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EXCLUSIVE: As New York City socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani pushes solutions to the city’s housing issues, including a rent freeze, Fox News Digital spoke to a local expert who said Mamdani’s agenda will do more harm than good to the housing situation.
“The fundamental problem with New York City’s housing market is that there is not enough supply to meet the demand,” John Ketcham, a legal policy fellow and director of cities at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News Digital.
“The city government has prevented the private sector from building enough housing through zoning, through other forms of regulation, through affordability requirements and so forth, and so we’ve had more jobs created in New York City than housing units to support the population of newcomers and so that has simply increased prices. Prices are an effect of the supply-demand dynamic. They’re not a cause, they’re an effect.”
Mamdani, positioning himself as a champion of the working class and someone who would address the housing crisis with policies like a rent freeze, doesn’t address the actual problem.
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Fox News Digital spoke to Manhattan Institute scholar John Ketcham about Zohran Mamdani’s housing policies (Getty/Fox News Digital)
“Assembly member Mamdani’s proposal to freeze the rent would only apply to the 1 million units of rent-stabilized apartments,” Ketcham said. “Now, these are units that can only increase in rents by an amount that the rent guidelines board determines and those members of the rent guidelines board are appointed by the mayor. So he would essentially appoint these members and direct them to keep rents stable.”
Ketcham continued, “Now, rents are already not covering increased operational costs for the owners of these rent-stabilized buildings and so the quality of the rent-stabilized housing stock is deteriorating…
