Few policies disgust academic economists quite like rent control. In the 1970s, the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck famously described it as the “most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.” In a 2012 poll of prominent economists, just 2 percent said that rent-control laws have had “a positive impact” on the “amount and quality of broadly affordable rental housing in cities that have used them.” (The Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler sarcastically proposed a follow-up survey question: “Does the sun revolve around the earth?”)
Unsurprisingly, then, economists and policy wonks have almost universally disparaged New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to “freeze the rent.” Headlines like “Zohran Mamdani’s Socialist Housing Plan Could Crash New York’s Rickety Rental Market” and “A Rent Freeze Is Not the Answer to New York’s Housing Crisis” have proliferated. My colleague Michael Powell, summing up the prevailing expert sentiment, described the proposal (among others) as “magic realism.”
But maybe his proposal is closer to political realism. The expert consensus holds that the way to bring down housing costs is to build more housing; and the best way to do that is to remove the regulatory barriers to a construction boom. When I interviewed Mamdani about his housing plans, however, he emphasized that although more building is necessary, it is not sufficient—or sufficiently fast. “We absolutely have to expedite the process by which we build new housing,” he told me. “But we can’t do that unless we also address people’s immediate needs.”
In many places, especially those where the housing shortage is most severe, the politics of building new units is toxic. The perceived costs of development often inspire intense opposition while the benefits take years, even decades, to materialize. This dynamic cannot be neatly separated from ideal housing policy. Mamdani argues that “freeze the rent” is not just a way of delivering relief from exorbitant housing costs; it is the only way to get enough voters on board with a growth agenda. A growing body of real-world evidence suggests that he has a point.
The case against rent control is simple and powerful: Housing is too expensive because there isn’t enough of it, and rent control makes that shortage worse. Most studies find that, by limiting how much profit developers can earn, rent caps make them less likely to build new housing. Meanwhile, if landlords can’t raise rents enough to cover the rising costs of maintaining their existing units, then those apartments will fall into disrepair or be taken off the market.
Among experts, the preferred solution to the housing crisis is to relax regulations around what kinds of housing can be built. But this approach, often called YIMBYism—“Yes in My Backyard”—has some practical problems. One is popularity. Although reams of empirical evidence show that building new homes tends to reduce housing prices in a given area, most city dwellers have the opposite intuition about it. They associate new development with rising rents, a higher cost of living, and displacement of existing residents—also known, collectively, as gentrification—and often oppose new development on those grounds.
Another problem is timing: Even if laws are passed to allow more housing to be built, people won’t feel the results for years. “This is the core challenge for the YIMBY worldview,” Christopher Elmendorf, a law professor at UC Davis who has conducted several surveys on voter attitudes toward housing development, told me. “How do you get voters on board with an agenda that violates just about every law of electoral politics?”
One answer, somewhat counterintuitively, might be rent control. In a 2022 paper, the political scientists Anselm Hager, Hanno Hilbig, and Robert Vief used the introduction of a 2019 rent-control law in Berlin to study how access to rent-controlled apartments influenced local attitudes toward housing development. The fact that the new law included an arbitrary cutoff date (it applied only to buildings constructed before January 1, 2014) allowed the authors to create a natural experiment, comparing otherwise-similar tenants in otherwise-similar buildings.
Heading into the experiment, the authors hypothesized that having access to a rent-controlled apartment would keep tenants in their existing units longer and therefore make them more resistant to neighborhood change. Instead, they found the opposite: Residents who lived in rent-controlled apartments were 37 percent more likely to support new local-housing construction than those living in noncontrolled units. (Hilbig cautioned to me that “there is some uncertainty, since the confidence intervals are really large,” but that “the effect is definitely sizable.”) This gap was largest in neighborhoods that had experienced the sharpest rental-price increases over the previous decade. The authors concluded that by guaranteeing price stability, rent control eases residents’ fears that new housing will make their current living situation unaffordable. “The takeaway for me is that when people feel protected, when they feel secure, they become much less scared of change,” Hilbig told me.
Rent control is also a clear political winner. Depending on the poll, it garners anywhere from 75 to 85 percent support among voters. In a 2024 survey of 5,000 voters across the country, Elmendorf and his co-authors gave respondents a series of choices between several different state-level policy platforms—each consisting of a random set of positions drawn from 39 different policy issues—and calculated how likely each issue was to cause respondents to switch their support from one platform to another. To the authors’ surprise, they found that rent control is, as Elmendorf put it to me, “one of the most important issues in state politics today,” more salient to voters at the state level than even such hot-button issues as immigration and policing. And, unlike the process of building new housing, passing a rent-control law can deliver tangible benefits almost immediately.
Taken together, the Berlin study and Elmendorf’s survey suggest that rent control could be very useful to a politician seeking to woo voters, and to make residents more open to new housing development. (This of course still leaves the question of who builds or invests in new housing—more on that in a minute.) Mamdani seems to understand this dynamic. “Freeze the rent,” his signature proposal, would halt rent increases for people living in the roughly 30 percent of city units designated as “rent stabilized” under law, whose annual rent increases are determined every year by a board appointed by the mayor. (This policy generally does not apply to either existing market-rate units or new units.) But his agenda also includes a commitment to use city funds to build 200,000 new units of housing over 10 years—a target that would slightly exceed the 185,000 new multifamily units of all kinds built in the city from 2010 to 2020. Mamdani has also expressed support for a YIMBY wish list of policies, including streamlining permitting rules, up-zoning wealthy neighborhoods, allowing apartment buildings to be built near transit, and relaxing regulations to allow for cheaper construction.
“It’s important that when a New Yorker sees housing constructed in their neighborhood, they know that this is actually part of a larger housing plan,” Mamdani told me, citing both rent control and stronger tenant protections. “And so the arrival of additional neighbors won’t be considered something that would then expedite displacement within that same neighborhood.”
Whether Mamdani is capable of pulling off this synthesis, or even willing to try, is unclear. He might not even be able to “freeze the rent” in the first place. The annual price increase of a rent-stabilized apartment is set by the Rent Guidelines Board, a government agency that New York’s outgoing mayor, Eric Adams, is reportedly considering packing with appointees who are unlikely to support Mamdani’s agenda, and Mamdani might not have the legal authority to replace them.
Perhaps more important, Mamdani has sent mixed signals on just how committed he is to building more market-rate housing. His platform states that he will meet his housing goals by tripling the city’s production of “publicly subsidized, permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes”—an incredibly narrow type of housing that is extremely difficult to produce at scale in New York City. In interviews, Mamdani has hedged on this position, claiming that he has changed his mind on “the role of the private market in housing construction.” Even so, he has continued to send contradictory messages, including his refusal to take a position on several pro-housing ballot measures. “The truth is that no one really knows what he’s going to do,” Alex Armlovich, a senior housing analyst at the Niskanen Center and a member of the Rent Guidelines Board, told me. “We’re all left staring at these vague, conflicting statements he’s made and trying to make sense of them.” (Armlovich said that whether he would vote for a rent freeze would be “context dependent.”)
Setting aside the specifics of New York City government, though, Mamdani may have hit upon a winning political formula for cities and states struggling to respond to the housing crisis. When I put Mamdani’s argument about rent control to YIMBY organizers—the people who are working to pass pro-housing laws in cities and states across the country—I expected them to roll their eyes. Instead, they lit up. In nearly every blue state that has passed significant pro-housing legislation, they explained, introducing some form of rent control has been crucial to getting those bills across the finish line. “It was absolutely essential,” Alex Brennan, the executive director of Futurewise, a Washington State think tank that helped spearhead an ambitious housing-reform package that passed in May, told me. “Saying that we’re going to have a lot more housing five or 10 years from now isn’t enough. Legislators want to know: What happens in the meantime? What are we going to do for those folks whose rents are increasing by double digits every year? We needed an answer for those people.”
I heard similar stories from organizers in other states, including California and Oregon. “We’ve seen this over and over,” Henry Honorof, the director of the coordinating team of Welcoming Neighbors Network, a national umbrella organization for dozens of YIMBY-aligned organizations, told me. “When major expansions in housing availability in blue places succeed, they usually pass alongside tenant protections and rent stabilization.”
The same dynamic appears to apply in New York City. Andrew Fine, the policy director of Open New York, the city’s most prominent YIMBY organization, told me that outgoing Mayor Adams’s relative success in getting housing built had much to do with the passage of a 2019 law that strengthened tenant protections. The law, Fine said, made progressive legislators more comfortable with pro-building policies. Fine spent much of the 2010s working on housing policy for the city. He watched as concerns around gentrification and displacement stymied dozens of proposed housing projects and efforts to change the city’s zoning laws. “That fear pervaded every single housing conversation in the city,” he told me. “We learned very quickly that you’re not going to get any support for new housing in an environment where people are scared of being priced out.”
Rent control might be good for getting voters on board with more building, but that doesn’t make it good policy on its own. Rent-control laws must be carefully designed to avoid the outcomes that economists have long warned about. Most of the recent state-level rent-control laws, including those in California, Oregon, and Washington, tie their annual rent caps to the overall inflation rate so that landlords can keep up with their own rising costs. These laws also typically allow landlords to raise the rent to the market rate—subject to rent control moving forward—when a tenant moves out, which helps keep those units on the market. Mamdani’s rent freeze would have neither of these qualities. (When I pointed that out, he said he was “not blind to the pressure that landlords face” and would find ways to reduce their major expenses, which include insurance premiums, utility bills, and property taxes.)
Rent control can also scare off investors and developers, even if the policy doesn’t apply to new construction, as Montgomery County, Maryland, learned when it passed a rent-stabilization law in 2023 only to watch new-housing investment plummet. Avoiding a similar outcome in New York, and other cities, might require some extremely skillful diplomacy, if it can be done at all. “What my investors care about is whether a given political climate is going to be hospitable to their investments not just tomorrow, but five or 10 years from now,” Bruce Fairty, the chief development officer at Cypress Equity Investments, a national housing developer, told me. “A policy like ‘Freeze the rent’ would almost certainly have a chilling effect.”
Another risk inherent to pairing a populist, fast-acting policy like freeze the rent with a series of politically tricky, slow-acting technocratic reforms, like eliminate height requirements for single-stair buildings, is that the technocratic reforms might never get done. Making it easier to build new homes requires upsetting powerful actors who benefit from the existing system. Tellingly, Mamdani has refused to take a position on a set of pro-housing New York City ballot measures, on the grounds that he is having “active conversations with labor leaders, elected officials, and other stakeholders.” If Mamdani becomes mayor and can’t or won’t defy the interest groups that oppose housing reform, housing won’t get built. Meanwhile, repealing a rent freeze would be a nightmare for any politician who tries it. Without enough new construction, the housing crisis will only get worse over time, tempting city leaders to engage in even more egregious forms of rent control, which will in turn make building homes even harder. This could trigger the kind of cycle that leads economists to compare rent control to bombing.
So combining rent control with YIMBY policies is no sure thing. But the status quo, in New York and many other cities, is intolerable. The housing crisis has metastasized for years while leaders have failed to figure out the politics needed to address it. If rent control offers a way to break through that impasse, it might be worth the gamble.
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