Mamdani's Rent Freeze Fiasco Is Squeezing Landlords Dry, While NYC Housing Crumbles

There's one utterly reliable thing about socialism: It fails, every time it's tried. It may fail on the national scale, like the Soviet Union, or it may fail on the municipal scale, like New York City is in the throes of doing right now. The "democratic socialist" mayor of the Big Apple, Zohran Mamdani, has never seen a commie policy he didn't like.

One of those policies is freezing rents in the city. That's already producing predictable results: Landlords are selling out and leaving.

When Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor of New York City, he made one promise unmistakably clear: he would freeze the rent. Now that campaign tentpole is poised to collide with the complex economic factors exacerbating the Big Apple’s housing affordability crisis.
As his administration begins to take shape, that pledge, rooted in a democratic socialist vision of housing as a human right, is likely to be the first major political test for Mamdani. Supporters say it is an urgent lifeline for tenants battered by inflation and record rents. Critics warn it could destabilize the city’s fragile housing ecosystem, deepen building distress, and accelerate an exodus of small property owners.

The housing ecosystem is fragile due to decades of previous socialist stupidity; the commie Mamdani isn't the first socialist nitwit to attempt to addle the Big Apple's housing market with a big red spoon. And landlords are responding, predictably.

"I have people walking away. I have two people selling their buildings right now. I have more people selling the buildings and leaving for Texas and Florida," Humberto Lopes, founder of the Gotham Housing Alliance, told Fox News Digital.
"People already came to me, and I have their buildings on the market already. Since January, my business in the real estate, I'm a licensed corporate broker, has doubled in the number of buildings we are selling."

What did they think was going to happen?

Mamdani Told New Yorkers How He Felt About the Police, Now He's Showing Them

This entire "Believe a communist's promises, vote him in, everything falls apart" cycle has been repeated so many times that it's growing truly tiresome, and yet now, a city that was once perhaps the greatest city on the planet is suffering under one of the most clueless practitioners of the socialist's "art." This happens because of the two claims that socialists make whenever socialism inevitably fails:

That wasn't real socialism.
We just need the right Top Men, then it will all work.

Zohran Mamdani has successfully sold himself to New Yorkers as the next in a line of Top Men, and he won't have any more success than the others did.

As far as housing is concerned, the only silver lining is that Mamdani's ability to freeze rents is limited.

Roughly one million apartments in New York City are rent-stabilized. A rent freeze would apply only to those units, holding annual increases at zero down from 3% for at least a year.

Even so, that's one million apartments. And we should note that these rent-controlled apartments suffer significantly poorer upkeep than market-rate units. The New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey has some data. In "rent-stabilized" apartments, only 47 percent have shown no maintenance deficiencies, compared to 63 percent of market-rate units. For 3 or more maintenance deficiencies, the figures are almost 18 percent for rent-controlled units compared to 7.5 percent for market-rate units, and for 5 or more, it's 4.2 percent compared to only 1.4 percent. These are significant differences, and this has to be in part because the market-rate unit landlords have more leeway, financially, for upkeep.

New York City has elected a communist mayor, and now the residents of the Big Apple are, literally, paying the price for it. Once again, socialism will have failed. Once again, the people least able to afford the results of these lunatic policies will be the ones hit the hardest.

Editor’s Note: New York City is now facing the consequences of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist takeover.

Help us continue to report on his radical policies and expose the Democrats who support him. Join RedState VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.