New York's small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape | Hacker News Reader

New York's small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape

theguardian.com

21 pointsceejayoz28 comments

Removing tiny pieces of red tape (a permit to sell ice cream) is a token gesture when he decided to install Lina Khan as Chair Of New York City Economic Development. Her entire reputation is built on being incredibly hostile to business.

General NIMBY-ism within the city combined with a ED chair who hates big business does not seem to bode well for the success of large projects.

Nice try Elon Musk. Lina Khan is fucking awesome.

> Her entire reputation is built on being incredibly hostile to business.

Her reputation is built on being incredibly hostile to malicious big business techniques that screw consumers and employees.

Banning non-competes, promoting right-to-repair, and requiring click-to-cancel were absolutely correct decisions that I laud her for.

She also failed to secure wins when suing most big businesses because their strategy and evidentiary standards were subpar. Her ideological positions haven't really held up to court scrutiny.

> She also failed to secure wins…

You ought to make up your mind a little. Is she bad because of the policies she espouses, or the failure to implement them?

The policies she chooses _results_ in the failure to implement them because the ideological obsession clouds rational judgement and it loses in court

And it couldn't possibly be that courts also have ideological bents, right?

Like the SCOTUS that decided Biden couldn't forgive student loans because it exceeded his authority, but that Trump could try to dissolve the entire department that manages them?

Do you really consider "noncompetes bad" to be an ideological obsession?

So what EXACTLY has she done since being installed that hurts small businesses owners?

Make it easier to sell ice cream.

Make it harder to trap people in subscriptions with not viable way to cancel.

If anything, being against monopolies is actually pro small business because monopolies make it harder for small businesses to compete

> General NIMBY-ism

Mamdani explicitly campaigned on building more, especially housing, so not sure where you got that idea. NIMBYs show up at community board meetings, sure, but your post makes it sound like that's somehow the mayor's fault?

I'm also not sure if you're a New Yorker or not but the NYC EDC remit is a hell of a lot more than just "encourage big business". They run the ferry, for example, and other infrastructure projects

> Mamdani explicitly campaigned on building more, especially housing

You can't claim to support building or improving housing while implementing rent freezes on 40ish% of all units in the city.

Why not?

Wanna set your own rents? Build new housing!

Rent Control is a settled topic in economics, bar some fringe theorists. It would be impossible for me to explain all the negative externalities that rent control has on both existing and new housing stock in a single comment. I implore you to do some academic reading.

> It would be impossible for me to explain all the negative externalities that rent control has on both existing and new housing stock in a single comment.

The same is true for pricing out 40% of the population.

That has a solution. Build (or permit) more housing where people want to live and the price will go down. Simple.

Rent control destroys all the market incentives that are the point of having housing be private. If you're going to do that you might as well have the government directly own and rent the housing stock itself.

> Build (or permit) more housing where people want to live and the price will go down.

Mamdani's working to do precisely that, including with this sort of red-tape cutting. https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/04/business/mamdani-housing-new-...

"His strategy uses market-oriented policies — easing building regulations, loosening zoning restrictions and rescuing the city’s crumbling public housing stock through private financing — to advance his social democratic goals of 200,000 affordable homes over the next decade."

He's just not letting it be an excuse to profiteer off existing tenants in existing housing.

If you abolish rent control with the current US housing stock, you make millions of people homeless. I’ve come around to how it has hurt the speed of development but it’s an entrenched policy at this point. You can’t get rid of it until there’s enough housing. The alternative as you allude to is massive public investment in subsidy, whether that’s public housing projects, rent vouchers, or UBI.

How does abolishing rent control make millions homeless? The housing would still be there, just with richer people living in them? It would certainly increase commutes for the working class though

The housing would likely sit empty as richer people are a limited quantity market, and are not usually shopping for the typical quality of a rent-controlled or low-income unit. Meanwhile the working class folk you mention are sleeping in their cars in the city, because a 4 hour long commute one way from the exurbs is not feasible.

Genuine question: why not?

There's pretty consistent reporting that rental building owners are earning considerable returns from rent. Rent freezes are one (of several) ways to encourage building owners to reinvest those returns to build/improve properties.

Whether it'll work at large scale is an unproven experiment (Detroit, Paris, Estonia, and many others all show competing possible futures here), but it doesn't seem hypocritical--not any more than, say, the idea of using high tax rates on businesses to encourage reinvestment of profits to drive growth/hiring/expansion.

How do rent freezes encourage building owners to reinvest? They can't raise the rent to recover the cost of any improvements they make. And new buildings would presumably be at risk of becoming rent controlled which reduces or eliminates profits. From my understanding rent controls just encourage maintenance at the lowest possible level.

Neither do high tax rates on businesses encourage (re)investment. They reduce the reward for any given investment. In combination with tax breaks for investment, that does incentivise investment, but that's not the high tax rates doing that.

Have you ever lived anywhere? Maintenance at the lowest level possible is the soup du jour my friend.

And rent control makes it worse.

I take it you’ve never rented a market rate apartment in New York City.

Rent control is just one of many factors that affect an incentive to build. For example (and these are hypothetical numbers just to show the point), if rent control made developers 10 percent less likely to build but easing building restrictions made them 50 percent more likely, it would result in a net gain for building overall.

In any Mamdani's interview that I've heard him talk about housing, he always talks about short-term solutions like temporary rent freeze and long term solutions of building new housing.

Why not?

Afaict, building more is only politically possible if you also assure existing voters that their rents won't blow up meanwhile.

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