Mamdani explicitly campaigned on building more, especially housing, so not sure where you got that idea. NIMBYs show up at community board meetings, sure, but your post makes it sound like that's somehow the mayor's fault?
I'm also not sure if you're a New Yorker or not but the NYC EDC remit is a hell of a lot more than just "encourage big business". They run the ferry, for example, and other infrastructure projects
There's pretty consistent reporting that rental building owners are earning considerable returns from rent. Rent freezes are one (of several) ways to encourage building owners to reinvest those returns to build/improve properties.
Whether it'll work at large scale is an unproven experiment (Detroit, Paris, Estonia, and many others all show competing possible futures here), but it doesn't seem hypocritical--not any more than, say, the idea of using high tax rates on businesses to encourage reinvestment of profits to drive growth/hiring/expansion.
How do rent freezes encourage building owners to reinvest? They can't raise the rent to recover the cost of any improvements they make. And new buildings would presumably be at risk of becoming rent controlled which reduces or eliminates profits. From my understanding rent controls just encourage maintenance at the lowest possible level.
Neither do high tax rates on businesses encourage (re)investment. They reduce the reward for any given investment. In combination with tax breaks for investment, that does incentivise investment, but that's not the high tax rates doing that.
In any Mamdani's interview that I've heard him talk about housing, he always talks about short-term solutions like temporary rent freeze and long term solutions of building new housing.
Rent control is just one of many factors that affect an incentive to build. For example (and these are hypothetical numbers just to show the point), if rent control made developers 10 percent less likely to build but easing building restrictions made them 50 percent more likely, it would result in a net gain for building overall.
Rent Control is a settled topic in economics, bar some fringe theorists. It would be impossible for me to explain all the negative externalities that rent control has on both existing and new housing stock in a single comment. I implore you to do some academic reading.
> It would be impossible for me to explain all the negative externalities that rent control has on both existing and new housing stock in a single comment.
The same is true for pricing out 40% of the population.
That has a solution. Build (or permit) more housing where people want to live and the price will go down. Simple.
Rent control destroys all the market incentives that are the point of having housing be private. If you're going to do that you might as well have the government directly own and rent the housing stock itself.
"His strategy uses market-oriented policies — easing building regulations, loosening zoning restrictions and rescuing the city’s crumbling public housing stock through private financing — to advance his social democratic goals of 200,000 affordable homes over the next decade."
He's just not letting it be an excuse to profiteer off existing tenants in existing housing.
If you abolish rent control with the current US housing stock, you make millions of people homeless. I’ve come around to how it has hurt the speed of development but it’s an entrenched policy at this point. You can’t get rid of it until there’s enough housing. The alternative as you allude to is massive public investment in subsidy, whether that’s public housing projects, rent vouchers, or UBI.
How does abolishing rent control make millions homeless? The housing would still be there, just with richer people living in them? It would certainly increase commutes for the working class though
The housing would likely sit empty as richer people are a limited quantity market, and are not usually shopping for the typical quality of a rent-controlled or low-income unit. Meanwhile the working class folk you mention are sleeping in their cars in the city, because a 4 hour long commute one way from the exurbs is not feasible.
I'm not sure what you're trying to imply with this link? As the first line of this article says, Silicon Valley Bank failed. The shareholders were wiped out. (Some people got confused because the Twitter conversation was primarily driven by rich VCs and founders who were depositors of the bank, quite reasonably arguing that they should get their money back if at all possible.)
They're being evicted from their home, but from the landlord's property. It would be the landlord's home if the landlord lived there, but they don't, because they're renting it to the tenant.
That's not true, a number of Jan 6 people were convicted of seditious conspiracy, it's just that those convictions have now been vacated because the coup plotters have now ended up in charge regardless through other means.
Yeah, we're talking about the guy who leased a new car every 6 months in order to avoid having to put a license plate on it, and then parked it in handicap spots, right? Absolute same "rules for thee, not for me" energy
This one is probably popping today because of the simonw post yesterday about using an LLM to basically one-shot port a lib across languages with the help of an extremely robust test suite
This looks like a way to force a few key players to gobble up all the federal dollars by forcing many executive controlled agencies to be force fed these LLM solutions because these same key players cannot sell their wares to the public so they need to steal public money, once again.
The difficulty for any party to want to govern after this is... there is no government. It is all oligarch captured, the candidates are oligarch sponsored, and don't count on the media to sound the siren because, well, you know why.
This is a plane that is never gonna fly again. The only way is to build a new plane, as impossible as that might sound.
Is DOGE still there? The latest reporting [1] I've seen is that it's leaderless and has more or less just been absorbed into other organizations. This aligns with DOGE not posting anything for several months now.
Ugh. I didn't realize until looking at the "US Tech Force" FAQ that USDS is now "United States DOGE Service." Somehow I assumed it had just faded away when all the good people left.
Mamdani explicitly campaigned on building more, especially housing, so not sure where you got that idea. NIMBYs show up at community board meetings, sure, but your post makes it sound like that's somehow the mayor's fault?
I'm also not sure if you're a New Yorker or not but the NYC EDC remit is a hell of a lot more than just "encourage big business". They run the ferry, for example, and other infrastructure projects
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