In his inaugural handle Thursday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised that his administration “will attempt every day to make sure that no New Yorker is priced out of any . . . fundamental requirements.”
How he’ll really pull that off stays a thriller.
Final week, a journalist with New York journal requested Mamdani to present an instance of a metropolis that had efficiently lowered its value of dwelling — and acquired crickets in response.
(“None sprang to thoughts,” because the reporter tactfully phrased it.)
It’s placing {that a} candidate who ran virtually solely on affordability can’t provide a single mannequin to emulate.
However let’s give our new mayor the advantage of the doubt: Higher housing affordability is inside attain — if he follows the correct examples.
Reducing rents occurs through two basic paths.
A metropolis can cut back demand by turning into a much less engaging place to reside, or it could possibly improve housing provide by making new development financially viable.
The primary strategy is the coverage equal of chopping one’s nostril to spite one’s face.
It occurred earlier than, when a long time of fiscal irresponsibility led to New York Metropolis’s efficient chapter in 1975 and painful cuts to companies, together with the NYPD.
Rents have been inside attain as a result of few individuals wished to reside in a metropolis in such misery.
At this time, NYC’s housing affordability challenges are largely the results of coverage selections that make development tougher and costly than essential.
However excellent news: Many American cities have made tangible progress in reducing rents.
They’ve accomplished so by loosening zoning and different land-use restrictions governing non-public housing development.
Contemplate Austin, Texas, the bluest huge metropolis within the pink Lone Star State.
Within the wake of the COVID pandemic, Austin skilled a rare demand surge as employees and corporations relocated from high-cost coastal areas.
Rents started rising quickly throughout town and its surrounding suburbs.
Quite than deny the issue or try to manage it by hire controls, Austin responded by loosening long-standing constraints on housing provide.
Beginning in 2023, the Metropolis Council revised its zoning code to get rid of parking minimums, allow as much as three-family properties on tons beforehand restricted to single-family use, and cut back minimal lot sizes.
Consequently, Austin added housing at nation-leading charges.
In 2025, it constructed 15,000 items throughout the metropolis limits and 26,700 within the metro space, together with giant numbers of two- and three-family properties in neighborhoods that have been beforehand zoned for single-family items.
Evaluate that to New York Metropolis, which usually builds roughly 25,000 items per 12 months, regardless of having a inhabitants about eight occasions bigger than Austin’s.
Since peaking in the summertime of 2023, Austin rents have fallen by greater than 22%.
Even in probably the most aggressive segments of the market — studio by two-bedroom items — rents have dropped 6.6% since November 2024.
Now Austin is the nation’s most inexpensive rental market, in response to Realtor.com.
Austin isn’t alone in reaching affordability: Sarasota, Fla. noticed common rents fall by almost 43% from January 2024 to January 2025, after taking comparable steps to advertise housing provide.
Hire controls, in contrast, have a constant historical past of distorting housing markets and discouraging extra provide.
Gotham’s rent-stabilized housing inventory is quickly deteriorating and at rising threat of default or chapter as prices outpace allowable hire will increase.
It’s fundamental economics: When extra housing is constructed, residents have extra choices — and landlords should compete for tenants, inserting downward stress on rents.
New York might obtain comparable outcomes.
Town has no scarcity of capital or builders keen to construct.
The query is whether or not Mayor Mamdani will encourage the non-public sector to assist him obtain the affordability he seeks.
In a current Manhattan Institute paper, my colleague Eric Kober outlined a sequence of pro-supply steps appropriate with Mamdani’s democratic-socialist worldview.
These embody additional repeals of off-street parking necessities, permitting redevelopment for websites now used solely for retail, leveraging the mayor’s new powers beneath the just lately handed constitution revisions to map higher-density R5D zones, and extra.
State legislation additionally requires years-long, enormously costly environmental critiques for native discretionary actions like zoning adjustments — despite the fact that residential rezonings hardly ever produce novel environmental impacts.
Mamdani ought to urge his former colleagues in Albany to exempt residential rezonings within the metropolis from environmental evaluation.
These strikes would create better certainty and decrease growth prices, spurring housing development that may assist New York obtain outcomes like Austin’s.
In his inauguration handle, Mamdani vowed to control “expansively and audaciously.”
However regardless of how boldly he or his authorities acts, no person can defy the legal guidelines of provide and demand.
If the mayor actually needs to make New York Metropolis extra inexpensive, cities like Austin provide a confirmed blueprint — if he’s keen to construct on it.
John Ketcham is director of cities and a authorized coverage fellow on the Manhattan Institute.
