all stabilized tenants” for at least four years.
The freeze isn’t the gift to the city’s nearly one million rent-regulated households that it appears to be. The obvious problem is that property owners’ costs would continue to rise; costs in rent-regulated buildings rose 3.8 percent between 2022 and 2023. Tenants who could have afforded a rent hike instead could see the upkeep in their apartment and building decline, as landlords abruptly cut costs. The 9.3 percent of rent-stabilized buildings considered “distressed” could see their landlords walk away from responsibility for the properties altogether—leaving them in limbo.
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here. Nicole is the author of Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, available now. This piece is adapted from City Journal.
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