{"id":88793,"date":"2026-01-04T15:19:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T15:19:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/88793\/"},"modified":"2026-01-04T15:19:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T15:19:07","slug":"mamdani-can-bring-rents-down-with-this-effective-blueprint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/88793\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani can bring rents down \u2014 with this effective blueprint"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his inaugural address Thursday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised<\/a> that his administration \u201cwill strive each day to ensure that no New Yorker is priced out of any \u00a0. . . basic necessities.\u201d<\/p>\n

How he\u2019ll actually pull that off remains a mystery.<\/p>\n

Last week, a\u00a0journalist with New York magazine asked<\/a>\u00a0Mamdani to give an example of a city that had successfully lowered its cost of living \u2014 and got crickets in response.<\/p>\n

(\u201cNone sprang to mind,\u201d as the reporter tactfully phrased it.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s striking that a candidate who ran almost entirely on affordability<\/a> can\u2019t offer a single model to emulate.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s give our new mayor the benefit of the doubt: Greater housing affordability is within reach \u2014 if he follows the right examples.<\/p>\n

Lowering rents happens via two fundamental paths.<\/p>\n

A city can reduce demand by becoming a less attractive place to live, or it can increase housing supply by making new construction financially viable.<\/p>\n

The first approach is the policy equivalent of cutting one\u2019s nose to spite one\u2019s face.<\/p>\n

It happened before, when decades of fiscal irresponsibility led to New York City\u2019s effective bankruptcy<\/a> in 1975 and painful cuts to services, including the NYPD.<\/p>\n

Rents were within reach because few people wanted to live in a city in such distress.<\/p>\n

Today, NYC\u2019s housing affordability challenges are largely the result of policy choices that make construction more difficult<\/a> and expensive than necessary.<\/p>\n

But good news: Many American cities have made tangible progress in lowering rents.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve done so by loosening zoning and other land-use restrictions governing private housing construction.<\/p>\n

Consider Austin, Texas, the bluest big city in the red Lone Star State.<\/p>\n

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, Austin experienced an extraordinary demand surge<\/a> as workers and firms relocated from high-cost coastal areas.<\/p>\n

Rents began rising rapidly across the city and its surrounding suburbs.<\/p>\n

Rather than deny the problem or attempt to regulate it through rent controls, Austin responded by loosening long-standing constraints on housing supply.<\/p>\n

Starting in 2023, the City Council revised its zoning code to eliminate parking minimums, permit up to three-family homes on lots previously restricted to single-family use, and reduce minimum lot sizes.<\/p>\n

As a result, Austin added housing at nation-leading rates.<\/p>\n

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In 2025, it built 15,000 units within the city limits and 26,700 in the metro area, including large numbers of two- and three-family homes in neighborhoods that were previously zoned for single-family units.<\/p>\n

Compare that to New York City, which normally builds roughly 25,000 units per year, despite having a population about eight times larger than Austin\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Since peaking in the summer of 2023, Austin rents have fallen<\/a> by more than 22%.<\/p>\n

Even in the most competitive segments of the market \u2014 studio through two-bedroom units \u2014 rents have dropped 6.6% since November 2024.<\/p>\n

Now Austin is the nation\u2019s most affordable rental market, according to Realtor.com.<\/p>\n

Austin isn\u2019t alone in achieving affordability: Sarasota, Fla. saw average rents fall by nearly 43% from January 2024 to January 2025, after taking similar steps to promote housing supply.<\/p>\n

Rent controls, by contrast, have a consistent history of distorting housing markets and discouraging more supply.<\/p>\n

Gotham\u2019s rent-stabilized housing stock is rapidly deteriorating and at increasing risk of default<\/a> or bankruptcy as costs outpace allowable rent increases<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s basic economics: When more housing is built, residents have more options \u2014 and landlords must compete for tenants, placing downward pressure on rents.<\/p>\n

New York could achieve similar results.<\/p>\n

The city has no shortage of capital or developers willing to build.<\/p>\n

The question is whether Mayor Mamdani will encourage the private sector to help him achieve the affordability he seeks.<\/p>\n

In a recent Manhattan Institute paper, my colleague Eric Kober outlined a series of pro-supply steps compatible with Mamdani\u2019s democratic-socialist worldview.<\/p>\n

These include further repeals of off-street parking requirements, allowing redevelopment for sites now used exclusively for retail, leveraging the mayor\u2019s new powers under the recently passed charter revisions to map higher-density R5D zones, and more.<\/p>\n

State law also requires years-long, enormously expensive environmental reviews for local discretionary actions like zoning changes \u2014 even though residential rezonings rarely produce novel environmental impacts.<\/p>\n

Mamdani should urge his former colleagues in Albany to exempt residential rezonings in the city from environmental review.<\/p>\n

These moves would create greater certainty and lower development costs, spurring housing growth that can help New York achieve results like Austin\u2019s.<\/p>\n

In his inauguration address, Mamdani vowed to govern \u201cexpansively and audaciously.\u201d<\/p>\n

But no matter how boldly he or his government acts, nobody can defy the laws of supply and demand.<\/p>\n

If the mayor truly wishes to make New York City more affordable, cities like Austin offer a proven blueprint \u2014 if he\u2019s willing to build on it.<\/p>\n

John Ketcham is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his inaugural address Thursday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised that his administration \u201cwill strive each day to ensure…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":88794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[433,5877,3640,2907,9,24,55,54,56,299,435,1777,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-88793","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-affordable-housing","9":"tag-austin","10":"tag-florida","11":"tag-housing","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","15":"tag-new-york-city-news","16":"tag-ny","17":"tag-opinion","18":"tag-rezoning","19":"tag-texas","20":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}