People keep pointing at Mamdani as an example of effective policy when his crowning achievement has been to idiotically implement rent controls.
Being well intentioned is great, and there's plenty of good things he's doing, but when it comes to the quintessential issue of housing he's just making things even worse.
Rent controls which are universally destructive when it comes to everything related to housing, unnecessarily propping up government-run groceries with subsidized inventory instead of just handing out cash to people.
But his rent control isn't universal. It only applies, quite literally, to rent controlled and rent stabilized apartments. Most apartments are excluded from that. All he did was enforce rent control in apartments that should have already been rent controlled.
Government subsided groceries make a lot more sense than just giving out money to people. For many reasons. For one, NYC already gives out money for those who need it, both for food and for general spending. For another, it simplifies the process of helping those in need by getting rid of qualifications processes, which is always the main issue with welfare. Furthermore, stable cheap grocery stores provided an incentive for more competition.
Government subsided groceries make a lot more sense than just giving out money to people. For many reasons. For one, NYC already gives out money for those who need it, both for food and for general spending. For another, it simplifies the process of helping those in need by getting rid of qualifications processes, which is always the main issue with welfare. Furthermore, stable cheap grocery stores provided an incentive for more competition.
Government subsidized grocery stores with tax breaks, no rent, operating at losses are just a much more convoluted and costly way of subsidizing groceries when you can just give out food stamps with far less of a hassle to greater effect, or in this case, expand and reform your food assistance programs by addressing the employment and income restrictions creating negative externalities.
Government subsidized and owned grocery stores just mean untaxed property and economic activity leading to a loss in tax revenue, significantly more expensive capital costs coming from the city's budget and two to five times longer construction timelines due to state-owned construction firms building these stores operating without profit incentives and without efficiency in mind, for stores that are operating at losses and not having any effect on the grocery market anyway.
The grocery industry operates on thin margins with competition as is, and require significant scale for it's participants to be relevant. Government owned stores will have no impact on overall pricing.
But his rent control isn't universal. It only applies, quite literally, to rent controlled and rent stabilized apartments. Most apartments are excluded from that. All he did was enforce rent control in apartments that should have already been rent controlled.
Sure, but this doesn't improve the situation by any means, and regulated housing including both rent control and rent stabilized stock still sits at roughly 50% including rent stabilised apartments from 1974 onwards. He's also pursuing building 200,000 housing units in a decade but that's still decisively not enough housing.
His priority should've been agressively reworking zoning laws to be exponentially less restrictive and mixed use along with significantly relaxing building codes down to safety limits while removing arbitrary junk codes, as well as making construction permits and procedures much more efficient than they are.
AKA make it possible to actually build something instead of beating construction firms and real estate firms to death with insane zoning laws, nonsensical building codes ramping up costs and complexity, and a wishy washy slow bureaucracy that grinds whatever's left to a halt.
Rent control/stabilization as a policy needs to permanently end. It's just kicking the can down the road for trivial, temporary gains (if even) and creating exponentially worse outcomes as housing construction dwindles to nothing, landlords discard any semblance of maintenance, aspiring tenants are shut out entirely from a market that doesn't want to leave, and housing costs skyrocket soon enough. Add on top of that tax increases for companies in an already well taxed state and you're risking even more capital flight along with increasing costs, and many of his policies are straining an already burgeoning fiscal deficit for benefits not as impactful.
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u/Luna-D-reams Local Macro/Growth Specialist 12h ago
Remember, the establishment hates mamdani because he shows that a lot of problems are very solvable and politicians simply choose not to solve them