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In his inaugural address Thursday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised that his administration “will strive each day to ensure that no New Yorker is priced out of any . . . basic necessities.”
How he’ll actually pull that off remains a mystery.
Last week, a journalist with New York magazine asked Mamdani to give an example of a city that had successfully lowered its cost of living — and got crickets in response.
(“None sprang to mind,” as the reporter tactfully phrased it.)
It’s striking that a candidate who ran almost entirely on affordability can’t offer a single model to emulate.
But let’s give our new mayor the benefit of the doubt: Greater housing affordability is within reach — if he follows the right examples.
Lowering rents happens via two fundamental paths.
A city can reduce demand by becoming a less attractive place to live, or it can increase housing supply by making new construction financially viable.
The first approach is the policy equivalent of cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face.
It happened before, when decades of fiscal irresponsibility led to New York City’s effective bankruptcy in 1975 and painful cuts to services, including the NYPD.
Rents were within reach because few people wanted to live in a city in such distress.
Today, NYC’s housing affordability challenges are largely the result of policy choices that make construction more difficult and expensive than necessary.
But good news: Many American cities have made tangible progress in lowering rents.
They’ve done so by loosening zoning and other land-use restrictions governing private housing construction.
Consider Austin, Texas, the bluest big city in the red Lone Star State.
In the wake of the COVID pandemic, Austin experienced an extraordinary demand surge as workers and firms relocated from high-cost coastal areas.
Rents began rising rapidly across the city and its surrounding suburbs.
Rather than deny the problem or attempt to regulate it through rent controls, Austin responded by loosening long-standing constraints on housing supply.
Starting in 2023, the City Council revised its zoning code to eliminate parking minimums, permit up to three-family homes on lots previously restricted to single-family use, and reduce minimum lot sizes.
As a result, Austin added housing at nation-leading rates.
In 2025, it built 15,000 units within the city limits and 26,700 in the metro area, including large numbers of two- and three-family homes in neighborhoods that were previously zoned for single-family units.
Compare that to New York City, which normally builds roughly 25,000 units per year, despite having a population about eight times larger than Austin’s.
Since peaking in the summer of 2023, Austin rents have fallen by more than 22%.
Even in the most competitive segments of the market — studio through two-bedroom units — rents have dropped 6.6% since November 2024.
Now Austin is the nation’s most affordable rental market, according to Realtor.com.
Austin isn’t alone in achieving affordability: Sarasota, Fla. saw average rents fall by nearly 43% from January 2024 to January 2025, after taking similar steps to promote housing supply.
Rent controls, by contrast, have a consistent history of distorting housing markets and discouraging more supply.
Gotham’s rent-stabilized housing stock is rapidly deteriorating and at increasing risk of default or bankruptcy as costs outpace allowable rent increases.
It’s basic economics: When more housing is built, residents have more options — and landlords must compete for tenants, placing downward pressure on rents.
New York could achieve similar results.
The city has no shortage of capital or developers willing to build.
The question is whether Mayor Mamdani will encourage the private sector to help him achieve the affordability he seeks.
In a recent Manhattan Institute paper, my colleague Eric Kober outlined a series of pro-supply steps compatible with Mamdani’s democratic-socialist worldview.
These include further repeals of off-street parking requirements, allowing redevelopment for sites now used exclusively for retail, leveraging the mayor’s new powers under the recently passed charter revisions to map higher-density R5D zones, and more.
State law also requires years-long, enormously expensive environmental reviews for local discretionary actions like zoning changes — even though residential rezonings rarely produce novel environmental impacts.
Mamdani should urge his former colleagues in Albany to exempt residential rezonings in the city from environmental review.
These moves would create greater certainty and lower development costs, spurring housing growth that can help New York achieve results like Austin’s.
In his inauguration address, Mamdani vowed to govern “expansively and audaciously.”
But no matter how boldly he or his government acts, nobody can defy the laws of supply and demand.
If the mayor truly wishes to make New York City more affordable, cities like Austin offer a proven blueprint — if he’s willing to build on it.
John Ketcham is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute.