How Mamdani can bring rents down with a blueprint that really works

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 respon...