Hacker News Reader

Comment by testfoobar | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

> 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-...

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.

> 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

Out of 3.7mm [1].

> not directly familiar with Berlin

Not comparable. Berlin froze rents “on more than 1.5 million” apartments in 2020 [2] out of about 2mm. 25% versus 75%.

Also, Berlin’s politicians didn’t propose a construction agenda. Mamdani has. (“New York City voters on Tuesday delivered a strong message in support of building more housing, passing three proposals that pitted City Hall against the City Council in an effort to rewrite decades-old development rules” [4].)

[1] https://www.nyc.gov/content/tenantprotection/pages/fast-fact...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/world/europe/berlin-gentr...

[3] https://www.berlin.de/en/news/8283996-5559700-housing-stock-...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/nyregion/nyc-ballot-measu...

Increasing supply brings down prices. But a builder will not build at a loss or an imminent threat to their rental income from expansion of rent freezes.

A city with an expanding rent-freeze is not inviting new supply.

[flagged]

First - a rent freeze directly transfers inflation costs to the property owners. It is a tax by another name.

Second - there is no similar freeze on property taxes - or the expected inflation in maintenance costs, insurance, and so on. Again - a tax on property owners by another name.

Third - starting with a rent freeze is an indicator of a property owner unfriendly administration. Any builder would have to calculate this into their expected returns on capital investment.

It's not property-owner-unfriendly, it's landlord-unfriendly.

Which is just fine in my book.

Builders do not have to "calculate" any of this into their "expected returns", because new construction will not be subject to rent freezes or even stabilization. You're selectively ignoring a key part of what the GP said in order to further your incorrect argument, and that's not cool.

As for your first and second points... tough shit for the landlords. That's a cost of doing business. Taxes, even implicit ones like this, change all the time. And a landlord owning a rent-stabilized unit should already know that there are limits on what kind of rent increases they can push through, and that those limits could change at any time, even to zero.

> tough shit for the landlords. That's a cost of doing business

If Mamdani does this, not only is he fucked, but he might take down the national progressive movement with himself.

"Tough shit" is a good Twitter reaction. It's terrible policy. Berlin did that, and it backfired in the most predictable way possible.

New York needs more housing. New York City's public finances simply do not permit a massive public housing construction binge, and Albany can't fund a socialist mayor's public works with upstate tax dollars. That means that housing must be privately developed. New York City, just today, transferred power away from City Council and to Gracie Mansion to help facilitate new housing. That means the impediment is local opposition. The literature shows that opposition gets dampened when folks aren't afraid of gentrification; rent freezes do that.

If Mamdani takes the easy route and "tought shits" the landlords, his housing policy grinds to a halt. Market rents, covering 75% of New York apartments, will spike. The experiment will be over. He doesn't strike me as an idiot, which is why I don't suspect he'll do this.

>If Mamdani does this, not only is he fucked, but he might take down the national progressive movement with himself.

Like Obama with ACA? He fully thought he'd be a one term president over trying to push it in. Sometimes the best thing for a city is not what's best for reelection. And I very much don't want a candidate who's only minmaxing around what will get him re-elected.

I think we need to have more faith in the people. As gen Z says, "let him cook". We're thinking too Establishment here in a time where we clearly need a different strategy. Establishment had nearly 2 decades to resolve this and it only got worse instead. Why not try a new plan while observing what went wrong before and adjusting?

Or at least be able to scrutinize when the people who want to ruin his 2028 campaign (should he rerun) are the same that tried these same tactics this year. If these tactics were effective, Mamdami wouldn't have gotten in.

Doesn’t seem like you read the comment you are replying to.

> You are ignorant of both

> You're talking out of your ass

You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>> You're talking out of your ass

>You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to.

Fair enough.

>> You are ignorant of both >You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to.

Would "the facts don't support your assertions in either case." be more acceptable? Or is noting a lack of knowledge in any way unacceptable?

I'm not trying to be snarky here. I just want to make sure I don't run afoul of the guidelines and make more work for you and the other already over-worked moderators.

Thanks!

It's good that you're committed to observing the guidelines, thanks.

It should be easy enough to reply without ugly personal abuse or swipes like "ignorant".

If someone's comment indicates a lack of important knowledge about the topic, you can just politely point out the missing information, the way you might in a respectful conversation with a friend over dinner or a beer. That's what we're aiming for on HN.

>a builder will not build at a loss or an imminent threat to their rental income from expansion of rent freezes.

A builder isn't a land owner. They make contracts, negotiate a price, and build to that price. They're dealing with a government, so there's more money in the bank to spend if the government is truly focused on solving an issue.

A city with an expanding rent-freeze is not inviting new supply.

>A city with an expanding rent-freeze is not inviting new supply.

Okay, cool. I honestly don't want an atchitect who can't think 5 years on advance (when these rent control proposals are scheduled to end, should they be enacted). That short term quarterly thinking is precisely why we have been unable to build housing.

I think the builder builds if you pay them. I don't think they care about what the rent will be because they just build stuff.

So, just pay them, and figure it out later.

The alternative is what we're currently doing, and have been doing for the past few decades: nothing. This does not work. Our current housing situation is simply not sustainable.

> Increasing supply brings down prices. But a builder will not build at a loss or an imminent threat to their rental income from expansion of rent freezes. > > A city with an expanding rent-freeze is not inviting new supply.

Builders build rent stabilized housing ("affordable apartments") in tandem with market rate unsubsidized units. There is an enormous backlog of development proposals that the city council has been sitting on for a while now. Vacancy rates in NYC are 1.4%. anything under 5% is defined as a critical housing shortage.

New housing is in such extreme demand that people pay $5k/mo for a shoebox.

awesome stuff! loved this comment cause it is the kind of thing US political party (one in particular) teaches its faithful followers that is rooted in some crazy ideology without a shred of any evidence to back it up (especially since here we are talking about NEW YORK CITY not some shithole in the South). Goodspeed mate, wild stuff!!

Berlin reverted the rent freeze later because it was deemed unconstitutional. Many people had to pay back the money they "saved". Without entering in the other discussion the Berlin case was not a success.

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.

The market isn't going to function ideally in a place like New York.

In other cities, a significant market-based response to high rents and housing demand is to increase supply with another ring of suburbs. Is there anywhere within reasonable commute radius left to develop around NYC at scale?

Uncapping rents might trigger some refurbishment of idle or marginal space by dangling enough money in front of landlords, but you're not going to pull another 500,000 units out of your rear that way.

We can acknowledge that NYC housing is a finite and desirable resource, but we can also say that we don't want to turn it completely into an auction for the highest bidder. Rent control helps encourage diverse and vibrant communities, part of what makes the city compelling in the first place.

You build up. Which is expensive, so developers will want assurances and no "20% affordable units" bs.

There also is always going to be pain. NYC has incredible global draw, so demand runs deep. It might be that you can never build your way under $2k/mo apartments there.

> Is there anywhere within reasonable commute radius left to develop around NYC at scale?

I get the challenge of existing property/buildings other states, etc - but it always seems weird to me that you can have single story buildings less than one mile from Manhattan in Hoboken, etc. (as the crow flies, I get transit, etc).

Feels like the big problem is we can't change anything easily anymore.

Hoboken has the fourth-highest population density of any municipality in the US. Although it is mostly low-rise in character, there aren't many single-story buildings there at all.

A good chunk of Hoboken was originally swampland; you can't exactly put in skyscrapers there. And even if you could, the other infrastructure (roads, water mains, sewers, trains, parking) absolutely could not support that level of development. You would basically need to bulldoze the entire town and build much wider roads etc... which would then cut into how much land could be devoted to housing.

Edit to add: genuinely baffled by the downvote. I lived in Hoboken for 7 years, and regardless of any personal opinions on the pros and cons, the town indisputably has infrastructure problems at its current density level: frequent water main breaks, flooding, over-crowded trains, buses that are too full to take on passengers, sink-holes, constant traffic jams at the few exits to town, double-parking / obstructed bike lanes, waiting lists for municipal garages (one of which is literally falling apart). The density level is objectively quite high relative to the US [1] and it's quite simply factually incorrect to list Hoboken as an example of insufficiently-dense housing in the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

I did not downvote, but I think your comment is a good example of the "Yes We Can't" feeling that I mentioned in it being too hard to change things. Manhattan wasn't exactly easy land to build on either.

How so? Manhattan's bedrock is famously well-suited for skyscrapers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Manhattan_Prong

Manhattan also has an inherent economy of scale that Hoboken lacks; Hoboken is barely over 1 square mile of land.

Meanwhile the lower-rise neighborhoods of Manhattan have roughly the same population density and building height as Hoboken. So why are you calling out Hoboken? What single-story buildings are you even talking about there, and why are you ignoring the presence of single-story buildings in Manhattan? They're rare but they absolutely do exist -- I just ate lunch in a single-story Manhattan building literally yesterday.

Left wing type policies can be very effective at producing housing in places like China where the government just says we are going to have 10,000 flats here and here and maybe contracts the construction to developers but deals with all the regulatory and permitting issues. Even in capitalist places like Singapore and Hong Kong a lot of the housing was built like that.

> Is there anywhere within reasonable commute radius left to develop around NYC at scale?

Many many places, if we were willing to undertake large scale public transit projects again. But no one even bothers to run on that anymore.

A huge chunk of the plan is converting unused office space into housing in Manhattan, mostly in neighborhoods that were already mostly commercial, so there's relatively little NIMBY pushback.

It's often cheaper to just demolish and rebuild, which is still very expensive.

Office space is built totally differently than residential space, unless you want dorms with communal bathrooms and kitchens.

It's easier than most people give it credit for. A lot of the complaints are from attempts to loosen the building code. There's savings of many millions on the table per refit if they manage to pass those, but they're not as needed as people say. For instance you lay down a raised floor to run utilities, and you can push sewer away from the core for relatively cheap and without shared bath/kitchen.

That being said, a return to allowing boarding house style housing would also not be the worst thing in the world for some buildings, and would probably do a lot to reduce homelessness. Hell, if I were still in my early 20s I'd be into the idea of a room to rent with shared bath/kitchen to save some money even not necessarily requiring the reduced in unit amenities.

> unless you want dorms with communal bathrooms and kitchens.

I personally wouldn't want to live in a space like that (maybe when I was younger), but I'm not convinced this sort of thing is so bad. Some people might like it, if it would cost less than a more traditional home.

Others whose housing situation is marginal, or who are homeless, might find it much preferable to the alternative. That's not an ideal reason for doing it, but perfect is the enemy of the good.

> Others whose housing situation is marginal, or who are homeless, might find it much preferable to the alternative

I lived in an illegally-sublet room with no window when I first moved to New York. I worked on Wall Street, and could afford something better. But I preferred to save money versus having a window I would look out of given my work (on the weekdays) and party (on the weekends) schedule.

Communal bathrooms are fine. Communal kitchens are fine; I know plenty of New Yorkers who might occasionally use their hot plate. (This changed post Covid, for what it's worth.)

This is another example of a little radicalism is a dangerous thing. You don't need to be friends with landlords if you're prepared to simply seize all their property.

I…don’t think he is prepared to do that.

That’s if he wanted to, which I am yet to be convinced.

Further, I don’t think any City government (including NYC) is prepared to do that! - short of an already-occurring collapse.

I'm not sure if he can do that. I feel like eminent domain needs to be performed by a governor or federal. People need to remember that a Mayor isn't a "president of city that can do whatever he wants".

I'm pretty radical myself and I also just don't think it's necessary. There's more than enough unusued buildings to rebuild upon or renovate than a need to seize property. Even a place as dence as NYC still has a lot of land to utilize.

This has the same energy as "but if you tax the billionaires they'll just leave!"

I say the same thing to that: good. If you don't want to participate in society (or in this case, your job) out of political beliefs, lets get in talent that will.

>Impossible to get an apartment unless you want to get an illegal sublet at regular old $4500/mo prices.

That's already the situation, and that was with a mayor who was openly bailed out by Trump. About as hand rubbing as you can get.

I think that's why these "radical" solutions stick. When you've hit rock bottom, you don't want the status quo.

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.

>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.

how many decades have you been in your stabilized apartment ?

>how many decades have you been in your stabilized apartment ?

Ask your wife. She spends a lot of time here.

By the way, When did you stop beating her?

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.

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."

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.

I'm all for building more housing, but in places that already have an affordability problem, removing rent control before building more housing would just displace people overnight.

I live in SF and wish we would build as much and as quickly as Austin has been building. But, if we could do that, we shouldn't consider eliminating rent control until after those units are on the market.

It's kind of incredible how the obvious and true solution to rents being too high is to BUILD MORE HOUSES and yet somehow people manage to convince themselves that in fact, the real solution to rents being to high is to artificially cap their prices. Incredible stupidity.

Mamdani is doing both though, in a controlled manner. He voted to oppose NIMBYism as well and has a plan for new construction.

There's two vectors here and people seem to not realize that, isolated from the short term suffering going on right now.

Rental control is short term relief. Obviously, using short term solutions long term is bad. This shouldn't be an enigma.

Building housing is long term. We cannot build new houses in a year. At least, not that I know of. But new houses in 4 years does not help the citizens knocked onto the streets in those times.

You need to relive those people while also securing the future. That's why rent control fails without a proper housing reform.

You can't be mad at a pipe bursting that you used duct tape to cover. But maybe that duct tape buys you time to find a plumber, who needs time to find the right size pipes. So duct tape is still really useful, just not the end all be all.

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.

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...

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.)

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.

I mean your analogy makes it very clear that usually if a server is temporarily running OOM you might use temporary means to mitigate. You might use mitigations while you are waiting for new memory to arrive.

But what do you want to do if upgrading memory just isn't really possible quickly? What is point not to apply mitigations?

No, that's the solution 20 years from now.

And also it does not work like this in cities. Housing is worthless to your city if the house is 1 hour outside the city. NYC can't alleviate housing costs by building more homes in Timbuktu.

Mamdami is mayor of NYC, not Timbuktu. He doesn't exactly have much control of where to enact his policy.

>Housing is worthless to your city if the house is 1 hour outside the city

I live in LA suburb so I'm confused by this. The commute sucks downtown but an hour commute these isn't a dealbreaker.

Its also my perception that NYC's transit system isn't completely crap like LA. That should enable you to build farther out from the core city if needed.

Well LA is not really a city, it's, like, 5 cities pretending to be one.

And what I mean is: the solution to not enough housing is to build denser housing, not just more housing. That's why LA is also broken: they didn't do that. They just built further out. Which didn't alleviate housing costs, because if you work in downtown, you have to buy a house in downtown-ish, and the supply there hasn't been fixed, because we built more housing somewhere else. Which is why LA housing costs are also mega fucked.

But NYC has another problem: it's already pretty dense. Building more housing where it matters won't be easy - which is why we see proposals from mamdani to convert some commerical space to housing.

Well I certainly agree LA is too big for its own good. I would have preferred denser housing as well, even if I myself wouldn't want to live downtown.

I don't know how feasible it is, but hearing that Mamdami is willing to convert abandoned post COVID businesses to dense housing is a good idea in my eyes. That would simply be too radical an idea before COVID forced the US to perform a mass WFH experiment.

>Which didn't alleviate housing costs, because if you work in downtown, you have to buy a house in downtown-ish, and the supply there hasn't been fixed, because we built more housing somewhere else. Which is why LA housing costs are also mega fucked.

I'm talking more in idealism, but to first go absurd: if we could teleport to work it wouldn't matter where we build houses.

That's the theory I go off of when I say "I assume NYC doesn't have crap public transit". I can commute downtown in 40 minutes with no traffic, but using buses and railway would take me 2.5 hours, one way. And missing a stop stalls you for an hour. Not even to mention the hours they run. That is unacceptable in an 8 hour workday.

LA's mistake (outside of NIMBY zoning laws) was thinking that you can outfreeway public transit. And I think we can safely say that has failed.the idea of suburbs can work if we had proper, modern railing that ran every 10-20 minutes and get downtown in 20 more. But I don't think anyone in tune with California needs to be reminded of how that project is going.

Housing is an inelastic supply which takes long to catch up to demand. Using price controls to combat market excess shouldn't be controversial. But price controls cannot work if underlying policy issues which prevent supply to increase (zoning, permitting, excessive standards) aren't resolved.

> Compassion, please. These are humans we're talking about.

I think that's the core issue with detractors. Rent control is relief, and those who are not in danger only see the forest and miss the trees burned in the process.

If you only think about humans as a spreadsheet, rent control makes no sense. "You gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelette" kind of deal. Even some otherwise economically progressive people I know seem to miss this, but I suppose being able to comment on the internet carries a bit of security to begin with.

The gold faith interpretation lies in the idea that rent control is political poison. It's unpopular to undo rent control, so it's never undone. And I get that. But

1. I see that as sign of a weak politician. Yeah, sometimes we need higher taxes. No one "likes" taxes but we need them.

2. In some ways, trying to undo rent control means the problem isn't solved yet. There's less resistance against rent control once you see housing prices start to fall naturally.

Price controls on inelastic demand are absolutely a subject of debate among economists

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

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.

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...

Stockholm too.

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

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.

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.

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.

Democrats want higher wages for workers instead of reducing the cost of living (rent, insurance, etc).

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.

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.

No, it's a pretty bad idea.

We don't mandate car manufacturers to build affordable cars (although they are free to). People with lower income rely (or should rely) on the used car market. Those cars are naturally affordable.

Car manufacturers build high margin cars for people with the money, people with the money leave a trail of used cars in their wake, people without money for a new car buy those used ones.

That's a totally sensible and functional market. No mandates or compelled charity needed.

You don't have to mandate anything of landlords. Public housing is a thing.

There are very successful examples.

And on the car side, there's plenty of very cheap new options. I can literally lease a new EV for ~$100/month. Who's voluntarily building starter homes anymore? We built fleets of those in the 50s, without the song and dance that they were luxury and required time to turn into starter homes. If anything in a lot of places, the starter homes of the 50s are the relatively expensive housing of today.

We don't have "used apartments". Your metaphor falls apart here. And land is limited and government controlled. So GM can't just roll up and produce new houses out of an assembly line.

Land is limited, meanwhile we've built cars for a century and maybe the last 40 yeses worth of cars are street compliant. The only thing comoarable for cars is showing what abundance can do for a market. Less people care about a 2026 Camaro being affordable if you can buy a used '05 camaro for $3000 (which is probably still and absurd price, but hey. That's less than two months of rent in CA)

Generally speaking, legal requirements for elevated wages are another form of price fixing. The results of this price fixing are that fewer people will have jobs, the poorest people will be disenfranchised because it is not profitable to pay them a full salary, and the cost of everything in the city may very well be elevated due to more people willing/able to pay for the limited housing and other necessities. If you really want to help poor people, find a way to help them be more productive, and stop damaging the industries that get people the things they need.

You can see this in California with its mandated $20/hr fast food minimum wage. Restaurants responded by cutting workers or cutting hours.

https://www.nrn.com/quick-service/california-lost-16-000-res...

"It has been almost one year since California implemented a $20 minimum wage for quick-service restaurant workers, and industry experts have been debating the long-term effects the wage jump would have on the industry’s job market.

As it turns out, thus far, the 33.3% wage increase for fast-food workers in California has resulted in almost 16,000 job losses — a decline of 2.8% — across the limited-service food industry from September 2023 (when AB 1228 was signed into law) until September 2024, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Since the law went into effect in April, California’s limited-service restaurant industry has seen an employment rate decline of 2.5%."

Does that compare to other similar states over the same time? It hasn’t been a great year for restaurants anywhere afaik.

That article doesn't even attempt to analyze why those jobs were lost, and just parrots the "minimum wage is evil" talking points of a conservative think tank. Hard to take it seriously.

Yeah, clearly minimum wage increases is why every other sector is also hiring less and laying off more. I'd love to see that -2.5% statitic compared to the tech industry this year in the US (and industry where you'd scoff at the idea of working for $20/hr.

That’s not a very robust assessment. And even there, the 2.5% reduction is a nothingburger. A busy fast food has like 50 employees working 15-25 hours on average. That works out to a loss of 2-3 people. These stores have been doing that type of efficiency moves since day 1.

My cousins operate fast food stores, none in California. They are doing the same thing. Starbucks let the genie out of the bottle ~15 years ago with the app. Legacy fast food like McDonalds use apps to reduce labor with the incentives of high prices for counter sales and the perception of easier ordering.

I think that's a horrible analysis, in a time where all job sectors except healthcare is hiring less. A 2.5% decline sounds pretty good when compared to the rest of the job market. Especially in a high turnover market like fast food.

At this point we need both. If full time minimum wage can't afford an entry level studio apartments, then we're already in trouble.

For reference, that's $2100 or so of monthly take home pay for NYC's 16.50 minimum wage. Old wisdom would mean that this should make for $700 rental prices. But I'm sure few Gen Z are expecting rent to be 30% of income.

How does he explain Tokyo then ?

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.

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.

Not something I've seen in montreal

> 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.

They are not independent. Rent control discourages housing development.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

> 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Bringing down asset prices is what is necessary for younger workers to have a chance. As it is - young people will be perpetual wage slaves and never build capital (e.g. home equity, retirement funds) like previous generations. The fear, anger and despondency evident in people who are delaying family formation, delaying medical treatment, hiding their true self while others boast of yachts, and gulfstreams and Aman resorts on instagram, and question whether someone's identity is worthy - all of it is profoundly sad.

But lowering asset prices is a nearly politically impossible lift.

Left-wing populists will promise to deliver. But will ultimately fail. Populism ultimately is a rejection of elites. Elites who are currently failing the public. But you musn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

My objection is that left-wing populism with its rejection of economic elites, rejection of capitalism and the big-tent embrace of "all" is isomorphic to right wing populism with its rejection of science (antivax), embrace of nationalism and focus on homogeneity. Economists have good ideas. Capitalism is what built the water system that nourishes NYC. A movement embracing "all" will find itself eventually fractured by vote-bank politics as tribal affiliations will dominate in the end.

I am personally focused on thinking about how rewire the financial plumbing over succumbing to either left or right wing populist movements.

Anyway - Mamdani is a forceful, and commanding speaker. His victory speech last night was truly an American original. I think he's trying to point the vector towards a better life for more people and that is a good thing.

> "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.

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.

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.

> 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.)

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

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

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.

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?

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

Weirdly you get the same effect without rent control.

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...

> who will be blamed?

20 bucks says Trump.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

(from wikipedia)

1. rent control is a specific, technical term which represents about 24k units

2. rent stabilized representing about 1M sets limits on rent increases in exchange for tax breaks for the building

3. corruption

When you have to argue semantics by defining a new term ("it's not rent control, it's rent stabilization") that's a pretty good sign that you've fucked up and you're trying to hide it.

What's next, "these people are technically not in poverty, they're income challenged"

>When you have to argue semantics by defining a new term ("it's not rent control, it's rent stabilization") that's a pretty good sign that you've fucked up and you're trying to hide it.

It's not "defining a new term."

In New York City, "Rent Control" is the official name of a specific program/set of laws and "Rent Stabilization" is the official name of a different specific program/set of laws.[0]

And since we're talking about New York City housing laws/policies and that Mamdani is proposing a rent freeze for units in one of those two programs, being specific about it isn't semantics at all.

The all-encompassing term that you thought you were using a gotcha on is "rent regulation."

Please! Put some knowledge on, your ignorance is showing. Sheesh!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation_in_New_York

Edit: Added ">" to identify the section I quoted.

> He is freezing rents only for select controlled units

45% of apartments in NYC

Rent-controlled units account for less than 1%. Rent-stabilized units for less than 25%.

Over 50% of rented units in New York are regulated somehow. 34% “rent stabilised pre-74”, 8% “rent stabilized post-73”, 1% rent controlled, 7% public housing, 2% other

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.

lol, going down according to who? https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/new-york...

I don't doubt that immigration has probably marginally impacted the market, that doesn't change the fact that rent in NYC is still increasing YoY and is way too expensive.

And yes, the people extracting exorbitant rent cost are in fact the ones to blame. I don't understand people who seem to occupy a fairytale land in which they feel the need to defend billionaires as though they owe some fealty to them.

Maybe NYC lags behind other major cities. Check Boston for example.

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?

Politics is all about sides. To think it isn't is delusional.

It's uncomfortable to take sides, but that's what politics is. It's finding out what you believe is important (e.g. helping average people make ends meet, even if it require regulation, or eliminating regulation), you will end up taking sides whether you like it or not.

I think it's incredibly naive not to consider who our choices benefit. If your choices benefit people who already have massive amounts of wealth, you should acknowledge that and be aware of that and accept the consequences of that, and vice versa. Obviously in many cases it is complicated--your choices may benefit several different classes of people and undermine others. If anything the problem with politics is that many people make choices without considering what "sides" will benefit, letting ads, propaganda, and persuasion convince them instead. This leads people to actively vote against their own interests without even realizing it.

Doesn't this also apply in reverse? How many supporters of Mamdani acknowledge the groups that this choice will potentially harm? I am instead seeing people usually get defensive and downplay the potential harm on the more controversial issues. I also haven't seen anyone acknowledge that if the risk goes awry, it could end up causing even more harm to exactly those the policies were supposed to help.

If the goal is to vote for one's self interest, isn't it assuming a lot that this will always be aligned with one side? Sometimes self-interest means supporting one side on one issue, and a different side on a different issue. The act of taking a side is in of itself a form of compromise. I see nothing wrong with that, but that's not what people usually mean when they talk of sides.

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." "

Reply on news.ycombinator.com