Zohran Mamdani’s sweet rent deal bares NYC’s housing truth

Andrew Cuomo’s revelation that his mayoral rival Zohran Mamdani lives in a $2,300-a-month rent-stabilized apartment in Queens may surprise those who labor under the illusion that low-rent apartments are meant to help those of low income.

But there’s nothing about New York City’s system of 960,000 rent-regulated homes to ensure that’s the case — witness its benefits for Mamdani, with his six-figure income and family wealth.

If Cuomo had the courage, he’d be making that very point — not just using it to slam another candidate.

In criticizing Mamdani, Cuomo asserts that the frontrunner is denying an apartment to a low-income single mother stuck in a housing shelter.

But rent stabilization was never designed to provide for those of low incomes: It makes rents artificially low for anyone, at the expense of building owners who increasingly struggle to maintain their properties.

In fact, the median household income for rent-stabilized tenants rose 27% between 2021 and 2023, according to the US Census Bureau’s definitive Housing and Vacancy Survey, the best picture of New York’s housing market.

Fully 30% of these tenants, like Mamdani, have annual incomes over $100,000.

What’s more, these below-market rentals are not being occupied by low-income households with children: 41% of units have just one resident.

You don’t need a business-school degree to understand why property owners would choose to rent to higher-income, small households.

If an owner will receive a limited rent, he or she must reliably get at least that much — rather than deal with the uncertainty of renting to a family of less means.

And those higher-income tenants have no reason to move out of their rent-stabilized units once they’ve snagged them — even if they’ve raised their families and now rattle around in apartments with extra, empty bedrooms.

Tenants in only 94,000 of the city’s nearly 1 million rent-stabilized units moved out (or died) in 2022, the most recent reported year, compared to 221,000 move-outs in market rentals. 

That’s the fundamental distortion caused by rent regulation: It gives New Yorkers an artificial incentive to stay put, enjoying a good deal at the expense of those — like Cuomo’s imagined single mother — stuck on the sidelines.

Then there’s concern about the property itself. Older adults (41% of rent-stabilized tenants) are simply less likely to cause damage to a unit.

Children can be hard on an apartment’s walls, floors, sinks and toilets — put bluntly, they’re more likely to break things, and plumbers, plasterers and carpenters are expensive and hard to get.  

This matters greatly when an owner must juggle limited revenues and high potential repair bills. It’s no coincidence that more than twice as many rent-stabilized units (230,000) report three or more repair problems than market rentals (110,000) do.

What’s more, 60% of market-rate rentals had no reported housing problems at all, the Census survey found, compared to just 39% of rent-stabilized  units.

Don’t expect Mamdani to comprehend any of this, or to draw a useful lesson from the fact that his building’s owner is the one subsidizing his good deal. 

As a Democratic Socialist, Mamdani believes housing is a right — and that the state should not encourage the private market to build and maintain buildings, but simply replace it altogether as the owner and landlord.

That, of course, means public housing — and despite the city Housing Authority’s valiant struggles, it remains Gotham’s biggest slumlord.

Conditions in public-housing rentals are even worse than those in rent-stabilized units, the Census reports: 43%, or 71,000 apartments, reported three or more significant repair problems. 

Countering sweet apartment deals like Mamdani’s would require means-testing tenants in rent-stabilized units — a remedy Cuomo has now proposed, calling the idea Zohran’s Law.  

But the state Legislature would have to pass a law to that effect, an unlikely prospect, and implementing it would be a bureaucratic nightmare — causing the displacement of thousands of current tenants.

That’s a political impossibility.

Far better to adopt a gradual phase-out of the system — such as the (since repealed) vacancy-decontrol measures for higher-rent units enacted by then-Gov. George Pataki — while making it far easier for developers to build new city housing.

New Rochelle has shown the way: By guaranteeing developers that their plans will be approved or denied within 90 days, the Westchester city has sparked a development boom that led to lower median rents — without a draconian price control system.

Ironically, New York state was on that sensible path — until 2019, when Cuomo rolled it back with legislation that kept stabilized rents low even after landlords made necessary repair investments.

It would take a brave candidate to back a rent regulation phase-out.

But that’s what the city’s broken housing market really needs — and what the mayoral race sorely lacks.

Howard Husock is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the forthcoming book “The Projects: A New History of Public Housing.”