EDITORIAL: The warmth of collectivism

The socialist now running New York City recently hailed a “rent freeze” on 1 million apartments. Not surprisingly, it didn’t take long for the laws of supply and demand to prevail over fantasyland thinking.

The New York Post reports that the average rent of an open Manhattan apartment recently hit $6,655 a month, up 10 percent from a year ago. “An average studio is now going for more than four grand,” the Post reports. “You’ll have to plunk down more than $12,000 every first of the month if you want three bedrooms.”

The median rent is $5,295 and has climbed in both June and July.

A major factor for these increases is Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rent freeze, set to be implemented on Oct 1. While the freeze covers about a quarter of the city’s housing stock, there remain — for now — more than 1 million market-rate units. Because tenants in rent-controlled apartments have little incentive to leave, the freeze pushes up prices for those units that aren’t subject to the mayor’s whims.

“Landlords who know their rent-stabilized units are about to be locked in place,” the Post reports, “are padding rents on their free-market apartments now to cover the gap.”

Other interventions in the market have also creating problems. “When a longtime rent-stabilized tenant finally moves out,” the Post notes, “2019 state ‘reforms’ make it unaffordable for landlords to bring the unit up to code, so even vacated apartments can’t get offered to new tenants. All of this makes the city’s ‘rent inequities’ even worse, with would-be newcomers facing the most ridiculous rents while the ‘haves’ already here get an ever-better break.”

Gary Malin, chief operating officer of The Corcoran Group, told the Post that ignorant politicians are to blame. “Misguided New York City and state legislation … have curtailed the supply of rental housing,” he said. “This has caused demand to build up to a boiling point and pricing for available apartments to reach all-time highs. Legislators seem to care more about optics versus the actual impact of their policies.”

To further highlight New York City’s housing dysfunction, Reason magazine reports that the city has 57,000 rent-controlled “zombie apartments” — about 5.6 percent of the regulated stock — that sit empty because it would cost landlords “more to repair and maintain than they could legally recover in rent.” Further discouraging investment, it can take 15 months for a New York City landlord to legally evict a tenant who stops paying rent.

It’s true many of these pathologies predate Mr. Mamdani. Yet the young mayor and his comrades remain so committed to their ill-advised ideology that they are incapable of recognizing economic reality and are instead intent on making things even worse. Welcome to the warmth of collectivism.