A Socialist Took City Hall. He Just Showed You Where the Ceiling Is.
Mamdani froze the rent on a million apartments. The same season, he went to court to block the expansion of a program that pays the rent for the poorest tenants in the city. The gap between those two
On the night of June 25th, New York’s Rent Guidelines Board voted to freeze the rent on roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments for the next 2 years. It was the first time in the board’s history that even 2-year leases got frozen. 6 of the 9 people who voted were appointed by Mamdani himself.
Mamdani called it “a historic victory for New York City tenants.” He was right. This time it was real.
Three months earlier, the same mayor did the exact opposite.
His lawyers filed an appeal to New York’s highest court to overturn a ruling that ordered the city to expand CityFHEPS, a program that pays the rent for people about to be thrown out onto the street. The position in that appeal was almost word for word the position of former Mayor Eric Adams, the position Mamdani had attacked every single day on the campaign trail.
Same man. Same administration. Two opposite actions. This is not a contradiction. It is a straight lesson in what a mayor can touch and what he cannot.
To see it, you have to know that renting in New York is really two separate worlds.
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One world is rent-stabilized housing. About 1 million apartments, a quarter to 40% of the city’s stock, usually older buildings or buildings that took a tax break. How much the landlord can raise the rent each year is not up to the landlord. It is decided by a vote of the Rent Guidelines Board. That is the world the freeze covers.
The other world is market-rate housing, which is everything else. The landlord charges whatever the market will bear. There is no legal ceiling. The freeze does not touch that world by a single dollar.
And the tenants on CityFHEPS? Most of them live in the second world. Stabilized apartments are scarce, and plenty of landlords will not take a tenant paying with a government subsidy. The ones who will are often market-rate landlords, because they can push the rent right up to the CityFHEPS payment cap, a cap that itself climbs every year in step with the federal government’s “fair market rent” number.
That is the whole answer. It is that expanding CityPHEBS was never in his power. Appointing the board that sets stabilized rents was in his power, and that is why the freeze happened. But expanding CityFHEPS costs real money, and the honest way to raise that money is to tax the rich. A New York City mayor cannot do that on his own. That power sits with the state government in Albany, not with him.
In the Bronx there is a man named Juan Figueroa. 57 years old, $33,000 behind on rent, waiting on exactly the CityFHEPS expansion that would have saved him. He does not live in a stabilized apartment. The rent freeze cannot reach him. “He promised this thing,” Figueroa said of the mayor. “The thing people need most help with is paying rent.”
Here is how you tell willpower apart from power. You check whether the person used everything he had, in the place where he actually had it. Mamdani did. Christina Smyth, the landlord representative on the board, quit in protest and said the freeze “was decided last year on the campaign trail.” She was right. Appointing that board was the mayor’s call alone. Expanding CityFHEPS was never his call to make.
Some people will read this far and reach a cheap conclusion. Reformists are useless. Voting is useless.
That conclusion is wrong.
The rent freeze is real. 1 million households will not face a rent hike for 2 years. That is a socialist reformist, a mayor who came up through the DSA, delivering something solid for ordinary people in the one place he controlled. A win like that is worth wanting, and worth defending.
Follow me long enough and you know where I stand. I am not against reformists, least of all the socialist kind like Mamdani. Because he shows you something worth seeing. The moment a reformist gets even a little real power, ordinary people’s lives get better.
But you have to see the other half just as clearly.
He froze the rent because appointing that board was his to do. He could not save Figueroa because raising taxes on the rich was not. That is the whole design. This system will let a socialist run the largest city in the country, and still keep the two things that matter most, the landlord’s income and the rich man’s tax rate, off the table before he ever sits down.
The rent freeze is not the first step toward something bigger. It is the ceiling. It is the most working people are allowed to win while this system stands.
So here is the real question, and it is not whether reformists can push a little harder. It is this. Who decided that the landlord’s income and the rich man’s tax rate are the two things no one is allowed to touch? Somebody made that rule. It is not natural. It is not permanent. And what one group of people made, another group of people can unmake.
What working people are owed is not one rent freeze. It is not a slightly bigger voucher. It is the power to decide who owns the housing, and who this city is actually run for.
Mamdani cannot give them that. The system he agreed to work inside will never give them that.
That will be the conversation we should be talking, right now.
To be fair , it is expanded , but not as what it supposed to be