An Open Letter to Mayor-elect Mamdani on Implementing Rent Freezes

Mayor-elect Mamdani, let me start the way every honest New Yorker should: with congratulations. You ran a disciplined, relentless and highly effective campaign. You energized people who haven’t cared about local politics in years. You tapped into frustration, fear, and the very real pressure renters feel in a city where affordability has become a luxury. That is no small feat. You earned the victory — and you deserve credit for it.

But now the campaigning is over. Now comes governing. And governing demands reality, not rhetoric.

You built your platform around freezing rents across New York City. I understand why that message resonated. Who wouldn’t want cheaper housing in a city where demand never sleeps and supply rarely grows? But I’m writing this not as a political opponent, not as a landlord advocate, not as someone interested in scoring points — but as someone who has spent a career inside the engine room of this city’s multifamily housing market. Someone who has seen how good policy makes a city thrive, and how bad policy quietly corrodes it.

And I’m here to tell you, plainly and without hesitation: Rent control has never worked. Not here. Not anywhere. Not once in economic history.

Every major economist — left, right and center — agrees that price controls distort markets, shrink supply, and ultimately hurt the very people they intend to help. This isn’t a matter of ideology. It’s math. It’s incentives. It’s human behavior. When you cap prices in a market defined by scarcity, investment dries up. Maintenance declines. New development stalls. Inventory disappears. And rents in the unregulated sector surge even faster.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Look at the places that tried it.

Paris imposed artificial rent caps. Rents continued to rise anyway — and housing supply contracted sharply. Investors fled, developers shelved projects, and the city ended up with fewer apartments and higher prices.

Argentina controlled rents so aggressively that owners stopped maintaining units, the quality of housing stock deteriorated, and new development came to a standstill. When the laws were eventually reversed, supply increased — and rents began to fall. The “protection” had been the problem.

Every time a government has tried to twist the dials of a housing market with blunt-force regulation, it’s produced the same result: less housing, lower quality, more scarcity and ultimately higher prices.

New York City learned this lesson the hard way in 2019. After state lawmakers passed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, building owners lost the ability to reinvest through rent increases tied to improvements. You can imagine what happened next: tens of thousands of apartments were warehoused, stuck in legal and financial limbo. Not luxury units — ordinary rent-stabilized homes sitting empty because laws made them economically impossible to repair and lease. 

Today we have an affordability crisis and a supply crisis, and we did it to ourselves. Your proposal to freeze rents risks accelerating that mistake — regular New Yorkers will get the shorter end.

You and I ultimately want the same thing: a city where New Yorkers can afford to live. But affordability doesn’t come from freezing prices. It comes from adding supply. More apartments, more competition, more options — that is how markets stabilize. Every economist will tell you the same. Austin proved it. Minneapolis proved it. Tokyo proved it. Cities that incentivize building bring rents down. Cities that restrict building see rents explode.

New York isn’t magically exempt from the laws of supply and demand.

What we need now is not a more restrictive housing policy, but a more sound policy. We need zoning that allows density where it belongs: near transit, in growing neighborhoods, in areas where the market wants to build. We need to streamline approvals, expand 485x, and modernize rules that were written for a New York that no longer exists. We need to cooperate with the private sector, not punish it. Because the truth is simple: The city cannot solve its housing crisis without the builders, operators, lenders and investors who actually create the housing.

You’ll find that even people who disagreed with you during the campaign are willing to work with you now — if the goal is real progress. Owners want to bring warehoused units back to market. Developers want to build. Investors want to deploy capital. Everyone wants the same outcome: more housing, better housing, and a New York where living here doesn’t require winning the lottery.

But that doesn’t happen under a rent freeze. A freeze tells owners not to invest. It tells lenders not to lend. It tells developers not to build. It tells capital to go elsewhere — and once capital leaves, it rarely comes back the same way.

Mayor-elect Mamdani, you have a rare opportunity. You can be the leader who stood up to a politically popular idea because you understood it would destroy the very affordability it promised. You can be the mayor who championed growth instead of stagnation, who embraced supply instead of scarcity, who chose long-term health over short-term applause.

New York thrives because people fight to live here. Let’s not make that fight harder. 

If your goal is to help renters — truly help them — then the path is clear: Build more housing, unlock the units we already have, encourage investment, and compete for renters through supply, not slogans.

What matters is simple: New York needs more homes, not more controls. And the time to build them — with sound policy and smart leadership — is right now.

Lev Mavashev is the founder and principal of Alpha Realty, a New York brokerage focusing on multifamily.