Democrats' Affordability Whining: The Height of Hypocrisy

Democrats howling about New York’s affordability crisis are the biggest hypocrites in politics—their endless meddling with rent controls, sky-high taxes, bloated public payrolls, and minimum wage hikes are exactly what turned this city into an unaffordable economic black hole where working folks can’t catch a break.

Take rent stabilization, a sacred cow for leftists like Zohran Mamdani, who just froze rents on a million units while promising 200,000 more “affordable” homes subsidized by taxpayers. But economists from across the spectrum agree: rent control slashes housing supply by 10-15% because landlords stop building or maintaining units when profits vanish. Every time New York has ramped up rent stabilization, it’s driven up overall rents and pulled apartments out of the housing stock. In NYC, it jacks up unregulated rents by 22-25%, as confirmed by various studies, because of the smaller supply of apartments chasing higher demand. And it turns buildings into slums since there’s no incentive or money for landlords to make improvements on apartments whose rents are not allowed to rise to cover the cost of the improvements.

Then there’s the $17 minimum wage downstate, set to index to inflation in 2027, with Mamdani pushing for $30 by 2030. That forces businesses to cut jobs or hours—New York’s own rent control studies show it hikes unemployment by over four percentage points among stabilized tenants because the lower rents reduce their incentive to seek work. Add in outrageous public sector deals, where city employees and MTA workers rake in pay levels far above private sector equivalents for similar skills—in addition to overtime that averages $100K+ for some. And overdone welfare benefits cost billions more than the private sector would ever dream of paying. No wonder taxes are crushing: NYC’s top 1% of earners foot 50% of the bill, but over a million residents fled New York since 2020, with 137,000 bolting in 2024-25 alone, mirroring California’s 216,000 loss last year. And the state’s tax hounds chase them down with audits rifling through phone records and even vet bills to claw back every dime.

Instead of making new housing affordable by fixing the root problems—like scrapping rent controls and curbing union bloat—Governor Hochul’s “Housing Compact” to build 800,000 units just throws taxpayer money at inflated costs, paying inflated union labor to construct overpriced “affordable” housing that’s only cheap because it’s subsidized by the rest of us. As the Cato Institute has hammered home for decades, these policies kill incentives, balloon costs, and drive out the productive, leaving us with perpetual crises. I’ve been saying for 40 years: cap public contracts at private sector levels, scrap rent controls, and let free markets work—or watch more New Yorkers vote with their feet, taking their tax dollars south.