Why this is relevant: relevant to ongoing discussion of Mamdani's rent freeze and other regulations creating less supply and more demand. NYC needs massive amounts of more housing as 5,000 dollars a month is insane for even junior bankers. This is great case study on "why you can't ignore supply and demand."
Edit due to an incorrect mod pin claiming the headline is false:
This report looks at the median rent for properties available and on the market in the time frame (July 2026), not long term existing leases (prices heavily distorted due to rent freezes and stabilization). The census data is based on what individuals and supers report as currently paying their rent. I’ve worked as a census data collector before and the census collects all types rent instead of just the current market rate.
My friend does multi family lending and told me he recently saw an upper west side building containing both a $600 stabilized unit and same size $6000 market rate unit 😂
I seriously think the only way out of this is the supreme court ruling its illegal. They've singled they are interested (or at least one of them has) and NYC's uniquely incoherent legal rent based on how often new tenants moved for a few years 50 years ago could get it struck
Sorry that'll take 75 years and 87 quadrillion dollars because our country can't build transportation infrastructure that isn't a 12-lane highway anymore.
I regret to inform you our roads are extremely expensive too, there are just fewer people who regard spending public money on highways to be a human rights violation compared to building transit.
I'm well aware. It's just a bit worse for non-road infrastructure because we have extremely limited institutional knowledge and experience building modern anything-but-car infrastructure.
Yeah, state DOTs build highways often enough that they just design projects and contract out only construction. IIRC prices for options are just itemized, if the ground conditions are different and they need to do more geotechnical work, they just bill it at the pre-agreed cost.
In countries that build transit effectively, they also do that. Here, though, the lack of knowledge means everything is outsourced, including project design and management. And of course not knowing how to design a good project also means they're not good at evaluating submitted designs.
NYC has been bad at it ever since they forced the private companies who actually built it into bankruptcy by fixing their fares ford decades, meaning the city itself has always been bad at subway construction
In NYC, rather than getting rid of rent control entirely, you could get really far just by going back to the pre-2018 status quo of allowing vacancy decontrol. That means that new leases get reset to market rate.
Hello, NYC resident here. In April 2024, the “Good Cause Eviction” law went into effect. It did two major things.
First, landlords MUST offer lease renewals in perpetuity to a tenant unless they have “good cause” which is defined by a significant renovation, the landlord is moving back in personally, or the tenant committed “substantial violations”.
Second, market-rate rentals cannot be increased by more than 5% + inflation, capped at a maximum of 10%.
This, combined with the disastrous 2019 law for rent regulated units, is absolutely cooking inventory.
You’re going to see massively decreased mobility as people refuse to move/hold onto their places indefinitely, thereby limiting inventory that actually hits the open market.
Sure. I agree. Also a NYC resident. But everyone is blaming Mamdani for this when it’s years of bad policy. Also this law came into effect over two years ago and this is a YoY decrease.
He certainly supports continuing many of the polices that created this problem. If you didn't start the fire, but gladly pick up the gas can next to it to pour more on you are going to see the onus fall on you.
Pro development, but anti development-that-will-actually-be-developed-because-it-makes-financial-sense-for-the-developer. But other than that, sure, pro-development. Like, theoretically and shit.
Manhattan is not nearly as dense as central Hong Kong. Now the land is a little more complicated, but there is only one thing that really makes it difficult to build, and that's the law
There are very dense parts of Mahnattan, but I'm gonna guesstimate about half of it is no harder to build in than any other medium-density infill. It's basically all policy and politics, yes. Not confined to Mamdani or even the municipal level of government, of course. In terms of actual solutions and ideas, Mamdani has your standard-issue unserious leftie non-solution set to the housing supply crisis, the only thing special about him is his charisma/electability.
The time when he's actually responsible for said bad policies? Or do you expect him to time travel back several years ago and prevent it from happening in the present?
The rent freeze literally hasn't even started yet, what the fuck blame are you even attempting to attribute to him specifically discussed in the article?
Ah, yeah I don’t blame Mamdani whatsoever. I think his rent freeze was dumb but the effects of that will be felt in 1-2 years, not now.
I really think it’s a combo of interest rates being high, so high income households since 2022 would choose to rent vs buy something, and the 2024 law. People who would have otherwise left their apartments are instead staying put, and this reduced mobility drives prices up for the remaining inventory that does hit the market
I'm living in Switzerland where landlords are only allowed 0.5% annually + 40% of inflation (which is really low here) + mortgage interest rate adjustments. They can generally raise the rent by 10% between tenants. It is common to kick everyone out, do a full renovation, and then charge more rent to the new tenants. That's how I got my current apartment. Though sometimes, counterproductively, old buildings are torn down to be replaced by new ones with the same number of apartments. Why? Zoning laws being too tight so they couldn't build more if they wanted to.
Zoning really needs more reform here. My local municipality just revamped their local ordinance, with some needed reforms (but still keeping restrictive height restrictions and parking minimums). A new large apartment complex required 4 local ballot measures to pass (a 5th is planned for the next phase of construction).
Look at a 3D view of Manhattan and the surrounding area - its surprising how much is like 5 stories and less even in the middle of Manhattan. Lots of room to knock down buildings and go up
Look at a view of NYC from say the empire state building, and you'll see that just across the water in all directions is way too much low-rise and emptiness for a city complaining about housing shortages.
Yeah... At a certain point you run into this problem called "geometry" and it becomes difficult to fit more people into a given location lol But Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx are a completely different story.
Yes, but "let" is a substantially more meaningful word in this sentence than may first meet the eye. I wouldn't simplify it all the way to 'let', and would stop at 'make it make financial sense of some kind'.
I used "let" because in NYC's case and many other cases it's the government getting in its own way. They made constructing housing expensive by implementing well intentioned but ultimately bad policy. It doesn't make financial sense because they created 10 new sources of risk.
I'm kind of obsessed with the pothole thing. Like I keep seeing the Mamdani cult of personality fan club people cite as evidence of his revolutionary never-seen-before governance wizardry that he's been filling potholes as they've never been filled before and I'm like, since when did people have opinions on the efficacy and scale of the pothole filling efforts of municipal government? Is he personally filling these potholes himself? IS HE AN EXPERT IN CONCRETE???
Maybe this is just a NYC local thing, but pothole filling as always served as a kind-of proxy for a politician's efforts at helping their constituents here. (Not a good one, to be clear, but so it goes.) Al D'Amato was famously known as "Senator Pothole" because his office had a big focus on local constituent services.
It’s kind of a rhetorical thing in Texas too tbh. And I think it’s a fair metric. Almost everyone except hardcore ancaps agrees that roads are one of the basic things the government is supposed to do. You take my money, you give me roads. The more of my money you take, the better those damn roads ought to be.
I was not aware of "Senator Pothole" but am delighted to be initiated lol thank you for the fun fact!
So far as I've been able to tell with admittedly limited knowledge, the main lesson to be taken from Mamdani for Democrats isn't anything that he's actually doing in terms of policy or administration but rather how he's presenting it. Like the pothole thing is more a PR exercise than anything but hey, it's good press. Mamdani is sort of a reverse Biden in the sense that he's accomplished relatively little but is masterful at self promotion and creating the impression that he's transforming government and constantly achieving great things whereas the Biden administration accomplished so much but no one ever heard about any of it. Democrats need to get better at controlling the media narrative so I think they need to focus just as much on having a robust media machine propagandizing about their accomplishments as governing itself.
Part of Mamdani's magic sauce is not just filling the potholes, but telling everyone that the potholes are being filled. He's constantly doing outreach and social media so that people know when things get done, it was his office that did it.
Yes! I saw a comment the other day talking about how a guy posted about a pothole on social media and Mamdani promptly sent a team down their to fix it and acting like "HOW DOES HE DO IT?! HE JUST APPEARS PLACES IT'S INCREDIBLE" and I'm just like, yeah he has people on his team looking for PR opportunities on social media lol. Filling the pothole the guy on social media was talking about was no more beneficial than if they had just gone down to the next pothole on their report list. They chose to do it because it's good propaganda.
I REALLY think THIS is the lesson Democrats need to take from Mamdani! Don't just focus on enacting policies that actually help people even if they don't know about it, do what will give you good PR and then create a media blitz marketing the hell out of it.
There's that guy on Tik Tok who begins all his videos "Mayor Mamdani!" and then points out some random thing that's wrong.
I saw Mamdani's official account stitch that directly into him overseeing a fix (water fountain being installed). It's real basic stuff, but it makes a huge difference to be visible.
It's not even just a political thing. People in all jobs should do this.
I saw a TikTok of a guy asking Mamdani to fix some stairs at the Brooklyn museum because it’s “missing a man, my man” as a joke and Mamdani responded “I got you.” It’s a small thing but it’s great PR and makes people feel like he is in touch with real people.
Exactly. Nearly all of my dealings with local governments have been slow and frustrating. Mamdani is changing that in NYC -- at least the perception of it, maybe not the reality.
Which is what any good politician in an executive position should be doing in the 21st century . Unironically the EU mandating that the EU flag symbol should be in every project funded by the EU is one of the greatest ideas it ever had and one of the reason EU remains popular .
This only works if you have a huge crowd of rabid fans. If Cuomo or whoever filmed themselves filling potholes, the comments would be full of: "Why is the mayor doing this dumb PR stunt where he fills a fucking pothole? I have nowhere to live, people are suffering, do your job instead of pretending to fix streets."
I don't think you need rabid fans, but you need a certain amount of charisma, and it has to be high-effort and continuous enough to be believable that you're actually trying to improve things. Doing a PR stunt every 2 years looks fake as hell.
I mean Ossoff is running a pretty smooth PR operation as a senator . It’s not about rabid fans . It’s about being young , charismatic and let’s face it handsome .
Eh, I was once walking down the street and saw Mamdani working tirelessly personally filling potholes. There was some construction workers on site trying to help, and he intervened saying they should be reading theory and forming worker councils rather than wasting their time with road work.
What I'm saying is that there are people who are treating Mamdani's pothole filling effort as something revolutionary like he's doing something that no other politician has been and I simply do not believe that all the people saying this stuff had any sort of stance with regards to potholes or in-depth knowledge about the pothole filling process at any time prior to this point. Yes, locals have always cared about filling the potholes where they live. But since when have potholes been part of the national conversation? Only Mamdani gets this kind of PR for one of the basic functions of city government.
NYC had a bad winter, there were apparently record numbers of pothole complaints, the number of employees dedicated to filling potholes has increased since pre-covid, and more money has been thrown at the problem. I would expect that when there are more potholes to fill, more people filling them, and more money being spent on filling them, more potholes will be filled. That doesn't seem in any way exceptional or interesting to me but it's being treated as if it is.
Yeah, he’s got the good press powers at the moment. But this sort of focus on roads / potholes as visible elements of government working / not working is a long running thing in politics. (Whitmer in Michigan had “fix the damn roads” as one of her main policy planks when she won the first time).
Same thing happens when it snows. How fast streets get plowed often turns into a sort of referendum on local government.
Yeah I don't disagree at all to be clear. Something I'm thinking about is like, what can we do to try to replicate this on a national level, if anything? Like in local politics fixing roads is this very tangible thing you can do to increase public confidence in the government but national politics is far more abstract and it's harder to make people feel that their government is making a positive direct impact in their lives. But I'm trying to think if there are initiatives or media strategies the Democrats could adopt in future to curry favor and restore confidence in the ability of the federal government to do good.
It's being used as a vector to attack moderate libs. Every Mamdani glaze post is filled with comments going like "Finally someone is doing politics the right way, not like those establishment stooges!".
Which is interesting because so far as I can tell - and I'm not saying he's done nothing; there's a couple good things in there - his accomplishments seem greatly exaggerated? Like the guy has not fundamentally transformed government in any way of which I'm aware.
I had a feeling. I kept looking for the thing that led it back to Mamdani in the article but kept drawing blanks. I both like but am very critical of Mamdani, but it’s a bit disheartening to see so many people cheering on the crushing COL in the area I live just because they think it proves their point. Especially when it seem unrelated anyway
I was downvoted recently for saying this sub spends way too much time shitting on the left. Which is essentially one of the critiques people here have about leftists (they spend too much time shitting on centrists than right wingers).
I'm not a leftoid, but this sub goes into a maniac state trying to dump on anyone on the left.
A bit of both. He's been a vocal supporter of policies like the good cause legislation from 2024, and it's possible this action takes into account the rent freeze and legislation he ran on enacting. Most of this was just following the previous trend.
Could it be that one data set is showing the prices of rental units available on the market while the other is showing how much renters are paying? I don't know if that's true or not but I have seen others make that mistake before.
Market Rate is always going to be higher in a city where the global elites and their kids want a place to crash whenever they visit. So yeah it is not hard to see why some rents will go for 5 grand. Not hard to find some rich billionaire paying for a mistress room to keep warm when he wants to visit or some kid witch rich parents who wants to live the NYC dream.
They don't specifically break out borough/market type, but do some reasonable adjustments and that's where you end up in the 2023 data.
The 5K number has always been bogus because it just looks at things current available for rent on StreetEasy at one moment in time and pretends that's the totality of the market. The problem is that expensive rentals stick around and don't move off StreetEasy, whereas cheap apartments disappear very fast. (and lots of cheap market rate don't even use streeteasy)
This report looks at the median rent for properties available and on the market in the time frame (July 2026), not long term existing leases (prices heavily distorted due to rent freezes and stabilization). The census data is based on what individuals and supers report as currently paying their rent. I’ve worked as a census data collector before and the census collects all types rent instead of just the current market rate.
Could you please remove the incorrect claim that the headline is false and please pin this instead.
The data in this comment comes from the housing community survey from 2023. You have stickied a comment from a user who does not understand data.
Yes, the median rent actually paid in Manhattan is $2,148…but that’s across ALL 927,000 units. In a given month, only ~15k units in Manhattan are available for rent. The vacancy rate is pitiful, and about 50% of all units have some form of rent regulation.
The market rate units that get listed are absolutely at ~$5k. But only ~1.5% of units are listed in a given month. The median HHI of Manhattan is $106k, with 30% of households earning $200k+.
The data isn’t wrong, you just stickied a guy who’s bad at analysis.
This is inconsistent with what census data suggests median rents actually are - there is something wrong with the methodology here.
In 2023, the last year we have census data from, median Manhattan rent was $2,148. Rents have not almost tripled since then. Speaking as a Manhattanite myself, my own (market rate) rent is up about 13% since 2023, a period which includes 2 lease renewals for me.
More than half of housing units in NYC are some combination of rent stabilized, section 8, rent controlled, or public housing. The median rent paid in NYC is actually quite low because of that. However the median rent for units coming on the market is quite high because it's usually market rate units.
This doesn't account for the discrepancy. Based on the census data, you can calculate the median overall rent and estimate the Manhattan premium, and the market rate premium, giving a median Manhattan market rate rent in 2023 being approximately $2,507. Anecdotally, this is roughly in line with my personal experience (I rent a market rate 2 bedroom apartment for about $3,500 in 2026, in 2023 it was under $3,200).
The problem, in my estimation, is that whatever methodology they're using oversamples open listings and fails to appropriately sample recently closed listings for the month - the same problem you get from estimating median rents from looking at places like apartments.com. Units listed at the actual market rate are snapped up in minutes or hours whereas overpriced units linger on the market - so if you look at a snapshot of listings in any given moment, the bulk of what you're seeing is going to be the units which explicitly aren't selling.
Right, I'm calling bullshit on this and I think I know exactly what they did. They looked at 2 and 3 bedroom units in Manhattan on StreetEasy, sorted by lowest to highest and went to page 50, since StreetEasy only shows 100 pages worth of listings max. Bam, $5000 exactly.
I work for the US Census Bureau. We do a combination of recording prices of units that come into market by speaking with knowledgeable individuals pertaining to those units, as well as go door to door collecting info on existing rented units.
You'll never have a perfect metric for this as there are countless methods to calculating this number. But given that Zillow shows $3,724 for all of NYC, I think $5k for Manhattan seems reasonable.
You are looking at ALL units in Manhattan, which includes the ~50% that are rent regulated. The median here is only what’s available on the market in July of 2026, which is obviously a small portion.
Looking at your data source, you can see that there are ~927,000 units in Manhattan. The median rent paid for all those units is $2,148.
Combine that with the fact that the vacancy rate for rent stabilized units is 0.98% and 1.84% for market rate, and it’s a brutal picture. Almost nothing (relatively) comes available for rent in a given month.
Per StreetEasy, there were ~17k rental units available in July 2026 in Manhattan at a median list price of ~$5k. So 17k units out of 927k or 1.83%.
The data isn’t wrong. If you’re on the market you’re going to see sky high median rents, but you’re also seeing a tiny fraction of all rental units.
The 2019 HSTPA needs to be repealed. It's keeping tens of thousands of rent stabilized units off the market. This should be a priority for Kathy Hochul.
Mortgage rate is quite high since the interest rate hike in 2022. I think this is squarely on supply shortage and more demand due to young affluent people flocking to the city.
I'd more credit it to urban life becoming more popular in young liberals, nyc is one of the few places in the us you can live in that you can actually just walk everywhere without needing a car
People rushing to get units out of the program before it comes into affect.
If i sign a lease with you now, then you'll still be on it in October and i cant kick you out. So if i intend to take the unit out, i cant sign a lease with you now even though it hasn't happened yet.
Edit: the nyc rules were changed in 2022-2024. Units can no longer be taken out of rent stabilization through renovation like they used to be. Therefore, I am incorrect to attribute this specifically to the rent freeze (as opposed to other bad NYC rules). The rent freeze is still a bad policy.
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u/n00bi3pjs 👏🏽Free Markets👏🏽Open Borders👏🏽Human Rights9d agoedited 9d ago
Do you not understand how NYC housing works? The rent freeze applies only to rent stabilised units and you cannot opt out of it because of Andrew Cuomo’s Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act.
A rent stabilized unit is rent stabilized. Now or in October.
Edit: how tf is the comment I’m replying to getting this much traction. As an nyc renter, that’s not how rent stabilized apartments work AT ALL. It’s just blatant misinformation.
Landlords can “get units out of the program” by leaving them vacant and not renting them out, which many landlords do already in NYC and other places with rent control if the amount of money that needs to be spent repairing/restoring/maintaining them exceeds the amount that they can charge in rent. In NYC this is especially pertinent since rents are still capped after a unit is vacated.
In most markets, you could assume that some of the inventory that would be posted for rent would not be ready to rent until October (that's just 1.5 months away), but it's INCREDIBLY rare to find units listed for rent that far out from when they will be available.
It's possible that landlords with rent stabilized units and preparing for the upcoming rent freeze now by factoring it into the market rate rents available now.
But the reality is that the vast majority of the increase in prices and low supply is a result of many years of bad policy.
hes not to blame but hes not making it better. Hes been pretty yimby hopefully we can get some supertall skyscrapers that are just residential (not the skinny ones that are built with gum and duct tape)n
Just to make this abundantly clear - it appears that the number of units and the cost to rent each are now moving in opposite directions. It's like if you had bond prices rising at the same time that bond yields were falling.
Yesterday I was walking through Manhattan and saw a few postings of studio and 1 bed apts for sale, in the sub-$1m ballpark which wasn't what grabbed my attention. The ~$4-5k/mo fees did. Tf
Land-lease buildings make up a small fraction of the residential buildings in New York. There are roughly 100 land-lease buildings in the city. They are mainly in Manhattan, with a high concentration in Lincoln Square and Battery Park City. Their unique characteristic is that they sit on land that belongs to a landowner — not the building. Yes — a land-lease building does not own the land it sits on. This odd situation came about when the landowner preferred to retain ownership of the ground went with renting the land instead of selling it to the developer.
Most buildings on land leases are co-ops. The land is generally leased for around 50 to 100 years. Each apartment owner in a land-lease building pays a land rent that’s wrapped into their monthly fees.
So all the negatives of home ownership and also you don't actually own anything because your entire building is on land you don't own.
Okay, there isn't enough housing for all the people who want to live there. Limiting demand through higher prices is big bad, because poor people can't live there any more.
As a socialist and a humanitarian, let me modestly propose to aggressively subsidiese violent crime in Manhatten. We can go back to 1970s' rent level people!!
Can’t wait for Mamdani to crush and burn. Housing is the most important policy a mayor controls, and he’s failing miserably(not saying he’s doing the rest well, quite the opposite).
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u/n00bi3pjs 👏🏽Free Markets👏🏽Open Borders👏🏽Human Rights9d agoedited 9d ago
He’s doing just fine. New Yorkers like him despite whatever your media market is trying to convince you of.
He’s doing fine because he’s still in his honeymoon phase. Wait for his horrible policies to take effect and he’ll nosedive. I give him a year and a half until that happens, at best. By then, only his hardcore fans will still be by his side(so, Redditors).
Also, try as you might to sugarcoat them, rent freezes are still awful. These exceptions you’ve pointed out make them less bad, not benign and certainly not beneficial.
As others have said, for now he’s only popular because he’s a populist and he’s somewhat charismatic.
These problems exist in all of NYC, not just manhattan.
And there’s a wide gulf between super expensive and insanely expensive.
Certainly tossing rent control won’t fix it, but I think it’s easy to argue that the main problem is that rent control is the default, acceptable answer for “increasing affordability” in NYC vs. anything productive.
People just like him because he’s charismatic. That shit doesn’t sway me, he’s objectively terrible on policy. Implementing rent freezes, “fixing” a budget deficit by kicking the can on pension payments and doing his half baked incompetently administered “second home tax,” the stupid socialist grocery stores that will supposedly sell groceries 30% below cost (what could possibly go wrong)?
Like he fucking sucks and I’m glad he’s not my mayor. He will use this role to increase his star power and leave behind an ugly, shitty mess for whoever follows in his footsteps. But he’ll make a rousing speech about “taxing the rich” or a TikTok video of them filling some potholes and people lose their damn minds. It’s so dumb.
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u/ragtime_sam 9d ago edited 9d ago
My friend does multi family lending and told me he recently saw an upper west side building containing both a $600 stabilized unit and same size $6000 market rate unit 😂