Zohran Mamdani can’t keep his big rent-freeze promise

Last week, at a candidates’ forum for New York City’s mayoral contenders, a questioner asked frontrunner Zohran Mamdani whether his signature plan to freeze rents would survive legal scrutiny.

He refused to answer.

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

First, Mamdani laid out his stump-speech condemnations of rapacious landlords’ ever-increasing profits.

Then he turned on a dime: “To freeze the rent,” he said, “does not also preclude you from working on the necessity of a property tax reform agenda that is currently part of the reason why it’s so difficult to maintain rental housing across the city.”

So which is it: Are landlords earning too much money and therefore deserve 0% raises?

Or are they hurting and need property relief to increase their profits?

It’s logically incoherent — and worse, it’s almost certainly illegal.

Here’s how Mamdani justified a rent freeze Wednesday: It’s all about “the chasm that we’ve 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.”

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.

But under the law, the mayor does not have the authority to control rents. That power belongs solely to the Rent Guidelines Board.

And while the mayor appoints the RGB’s members, the board’s determination on rent adjustments is governed by the New York City Administrative Code — not by campaign promises.

RGB members are required by the statute 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’s costs of living, and more.

The board is not tasked with considering tenants’ incomes — and has no power to decide whether landlords are profiteering.

Indeed, Mamdani’s rent-freeze vow rests entirely on a legally shaky premise.

The law requires the board to make adjustment decisions on an annual basis, taking all those statistics into account — yet the candidate pledges that his RGB will ignore the law’s plain text and obey his dictated 0% increase for four consecutive years.

In essence, he’s telling voters that he’ll force the RGB to break the law for four years running.

Of the nine RGB members, two must represent tenants, two landlords, and four advocate for the general public.

Mamdani’s proposal makes a farce of a structure that’s designed to strike a fair, evidence-based compromise.

If he follows through, lawsuits will rightly follow.

And by making this promise so explicit, Mamdani has created a record that will be used against him.

New York’s high court has expressly held that independent bodies like the RGB must remain impartial.

Any rent determination that appears to be made to serve Mamdani, and not the law, should be struck down.

Mamdani’s proposal is one big prejudgment — a brazen attempt to fix the outcome for his whole term, even if impartial RGB findings suggest that a rent increase is warranted.

While Mamdani poses as the friend of the “little guy,” his illegal plan will destroy small landlords across the city.

Rent regulations already impair the value of the city’s rent-stabilized buildings, making them difficult to maintain and operate at modest profit.

In its latest report, the RGB found that operating costs for landlords rose 6.3% between April 2024 and March 2025.

Over the last five years, landlords’ costs increased by a staggering 28.1%.

Mamdani’s “freeze” will likely result in more landlords who cannot make monthly mortgage and insurance payments on their properties.   

The rent freeze is an empty promise.

It’s bad policy, as Mamdani essentially concedes when he suggests landlords deserve relief from high property tax and insurance rates.

It’s bad for tenants, who will pay “frozen” rents in poorly maintained buildings run by financially strapped landlords.

And it’s bad on the law, constituting a blatant abuse of the RGB’s powers.

New York City’s rent-stabilization rules were designed to strike a balance between landlord and tenant needs based upon objective economic data — not a politician’s class-warfare rhetoric.

If he is elected, voters who put their faith in Mamdani’s economic fantasies will likely see the courts put his rent freeze on ice.

John Ketcham is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Christian Browne is an attorney. Views expressed are those of the authors and not their employers.