Rent control did not cause New York’s housing crisis — eight decades of zoning-driven scarcity did. In History Shows Why Mamdani’s Rent-Control Scheme Won’t Work, National Review’s Daniel J. Flynn argues that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s freeze on one- and two-year leases will deepen the shortage by scaring off landlords and builders, and summons Milton Friedman and George Stigler’s 1946 pamphlet Roofs or Ceilings? as the historical proof. The pamphlet is genuine. The diagnosis is wrong.
I should concede the kernel, because it is real. When rent is set below what it would clear at, individual landlords do face arithmetic problems, and the historical record on price controls in tight markets is genuinely mixed. Flynn is not making it up — Friedman and Stigler articulated it well, and the National Association of Real Estate Boards evidently liked it well enough to distribute half a million condensed copies. That tells you whose case they were making.
The piece collapses because it treats one piece of the puzzle as the whole. New York City’s housing shortage is a supply crisis, and the thing actually stopping new units from getting built is not the rent cap. It is the rulebook. The 1916 zoning resolution, the 1961 rewrite, the floor-area and height limits, the not-in-my-backyard vetoes, the mandatory parking minimums, the landmark designations that cover huge swaths of Manhattan — these are what stop new units from being built. Rent regulation covers about a million apartments out of roughly 3.4 million rental units citywide, and has existed in some form since New York’s first rent laws in 1920. In the three-quarters of a century since national rent control ended in 1949, the city has added millions of housing units without its rent-stabilized stock going to mass abandonment. The buildings are still there.
Flynn’s other centerpiece is a June 2026 Manhattan median rent of $5,295, which he treats as proof the freeze failed. The freeze cannot have produced a number that pre-dates it. It covers leases signed between October 1, 2026 and September 30, 2027. The $5,295 figure is what tenants were already paying or being quoted before any new policy. What that number actually shows is the underside of Flynn’s argument: $5,295 for a one-bedroom is not a market signal to builders. It is an eviction notice to working tenants. The freeze is the only thing stopping it from rising again next year.
The second piece of the puzzle is the one Friedman and Stigler forgot, and that Flynn skips too: where rent-stabilized buildings do deteriorate, it is rarely because the cap is starving them. The cash that pays for the boiler, the elevator, the lobby lights is being eaten one floor down, by the mortgage. These buildings have been bought and sold — over and over — at prices based on whatever rent they pull in, and each sale loads a bigger mortgage onto the building. The rent pays for the superintendent. The mortgage is what knocks the building over. A rent freeze does not change what is happening one floor down.
The complaint that “freezing the rent does not freeze my mortgage” is, in the most literal sense, true. It is also a complaint about the mortgage, not about the freeze. Lifting the freeze would mostly push the next sale price higher, and the next buyer would take on a bigger loan. It would not, on its own, fix the boiler.
Flynn treats supply as if it were the only thing that matters, and then reaches back to a 1946 pamphlet written about a wartime housing emergency — Depression and wartime construction freezes that ended abruptly with the postwar boom — and treats it as a guide to a city that has steadily under-built for forty years in a peacetime economy. The honest version of the story: New York under-built somewhere on the order of half a million homes between 1990 and 2020. Wages for the bottom three quintiles stagnated. Those two facts, not the freeze, are the shortage. Flynn’s own essay cites a “worsening inequality” outcome from the original Stigler–Friedman argument and then refuses to follow the implication. Inequality in housing is not solved by removing ceilings on rents.
This is the part where I am supposed to say the free market will provide. It will not. Markets are wonderful at producing restaurants and sneakers. They are catastrophic at producing chemotherapy and they are no great shakes at producing housing in a city where every parcel is zoned into a corner. New York’s housing shortage will not be cured by Friedman, by Mamdani, or by letting landlords evict en masse. It will be cured by building — a lot — and by getting serious about who owns what gets built.
The strongest point Flynn makes is the supply point, and he deserves the credit for it. A rent freeze without a serious building program will not, on its own, end the shortage. Landlords cannot meet mortgage payments out of frozen receipts. Those are real constraints and they deserve real policy responses — a capital fund for small landlords facing hardship, a tax abatement tied to long-term stabilization, fast-track permitting for affordable projects. A freeze plus a building program is not the same policy as a freeze alone, and the freeze Mamdani passed is the first half of that, not the whole thing.
Here is what already works. Vienna, in a city a fraction of New York’s size, runs a social-housing system in which about three-fifths of residents rent from limited-profit cooperatives or the city itself — in buildings the city has zoned to actually allow housing. The rent line pays for the boiler, and the books stay in the black. The waiting lists exist; the housing exists; the rents exist; the city works. The model is public, cooperative, and private ownership running in combination, with zoning and finance rules that make supply follow demand instead of strangling it. None of this requires the gulag or strip-mining the landlords. It requires treating housing as the kind of thing an economy is for — not a thing to play leverage games with.
Flynn closes by quoting Bill Levitt: “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist.” That is not an argument about rent control. It is a confession that the alternative to a working rental market is to turn every renter into a homeowner — and that the unspoken assumption in our housing policy is that the people who rent are not quite the same people as us. Friedman himself, in the 1971 Newsweek column Flynn cites, said he wanted New Yorkers to behave like grapefruit consumers. Half a century later we tried it. The fruit is still expensive.
If you want to know why a New Yorker’s rent keeps rising, do not start with the rent cap. Start with the zoning code. Start with the leveraged buyout of the building on your block. Start with who owns the units, who owns the debt, and what they are doing with the cash. Then — once you have named what is actually breaking — build the thing Vienna already proved can work.
The build looks like this. As-of-right zoning on every lot within a quarter mile of every subway station. A city construction authority that issues bonds and builds mixed-income housing on public land at cost. A right of first refusal for tenants when buildings go up for sale. Wage growth that closes the gap between what a service job pays and what a market-rate unit costs. None of that requires dismantling rent stabilization. All of it requires doing the opposite of what the last forty years did.