American city-dwellers are especially justified in fearing the economy is about to collapse on them. The all-item urban consumer price index has climbed from 262 in January 2021 to 324 this past September, with the primary residence rent index rising from 344 to 438 over the same period, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. One possible takeaway from Zohran’s leap from backbencher state assemblyman to mayor of New York City is that voters tend to reward the one person in an election who makes a good enough show of honestly caring about their real-life concerns, regardless of the substance of the policies on offer. This fantastic ability to buck the limits of the current politics in identifying and articulating a deeply felt problem, joined to almost slapstick inadequacy at solving the problem in question, is an obvious common point between Mamdani and Trump. In fact, the president has already said he is looking forward to eventually meeting the incoming socialist mayor of his hometown.

Mamdani’s centerpiece affordability proposal is additional rent control in what’s already perhaps the most regulated major rental market in America, “freeze the rent” being the “hope and change” of the 2025 New York mayoral vote. But in a new essay for The Free Press, author and Manhattan property manager Matt Miller elucidates the dangers of populist affordability politics. As Miller explains, even pre-Mamdani, New York laws limited monthly rent increases on regulated units to “between 1/144th and 1/180th of what you spend on improvements … and only on the first $30,000 or $50,000 of costs,” meaning it takes 12 to 15 years for a landlord to recuperate the expense of bringing a unit back to market. As a result, some 50,000 rent-controlled New York City apartments are now empty, a whopping 2.5% of the rental stock in a city with a 1.2% vacancy rate—and this is before Mamdani’s promised freeze on regulated rents makes it even harder for building operators to stay above water. Miller used the example of a recently deceased Manhattan tenant to show the near impossibility of bringing rent-regulated units back online, even now, before Mamdani’s been sworn in:

For existing tenants, rents on stabilized units rise according to the annual increases allowed by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board. In 1984, my tenant’s rent was $300.15 a month. When he died in 2021, he was paying $880.53 a month. Typically, studios in that area can rent for $3,000, even with pretty basic renovations.

According to the board, the average cost to operate an apartment in a rent-stabilized Manhattan building built before 1974 was $1,560 a month, not including mortgage payments. Rounding for simplicity’s sake and assuming that I did $50,000 of renovations, that maximum legal rent on this apartment would only increase to about $1,230. After all the work was done, I would still be upside down each month on that apartment.

Since New York property owners usually have both regulated and unregulated units in their portfolios—sometimes in the same building—tenants in those $3,000-a-month nonregulated units effectively subsidize the rent-controlled tenants, who are locked into spectacular deals for the entirety of their lives and their children’s lives. Roughly half of the city’s rental supply is under some form of rent control, and though losing mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo never got around to mentioning it during the campaign, one person’s rent freeze is necessarily another person’s rent hike.

The people living under rent control aren’t safe from its consequences either. If operating a regulated residential building is no longer profitable, owners will either bring units offline or sell their buildings to institutions that can wait out the Mamdani era, like investment banks or private equity concerns. The result will be an illiquid rental market in which it will be more difficult for New Yorkers to find new housing when they want it or require it. Meanwhile, the quality of the regulated housing stock will deteriorate as landlords lose the financial ability or the motivation to maintain their buildings. It’s not as if an unregulated $4,000-a-month New York apartment is especially luxurious. You could find your magical 600 square feet on a postcard block in Prospect Heights and still go to bed each night wondering when in the early morning that clanging heating system installed in the 1910s is going to wake you up.

Affordability mania risks creating a politics of resentment, made even more toxic by the reality and urgency of the issue itself. In New York, Mamdani voters believed their man could shift the costs of city life from their own pockets to New York’s allegedly thieving class of owners and landlords, demons who care only about profiting off of the stolen dreams of their renters. As a result of their sincere belief in this embittered caricature of their socio-economic predicament, the Mamdanians probably just voted for an even more warped and expensive rental market.

Mamdani’s affordability politics also pits somewhat arbitrarily assigned groups of renters against one another. As Miller hints, one of the more perverse things about New York rent control is that it isn’t really needs-tested: His rent-stabilized tenants have included “classical pianists, opera singers, writers, [and] politicians,” as well as “a carousel of deadbeats, tech bros, people who bring home different ‘dates’ each night of the week, and a Venezuelan political activist.” None of these people sound like they’re grifting the system—but they did enjoy a privilege that not every New Yorker has. Under the banner of “freeze the rent,” Mamdani promised to lock in the existing advantages of people lucky enough to currently live in a rent-controlled apartment, while subjecting nonregulated renters to an even more distorted market. The latter category of New Yorker might want to start looking for options elsewhere. Maybe Argentina?

According to a March article in Reason magazine, President Javier Milei’s elimination of sweeping rent-control laws resulted in a near-instant 180% increase in the number of Buenos Aires rentals listed on the country’s leading online real-estate portal, as well as in a fall in inflation-adjusted rents and a decrease in renters stuck in “short-term workarounds.” Many New Yorkers know the special hell of having to move every 18 months through no particular fault of their own, with life in the city always in danger of becoming an unending slog of short-term workarounds. Could rent control be to blame for that, too? Sadly, this is a question our new mayor was more or less elected not to ask.