New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board recently approved a zero-percent rent freeze on roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments for both one- and two-year leases, delivering on a central campaign promise of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. At a Journal Live Event, host Ryan Knutson discussed the policy with Emily Eisner, executive director and chief economist of the Fiscal Policy Institute, who spoke in support of the freeze, and Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, who spoke against it.
Eisner’s defense of this lunatic policy is a master class in isolating real problems and then blowing the analysis because she is an economic moron of the precise type that props up Mamdani.
Here are the key claims Eisner advanced:
The difference between a zero-percent freeze and a two-percent increase is “just not that big a deal,” even over four years.
A Moody’s report showed that at most six percent of landlords would face serious risk of default under a multi-year freeze, so the finances of the stabilized stock are basically “okay” and “not as bad as the landlord groups like to say they are.”
The freeze is a practical, non-radical tool that delivers immediate relief to rent-burdened tenants.
Each of these claims collapses under the slightest contact with economic reality. Start with the “not that big a deal” dismissal of a two-percent increase. Operating costs—insurance, property taxes, water and sewer, labor, and mandated code upgrades—keep rising every year. Freezing revenue while costs climb is not a minor adjustment; it is a forced reduction in the owner’s ability to maintain the building. By dictating prices through government force, it also abuses the free market and makes it impossible for investors and homebuilders to plan or construct any new housing. Pretending the gap is trivial is the kind of arithmetic only an academic who never has to meet a payroll or a mortgage can offer.
Next, the Moody’s six-percent figure. Six percent is one out of every sixteen landlords facing serious default risk. That is not a rounding error; these are precisely the investors the city needs to maintain its housing stock, and forcing them into default will economically devastate them while driving their units into disrepair. Worse, the number captures only those headed for outright default. It ignores the far larger group of owners who are already failing to earn any return and are forced to pour their own capital into the property simply to keep the lights on and the elevators running. Declaring the finances “okay” while ignoring both the defaulting owners and the quietly subsidizing ones is not analysis. It is propaganda designed to justify transferring the cost of political affordability onto private property owners, most of which were caused by the policies of Mamdani and his progressive predecessors.
Finally, the claim that the freeze is merely practical short-term relief. What kind of blind partisan talks only about how nice this would be for tenants while completely ignoring the enormous damage it does to landlords and the housing stock at the same time? Price controls do not create housing; they destroy the incentive to maintain and expand it. When half the rental stock is locked at zero while costs rise, owners defer maintenance, leave units vacant, and exit the market. The result is fewer livable apartments, not more affordable ones.
Eisner’s entire defense is the predictable output of someone who treats private property as a public utility available for political extraction. Mamdani pushes the policy; Eisner supplies the economic nonsense that tries to make it sound respectable. Both are wrong, and both are dangerous to the housing stock New York actually needs.
If losing 2% a year compounded for four years is no big deal to landlords, then how can it provide immediate relief to tenants?
Or to put it the other way, if 2% compounded increase is so bad for tenants, why isn't it also bad for landlords?
I really despise idiots like that.