On the surface, it’s easy to see why New York City elected Zohran Mamdani mayor. The charming state assemblyman put New York first during his campaign, all while smiling blithely, a proverbial cat in the sun.
Ask a random person on the street why NYC opted for Mamdani, and you’ll likely hear something along the lines of, “We needed to try something new.”
It’s an understandable impulse for the perpetually mismanaged city. The problem is that none of Mamdani’s policy proposals are new. In fact, Mamdani’s ideas are quite old and well-tested. And if the past is prologue, New York City will suffer mightily for being snookered into believing the dusty, discredited ideas of 20th-century collectivism have suddenly become fresh and viable.
Take the new mayor’s signature policy of rent freezes. In the 1970s, Massachusetts allowed Boston and other large cities to cap rent increases. The results were catastrophic. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that housing supply shrank by roughly 10% during that time. Meanwhile, rental homes fell into disrepair as landlords were unable to keep up with costs. New constructions nearly ceased.
Ironically, the policy hurt low-income renters most of all. The rent caps disincentivized landlords from caring for their properties, deteriorating the housing quality, while the supply shortage drove up prices, making it harder for new renters, often low-income families moving for work, to find affordable homes.
San Francisco’s dalliance with rent freezes in the 1990s caused a similar catastrophe. According to a recent American Economic Review study on the policy, freezing rents may have protected incumbent renters from immediate displacement, but it likewise diminished housing supply, making rents skyrocket in the long term and ultimately defeating the purpose of the policy.
Rent freezes haven’t worked overseas, either. A 2020 rent freeze in Berlin caused a 57% drop in available apartments, leading to skyrocketing rents in the unregulated market.
Mamdani’s plan differs slightly from those of Massachusetts, San Francisco, and Berlin. In one sense, it’s more targeted, as it’s limited to the existing 1 million rent-stabilized apartments in New York City. In another, it’s far more radical. He has pledged a zero percent flat rent freeze, whereas the other cities had mechanisms for a small annual adjustment to keep up with inflation.
Will Mamdani finally be the first to implement a rent freeze plan that doesn’t end in disaster? Historical odds aren’t in his favor.
Another old idea being put to fresh use is Mamdani’s proposal to set up five municipally owned, non-profit grocery stores in high-poverty areas. Whether it’s five or 500 doesn’t matter, because the underlying principle doesn’t work on any scale.
In the early 2000s, Venezuela established state-run grocery store networks and price controls under the government of Hugo Chávez. This government food distribution system depended on the country’s oil wealth. Predictably, food became scarce the moment oil prices plummeted in late 2014. The government could no longer subsidize prices to make them affordable to the poor. This led to massive shortages, hyperinflation, stores with empty shelves, and reliance on the black market. Venezuelan poverty skyrocketed. A 2017 survey found that 9.6 million people ate two or fewer meals a day and, 93% of the population couldn’t afford food.
It’s easy to see why: government-run industries are inevitably plagued by corruption, mismanagement, and a resulting lack of profitability. Managing a large and complex business requires expertise and an incentive structure that keeps its component parts operating efficiently and innovating when necessary. For a government bureaucracy, this isn’t exactly in the wheelhouse.
Small-scale government-owned grocery stores in the United States have similarly failed. As recently as last August, a Kansas City grocery store that received $18 million in city investments closed. The cause? Economic mismanagement, poor incentive structures, high rates of theft, bare shelves — everything you’d expect from a government-run grocery store. It’s the same foolish utopianism that has willfully disregarded basic human nature and economic principles for centuries.
Mamdani’s plan to “reimagine public safety” also has a recent track record of abject failure. In cities that embraced the “defund the police” movement, murder rates quickly spiked. Voters in these cities were similarly quick to pull back from the brink. Minneapolis voted down a ballot measure that would abolish the police department in 2021, and Portland, Oregon’s mayor renounced the movement. In New York City, murders climbed 44% during a period of declining arrests between May 2020 and February 2022. But when the New York City Police Department began repolicing under then-Mayor Eric Adams, arrests climbed, and murders dropped.
Should Mamdani make good on his campaign promises, Gotham will revert to chaos.
VIDEO: MAMDANI VOIDS ADAMS’S PRO-ISRAEL EXECUTIVE ORDERS ON DAY ONE AS MAYOR
At his inauguration this week, the new mayor vowed to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” His immense political talent enables him to introduce socialism as if it were a fresh idea. But it’s an ideology as old as the hills and twice as rocky. It doesn’t work — it never has, and it never will.
All that remains to be seen is whether he will continue to smile while America’s greatest city crumbles. Or whether he will, like so many failed collectivists before him, turn dark as the hole keeps getting deeper.
