Mamdani Has Learned Nothing from Rent-Control History

By Anastasia Boden

Saturday, January 31, 2026

 

By embracing rent control, New York City’s mayor is recycling a policy that feels compassionate but fails everyone it touches.

 

In November 1992, a group of residential landlords in New York City met to organize a “full-fledged campaign” to repeal the city’s rent-control and rent-stabilization laws. They said the laws, implemented during World War II, were “buying votes on the backs of property owners.”

 

“Rent control puts an unfair burden on the small landlord,” said Lee Sterling, then director of the American Property Rights Association, at the meeting in downtown Brooklyn. He complained that the rent laws were damaging because “the big landlords can benefit from tax abatements and tax exemptions that the little guys cannot receive.” But his concerns were ignored, and rent control stayed in place.

 

Two weeks before the meeting, a baby was born who would one day become mayor of New York. And given Zohran Mamdani’s current support of rent-control laws, it seems as if he knows nothing about the effect of rent control for the first five decades before he was born, nor for the subsequent 33 years he has been alive.

 

The idea that rent control doesn’t work is one of the most settled issues in economics. Because it reduces the incentive to build, it exacerbates housing shortages. Because landlords cannot raise rents to reflect costs, it discourages proper maintenance and leads to aging housing stock. And because it nudges people to stay where they are, it leads to a system that benefits only those who get there first — not necessarily those who need subsidies the most.

 

Mamdani’s administration has effectively admitted as much. In a recent court filing attempting to stave off a company’s purchase of a slew of buildings in New York City, attorneys for the city argued that the sale would “not lead to a supportable business” by virtue of being rent-controlled. In other words, the low rents mean the buyer wouldn’t be able to keep the properties up to code. Yet Mamdani has forged ahead with a promise to freeze rent on the city’s nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. Such a plan would affect nearly 30 percent of New York City’s population.

 

New York, like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and other major U.S. cities, is undoubtedly suffering from too few homes and too high prices. But rent control does nothing to address the root causes of these things: arbitrary zoning laws; lengthy and expensive permitting systems; and parking, solar, and other expensive mandates that thwart innovative housing solutions. These forces are at work in New York City, which has steadily limited high-density zoning and continues to implement an expensive permitting scheme that can take months, if not years, to surmount. Price caps slap a highly visible but sloppy Band-Aid on a problem that, in the long run, exacerbates the wound while allowing politicians to claim they lowered prices.

 

It’s obviously bad policy, but is any of it legal? Because rent control interferes with the right to control one’s property, it implicates serious constitutional concerns. After all, under the takings and due process clauses, the government cannot take private property without offering “just compensation,” or deprive people of their constitutional rights without good reason. The Supreme Court has blessed rent control in the past, but it did so under wartime pressures and an influx of returning soldiers after World War I. Back then, the Court justified the burden on the property rights of landlords as a necessity of “emergency.”

 

Under modern circumstances and with the benefit of decades of economic research, the Court might reconsider. After all, some forms of rent control prevent landlords not only from setting rent on their own terms but also from evicting tenants — forcing them to tolerate people on their property against their will. The right to include (or exclude) others is one of the most basic aspects of property ownership. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch therefore have serious concerns about the constitutionality of these schemes. In a case directly involving the constitutionality of New York City’s rent-control ordinances, Thomas (joined by Gorsuch) said that though the particular case was not a good vehicle for the issue, he would be willing to take it up on behalf of a different plaintiff. And indeed, new plaintiffs are already lining up with the hopes of getting a case before the high court.

 

Rent control is not a bold idea. It is an old one — tried, studied, and discarded everywhere that serious housing reform has taken place. Its political appeal lies precisely in its failure: It creates visible winners quickly while quietly imposing costs on everyone else. New York can either confront the real causes of its housing crisis or continue to recycle policies that feel compassionate but fail everyone they touch. Mamdani has chosen the latter. History suggests the city will regret it.