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Comment by richwater | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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