{"id":298045,"date":"2025-10-12T19:36:17","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T19:36:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/298045\/"},"modified":"2025-10-12T19:36:17","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T19:36:17","slug":"zohran-mamdani-cant-keep-his-big-rent-freeze-promise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/298045\/","title":{"rendered":"Zohran Mamdani can’t keep his big rent-freeze promise"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, at a candidates\u2019 forum<\/a> for New York City\u2019s mayoral contenders, a questioner asked frontrunner Zohran Mamdani whether his signature plan to freeze rents would survive legal scrutiny.<\/p>\n

He refused to answer.<\/p>\n

In fact, the word-salad response from the 33-year-old political wunderkind undercut his own arguments for his most celebrated campaign promise.<\/p>\n

First, Mamdani laid out his stump-speech condemnations of rapacious landlords\u2019 ever-increasing profits.<\/p>\n

Then he turned on a dime: \u201cTo freeze the rent,\u201d he said, \u201cdoes not also preclude you from working on the necessity of a property tax reform agenda that is currently part of the reason why it\u2019s so difficult to maintain rental housing across the city.\u201d<\/p>\n

So which is it: Are landlords earning too much money and therefore deserve 0% raises?<\/p>\n

Or are they hurting and need property relief to increase their profits?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s logically incoherent \u2014 and worse, it\u2019s almost certainly illegal.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how Mamdani justified a rent freeze Wednesday: It\u2019s all about \u201cthe chasm that we\u2019ve seen opening up between the continued increase in profits for the landlords of these units amidst the stagnation of the median salary of the tenants of these units.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short, Mamdani believes landlords are raking in money at the expense of tenants in rent-stabilized buildings, and that as mayor, he can put a stop to it.<\/p>\n

But under the law, the mayor does not have the authority to control rents. That power belongs solely to the Rent Guidelines Board.<\/p>\n

And while the mayor appoints the RGB\u2019s members, the board\u2019s determination on rent adjustments is governed by the New York City Administrative Code \u2014 not by campaign promises.<\/p>\n

RGB members are required by the statute<\/a> to consider a host of objective factors, including projected real-estate taxes and water rates, gross operating and maintenance costs, finance costs, vacancy rates, the overall housing supply, the area\u2019s costs of living, and more.<\/p>\n

The board is not tasked with considering tenants\u2019 incomes \u2014 and has no power to decide whether landlords are profiteering.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Mamdani\u2019s rent-freeze vow rests entirely on a legally shaky premise.<\/p>\n

The law requires the board to make adjustment decisions on an annual basis, taking all those statistics into account \u2014 yet the candidate pledges that his RGB will ignore the law\u2019s plain text and obey his dictated 0% increase for four consecutive years.<\/p>\n

In essence, he\u2019s telling voters that he\u2019ll force the RGB to break the law for four years running.<\/p>\n

Of the nine RGB members, two must represent tenants, two landlords, and four advocate for the general public.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s proposal makes a farce of a structure that\u2019s designed to strike a fair, evidence-based compromise.<\/p>\n

If he follows through, lawsuits will rightly follow.<\/p>\n

And by making this promise so explicit, Mamdani has created a record that will be used against him.<\/p>\n

New York\u2019s high court has expressly held that independent bodies like the RGB must remain impartial.<\/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

Any rent determination that appears to be made to serve Mamdani, and not the law, should be struck down.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s proposal is one big prejudgment \u2014 a brazen attempt to fix the outcome for his whole term, even if impartial RGB findings suggest that a rent increase is warranted.<\/p>\n

While Mamdani poses as the friend of the \u201clittle guy,\u201d his illegal plan will destroy small landlords<\/a> across the city.<\/p>\n

Rent regulations already impair the value of the city\u2019s rent-stabilized buildings, making them difficult to maintain and operate at modest profit.<\/p>\n

In its latest report, the RGB found that operating costs for landlords<\/a> rose 6.3% between April 2024 and March 2025.<\/p>\n

Over the last five years, landlords\u2019 costs increased by a staggering 28.1%.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s \u201cfreeze\u201d will likely result in more landlords who cannot make monthly mortgage and insurance payments on their properties.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

The rent freeze is an empty promise.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s bad policy, as Mamdani essentially concedes when he suggests landlords deserve relief from high property tax and insurance rates.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s bad for tenants<\/a>, who will pay \u201cfrozen\u201d rents in poorly maintained buildings run by financially strapped landlords.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s bad on the law, constituting a blatant abuse of the RGB\u2019s powers.<\/p>\n

New York City\u2019s rent-stabilization rules were designed to strike a balance between landlord and tenant needs based upon objective economic data \u2014 not a politician\u2019s class-warfare rhetoric.<\/p>\n

If he is elected, voters who put their faith in Mamdani\u2019s economic fantasies will likely see the courts put his rent freeze on ice.<\/p>\n

John Ketcham\u00a0is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute.\u00a0Christian Browne is an attorney. Views expressed are those of the authors and not their employers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, at a candidates\u2019 forum for New York City\u2019s mayoral contenders, a questioner asked frontrunner Zohran Mamdani…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":298046,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,5341,1269,8167,55485,24845,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,5301],"class_list":{"0":"post-298045","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-nyc-mayoral-election-2025","16":"tag-opinion","17":"tag-rent","18":"tag-rent-control","19":"tag-rent-stabilization","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\/115362882521288039","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298045","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=298045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}