{"id":138852,"date":"2025-08-12T05:24:16","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T05:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/138852\/"},"modified":"2025-08-12T05:24:16","modified_gmt":"2025-08-12T05:24:16","slug":"zohran-mamdanis-sweet-rent-deal-bares-nycs-housing-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/138852\/","title":{"rendered":"Zohran Mamdani’s sweet rent deal bares NYC’s housing truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Cuomo\u2019s revelation that his mayoral rival Zohran Mamdani<\/a> lives in a $2,300-a-month rent-stabilized apartment in Queens may surprise those who labor under the illusion that low-rent apartments are meant to help those of low income.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s nothing about New York City\u2019s system of 960,000 rent-regulated homes to ensure that\u2019s the case \u2014 witness its benefits for Mamdani, with his six-figure income and family wealth<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If Cuomo had the courage, he\u2019d be making that very point \u2014 not just using it to slam another candidate.<\/p>\n

In criticizing Mamdani, Cuomo asserts that the frontrunner is denying an apartment to a low-income single mother stuck in a housing shelter. <\/p>\n

But rent stabilization was never designed to provide for those of low incomes: It makes rents artificially low for anyone, at the expense of building owners <\/a>who increasingly struggle to maintain their properties.<\/p>\n

In fact, the median household income for rent-stabilized tenants rose 27% between 2021 and 2023, according to the US Census Bureau\u2019s definitive Housing and Vacancy Survey, the best picture of New York\u2019s housing market. <\/p>\n

Fully 30% of these tenants, like Mamdani, have annual incomes over $100,000.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, these below-market rentals are not being occupied by low-income households with children: 41% of units have just one resident.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t need a business-school degree to understand why property owners would choose to rent to higher-income, small households. <\/p>\n

If an owner will receive a limited rent, he or she must reliably get at least that much \u2014 rather than deal with the uncertainty of renting to a family of less means.<\/p>\n

And those higher-income tenants have no reason to move out of their rent-stabilized units once they\u2019ve snagged them \u2014 even if they\u2019ve raised their families and now rattle around in apartments with extra, empty bedrooms.<\/p>\n

Tenants in only 94,000 of the city\u2019s nearly 1 million rent-stabilized units moved out (or died) in 2022, the most recent reported year, compared to 221,000 move-outs in market rentals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the fundamental distortion caused by rent regulation: It gives New Yorkers an artificial incentive to stay put, enjoying a good deal at the expense of those \u2014 like Cuomo\u2019s imagined single mother \u2014 stuck on the sidelines.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s concern about the property itself. Older adults (41% of rent-stabilized tenants) are simply less likely to cause damage to a unit.<\/p>\n

Children can be hard on an apartment\u2019s walls, floors, sinks and toilets \u2014 put bluntly, they\u2019re more likely to break things, and plumbers, plasterers and carpenters are expensive and hard to get.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGet opinions and commentary from our columnists\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter!\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\tThanks for signing up!\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

This matters greatly when an owner must juggle limited revenues and high potential repair bills. It\u2019s no coincidence that more than twice as many rent-stabilized units (230,000) report three or more repair problems than market rentals (110,000) do.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, 60% of market-rate rentals had no reported housing problems at all, the Census survey found, compared to just 39% of rent-stabilized\u00a0 units.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t expect Mamdani<\/a> to comprehend any of this, or to draw a useful lesson from the fact that his building\u2019s owner is the one subsidizing his good deal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a Democratic Socialist, Mamdani believes housing is a right<\/a> \u2014 and that the state should not encourage the private market to build and maintain buildings, but simply replace it altogether as the owner and landlord.<\/p>\n

That, of course, means public housing \u2014 and despite the city Housing Authority\u2019s valiant struggles, it remains Gotham\u2019s biggest slumlord.<\/p>\n

Conditions in public-housing rentals are even worse than those in rent-stabilized units, the Census reports: 43%, or 71,000 apartments, reported three or more significant repair problems.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Countering sweet apartment deals like Mamdani\u2019s would require means-testing tenants in rent-stabilized units \u2014 a remedy Cuomo has now proposed, calling the idea Zohran\u2019s Law<\/a>. \u00a0<\/p>\n

But the state Legislature would have to pass a law to that effect, an unlikely prospect, and implementing it would be a bureaucratic nightmare \u2014 causing the displacement of thousands of current tenants.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a political impossibility.<\/p>\n

Far better to adopt a gradual phase-out of the system \u2014 such as the (since repealed) vacancy-decontrol measures for higher-rent units enacted by then-Gov. George Pataki \u2014 while making it far easier for developers to build new city housing.<\/p>\n

New Rochelle has shown the way: By guaranteeing developers that their plans will be approved or denied within 90 days, the Westchester city has sparked a development boom that led to lower median rents \u2014 without a draconian price control system.<\/p>\n

Ironically, New York state was on that sensible path \u2014 until 2019, when Cuomo rolled it back<\/a> with legislation that kept stabilized rents low even after landlords made necessary repair investments.<\/p>\n

It would take a brave candidate to back a rent regulation phase-out. <\/p>\n

But that\u2019s what the city\u2019s broken housing market really needs \u2014 and what the mayoral race sorely lacks.<\/p>\n

Howard Husock is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the forthcoming book \u201cThe Projects: A New History of Public Housing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andrew Cuomo\u2019s revelation that his mayoral rival Zohran Mamdani lives in a $2,300-a-month rent-stabilized apartment in Queens may…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":138853,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[852,5229,5297,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,5341,1269,55485,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,5301],"class_list":{"0":"post-138852","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-affordable-housing","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-andrew-cuomo","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-newyork","14":"tag-newyorkcity","15":"tag-ny","16":"tag-nyc","17":"tag-nyc-mayoral-election-2025","18":"tag-opinion","19":"tag-rent-control","20":"tag-united-states","21":"tag-united-states-of-america","22":"tag-unitedstates","23":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","24":"tag-us","25":"tag-usa","26":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115014131028754203","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}