New York City

Howard Husock | 10.20.2025 12:00 PM

Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist and the likely next mayor of New York City, believes the solution to Gotham's perpetual housing crisis is stringent price controls and massive government subsidies. His flair for making wonky policy fun and relatable helps to explain his popularity. In a TikTok video shot on the beach at Coney Island in January, Mamdani told viewers, "I'm freezing…your rent," before joyfully rushing into the frigid water in a suit and tie. The video goes on to elaborate on his popular call to halt rent increases for roughly a million regulated units.

What Mamdani doesn't understand (or chooses to ignore) is the extent to which the Big Apple's housing market is already drowning under the government's outsized role in setting rents, subsidizing construction, and serving as landlord for the roughly half a million New Yorkers who live in public housing.

New York housing is more socialist than not, which is why the sector has all the familiar characteristics of collectivism and central planning: rampant mismanagement, decay of public assets, misuse of scarce resources, and privilege for the select few.

Mamdani wants to extend this socialist-style regime by freezing regulated rents and implementing a $100 billion program to build 200,000 new, publicly subsidized, rent-regulated housing units. He details both ideas in the plan he calls Housing by and for New York.

Rent regulation and public housing have been around in New York in different forms for over a century, and they are policy disasters. They are the underlying cause of the city's perennial housing "crisis."

With public housing, a local housing authority owns and manages apartment buildings. New York's program, initiated by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in the 1930s, is by far the nation's largest public housing system, providing shelter to an estimated 520,000 residents on 335 sites.

These buildings are falling apart, with an estimated $78 billion repair backlog, including "non-functioning smoke detectors, antiquated electrical components, damaged interiors, missing child guards…deteriorated roofs, deteriorated pumps, and leaking pipes," according to a recent

© Reason.com