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> Politics in america is like entering an inverted world in which some weird internal drive actively makes people vote against their own personal interests.

Because that's what the opposition, wrapped in the flag, tells voters to do.

And the voters go along with it not because they are dim, but because they understand that these things would not only benefit them, but benefit other groups of Americans that they despise.

"Free buses" is not really a thing even in the most left leaning European countries. Most experts recommend very cheap subsidized public transportation but not free.

Well Luxembourg is pretty much less a dense Staten Island, and they do more stuff than buses.

Not without grumbling though. Recently the cost reached 1 billion euro/year and it drove quite some discussion

Rent control in particular is an economic basket case policy, the fact that it's popular at election time should have about as much bearing on it making sense as the fact that another "experimental" candidate was considered by voters in 2024 to be "better on immigration"

As for offering free stuff, the problem that - if you look at relative population numbers - NY, CA, etc are already facing is that on the margin people he hopes will pay for it will just move away.

Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy. It shouldn't even exist. If we want an economy that actually provides goods that people need we should focus on productive components like building more houses and actual shelter rather than using limited housing to extract profit, often without even improving the housing itself.

> are already facing is that on the margin people he hopes will pay for it will just move away.

This myth is promulgated constantly with no evidence to back it up. The tax increases he has proposed are a drop in the pond to the bracket he aims to tax. If those people care so little for the city, so be it, they can leave. I don't need to share communal space with people who want to live as atoms and don't actually care about the place they live beyond how it affects their bottom line. If they actually love NYC for the city it is, they will stay. The increases are not going to be untenable for those people, it all comes down to their priorities, and if they don't want to prioritize NYC, then yes, they should gtfo because they are characterless, tasteless people who only care about themselves and their money.

Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy is a ridiculous statement. People need shelter and like nice shelter. People pay for access to amenities and convenience. _incentivizing building housing in areas where people want to live or where people work is efficient_

Nothing you've said has anything to do with rent. It'd be equally possible to build and incentivize building housing and then to enable people to own homes or at least own units within multi family homes.

Rent is a predatory practice established over and above the supply of a basic need (housing) that does nothing more than extract profits for no productive contribution. If anything I'm incentivized to limit housing supply as a landlord in the limit because growing housing supply means competition for me as a landlord.

Right, and it’s a good thing that the people producing housing, legislating housing production, and in control of housing supply aren’t the same.

Why is owning a home important? I do not think that home ownership is what most people want. We have attempted to make this desirable at through state intervention by pitching housing as an investment instead of a durable good.

saying one of the many reasons rent is good “is not about rent” doesn’t mean there’s no clash in the argument.

All moving to an entirely ownership model would do is reduce elasticity of the housing market, which would be disastrous.

These are good points—I think you're right to flag rent in itself isn't the issue per se, and this points to the fact that the main crux of housing affordability is a mismatch between supply/demand and prices.

I think the issue with rent is that it just complicates the situation regardless and leads to bad power differentials, and again, I don't know how you prevent slumlords but permit renting.

The way I see it rent takes an inherently unproductive fact of life (occupancy) and makes it a profit mechanism. Now if we had something like old school English land improvement laws or something, you could have a system in which rent and home ownership are forced to be productive, but barring that, I don't see a way of doing it and thus rent mostly just seems to complicate the market and mostly drive up costs and potentially prevent the majority of people from owning.

I agree that elasticity reduction would be bad, but let's build more homes and reduce costs enough to make buying and selling homes not literally the biggest financial undertaking in life and this will be less of an issue. I just find it incredibly difficult to conceive of a scenario in which renting contributes benefits beyond those you could realize simply by solving actual demand and cost issues. If you get lucky and have a good landlord who actually takes care of home management for you, sure, but this is not the reality. I'd maybe accept a renting economy with strong regulations around what landlords must provide, reasonable caps on increases, maybe even required improvements every N years, but barring that, renting mostly just enables parasites to sit on property, scoop up more property, and prevent swaths of people from owning in neighborhoods.

> I do not think that home ownership is what most people want.

I think this is a ridiculous statement. I don't know your background, but I grew up in extreme poverty (by Canadian standards). In the welfare complexes I lived in growing up, living in a home you owned seemed like an unattainable dream. The ability to choose between owning a home and renting a home is representative of a degree of economic freedom that is becoming unattainable for many, many people.

There is absolutely merit to the idea that choosing to rent is a good choice for many people, but in most cases the people who would make that choice are inclined to do so because they either desire or require mobility in terms of relocation, and frequently the reason people desire that is the opportunity to pursue better economic opportunities (jobs, investments, etc).

I get what you're saying, I also grew up below the poverty line for all of my childhood. My point was pretty unclear. I don't think that people want to "own a home" in that it's not home ownership that they're after but an asset.

The amount of people I grew up with who viewed having a house as a way to become wealthy was large. Which is silly. (Real housing prices : median income) cannot continue to climb in a society that has decreasing population without some sort of external intervention. Poor people spending the entirety of their money on a house will be the ones left holding the bag, which is part of why it irks me so much.

> Right, and it’s a good thing that the people producing housing, legislating housing production, and in control of housing supply aren’t the same.

They very often are, heck, the president himself is a real estate mogul. And most politicians own several homes each.

> I do not think that home ownership is what most people want.

It is, though.

You equate "housing" and "rent". In a world where consumers had unlimited access to capital, the free market rate for housing would converge on the interest rate + shared costs (think condo fees, property taxes, etc) -/+ appreciation/depreciation of the housing, because consumers would always have the option of taking a loan to buy the property, then re-selling when they want to move, paying off the loan and receiving back whatever they paid on the principal.

Comparing to the real world, the cost of rent is greater than that, because people are paying a premium for their inaccess to capital. Looking at where I live, the hypothetical value is approximately the condo fees (5.5% interest, 1% property tax, 6-and-change% appreciation), which for a 2b2b apartment around around $600 bucks a month. Rent for an equivalent apartment literally next door is $2700 a month. That suggests that more than 75% of the value of rent is paying for inaccess to capital, i.e., textbook rentseeking.

> If we want an economy that actually provides goods that people need we should focus on productive components like building more houses and actual shelter

What if we built some on spec and then charged people who live in them a monthly fee to recoup the cost. That way we could build more houses immediately without having to get all the money together all at once. We could then use the extra money to build even more houses.

> Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy ... we should focus on productive components like building more houses

Through... rent?

So if I build a building full of studios targeted at young people who would have no interest in owning one permanently, or poorer ppl who don't have money or stability to buy, how am I to be compensated/incentivised? I guess it's not being built then!

As for population e.g. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-...

Or, a public developer could construct and operate housing at cost, where rent pays off just enough to service the debt and operations.

That has been tried in the US before. Public option sucks unless like in Singapore (or USSR where it sucked only moderately) you force almost everyone into a public option. Otherwise people most capable of moving out, move out; the public option gets worse; rinse, repeat.

Here new buildings are paid by loans taken out by the tenant owned association that owns the building and people buying a condo (share) in it. The tenant association operates as a non-profit and tenants pay a "rent" that is used to pay off the loan, interest, maintenance, etc.

As further evidence to OP’s point: people paint Mamdani as an extremist for discussing rent control but it’s already the law in NYC. It’s not even remotely new. And there were 0% increases (effectively freezes) in 2014-2016 and again during COVID in 2020.

It’s been a truly exhausting election cycle for New Yorkers who have been lectured from all sides by people who don’t even understand how the city works.

> Rent control in particular is an economic basket case policy

Switzerland has had rent control for a long time, and seems to have (rather successfully) avoided this economic basket case fate.

You can’t find another city that even approaches NYC without moving to another country. And moving to London or Paris to escape taxes doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Example: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-...

In case of the cities you don't even need to move that far. I know multiple people in Seattle who just moved to nearby towns 105-15 minutes by car, 20-45 by transit) to avoid Seattle specific issues, and some people who move just outside of king county to avoid even more nonsense. Mostly techies, but not exclusively.

It's not like American cities haven't been hollowed out before, NYC included.

It's funny that you mention moving outside the city when Zohran's tax plan is centered on bringing the corporate tax rate in-line with our neighboring state.

I'll also caveat that any parallels you might see in Seattle don't really apply to NYC. Besides the low car ownership rates, wealthy individuals choose to in NYC for it's convenience and culture, which really are unique in the US.

Sure, the rich will all leave Effing New York City after Mamdani raises taxes by 2% (matching New Jersey's). Don't be ridiculous. This rhetoric of "they'll just leave" is incredibly damaging, this is how we get to the current situation. It's time everyone paid their fair share.

Eh, I live in SF. People are moving in in droves because AI startups are popping up. He might catch a tech boom and it might pay for all this

> yet somehow in the USA this is "radical"

As they say... (often misattributed to John Steinbeck, but at best its really a rough paraphrase of something he wrote) "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

The truly wealthy have long convinced the average "middle class" American that they exist in roughly the same social class (even though this has always been an insane lie) but this illusion is quickly falling away due to current economic circumstances causing untenable concentration of wealth.

Ultimately its the absolute naked greed of the truly wealthy that is causing this realignment (that is likely to end badly for them as well) to happen. They are so dead set against making even the smallest move toward fair taxation that they are creating a situation in which the shrinking middle class have no choice but to see that they are quickly becoming an endangered species whose relative fortunes are moving rapidly down rather than slowly up.

The experimental part is that he's Brown and Muslim.

I'd love to read more on the cheap rent controlled units and free buses in Paris or London when you have a second to link them. Thanks!

> Politics in america is like entering an inverted world in which some weird internal drive actively makes people vote against their own personal interests.

Nobody willingly does this. If you think they are, that should be a strong sign to you that those people and you disagree about what their best interests are, and you should seriously consider the possibility that they are right and you are wrong. You might not be wrong, but jumping to "they are voting against their own interests because they are dumb" as many do is both unhelpful and untrue.

I never said they were dumb. It is entirely possible to be smart about a lot of things and to still vote against your own material interests because you have either been manipulated or harbor ideology. Not to mention, most people are fed partial information when it comes to voting on policy decisions. The NYC mayoral election itself is a great example, it's difficult to find any meaningful information on ballot proposals beyond the one paragraph snippet they give you, and any other information on them is usually spun by people who want you to vote for/against.