New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani swept to victory Tuesday evening on a platform of affordability, anchored by a plan to freeze rents across nearly 2 million rent-stabilized apartments.
But economists, universally, hate rent control. In a 2012 poll of top economists, just 2% agreed that rent-control laws have had “a positive impact” on the supply and quality of affordable housing. The Nobel laureate Richard Thaler even quipped in the survey that the next question should be: “Does the sun revolve around the Earth?”
