If anyone needed a compelling argument for why New York City is in desperate need of socialist governance, the city’s real estate elites and the political class they own gave one last week. The Rent Guidelines Board, whose members are appointed by the mayor, voted on April 30 to consider drastic rent increases on at least one million rent-stabilized apartments. The nonbinding vote showed the board’s openness to raising rents by as much as 7.75 percent — in the midst of ever-skyrocketing rents that have pushed out enormous numbers of working-class people from the city in recent years.
Socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has been campaigning on a promise to immediately freeze the rent for those very tenants. Of all the enticing campaign promises socialists make during an election season, this is one of the easiest to implement, since the mayor appoints the rent board and can pick members who will implement his agenda. Just as Mayor Eric Adams has consistently chosen members who side with landlords, Mayor Mamdani could appoint a pro-tenant board that would freeze the rent (as Mayor Bill de Blasio did).
It is an insult to the city’s working people that our real estate elites feel entitled, in the middle of a crippling affordability crisis, to further squeeze a million tenants living in rent-stabilized buildings. And it is part of the reason why Mamdani’s campaign has so much momentum.
As in many other US cities, housing costs cause New Yorkers immense hardship. Last month, the New York Times reported that not including migrants, about a third of families living in the city’s homeless shelters had at least one adult who was working. These are New York City’s workers: janitors, line cooks, construction workers, ambulance drivers, even librarians and nurses. They’re not in the shelters because of drug abuse or mental illness or failure to keep a job — they’re there because the rent is too damn high.
Homelessness…
Auteur: Liza Featherstone
