New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s central promise has been to bring down his city’s cost of living.
But New York’s affordability problems are a result of its own success: Despite slowing population growth, the city’s housing stock and services are still in high demand, pushing prices up. Cities typically get cheaper when people don’t want to live in them anymore — think of Detroit, after its downfall — and not when they’re in high demand and growing.
So the question becomes not whether Mamdani can make New York broadly affordable for everyone. It’s whether he can deliver on reducing costs for the poorest New Yorkers by taxing the richest.
Mamdani promised three key affordability fixes: Free and fast buses, universal childcare, and a rent freeze for rent-stabilized apartments.
Versions of all three have been tried elsewhere, with mixed results. Minneapolis tempered housing costs by making it easier to build; Boston’s free buses have slowed down routes but saved riders money; New Mexico’s universal childcare program is saving families an estimated $12,000 a year — if they can find a spot.
The throughline from these experiments is that they can work as targeted relief, but don’t solve the underlying math of New York affordability on their own. Mamdani wants to pair narrower solutions like a rent freeze with broader ones, like more development and affordable housing.
“Last year, New Yorkers in every borough made their voices heard, and made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that a more affordable City cannot wait,” said Jenna Lyle, Mamdani’s deputy press secretary for education and childcare, in a statement. Lyle highlighted the mayor’s moves toward speeding up affordable housing development, childcare investment, and a new advisor for buses.
But even the targeted pieces of the plan face a basic constraint: funding. Raising taxes is, for the most part, in the hands of the state government and outside the mayor’s control. The governor and legislature have already pushed back on increasing income and corporate taxes.
And unless New York City suddenly becomes undesirable, bringing costs down in a high-demand city is incredibly difficult.
“The record does not favor his success, and the underlying economics are what they are,” said John Ketcham, the director of cities at right-leaning policy think tank the Manhattan Institute.
Here’s how other cities have fared trying out Mamdani’s signature policies.
Free buses might not be as effective as building more lanes
In Boston, riders saved $35 a month on average on three free routes funded by pandemic-era federal aid. But two of those routes became among the city’s slowest. Making buses free increased ridership — but without infrastructure improvements like dedicated bus lanes, commuting on them got worse.
In New York City, a yearlong pilot of five free routes increased ridership, especially among New Yorkers who already used them to get to school or work. Riders with incomes below $28,000 made up the greatest share of both new and existing ridership, suggesting that the gains from free fares concentrate among lower earners.
But bus speeds on the pilot routes worsened during the summer, and the MTA estimated the pilot cost nearly $11 million in lost fares.
Eliminating fares entirely would cost about $652 million a year, according to a 2023 analysis from the Independent Budget Office. By comparison, the City Council projected that building 150 miles of protected bus lanes, a long-delayed city goal to speed up transit times, would cost about $123 million.
“Free buses would not have as transformative or positive an impact as improving the quality of service and the reliability and frequency of service,” said Ketcham.
Making buses free puts more money in low-income commuters’ pockets. But slower buses cost them in other ways. Infrastructure improvements are likely the most viable route to making buses more affordable in the long term; delays won’t eat into potential earnings or disrupt commutes to work, especially for minimum-wage workers. Meanwhile, more targeted reduced fare programs for low-income New Yorkers could provide relief to those who need it most.
Minneapolis’ building reforms were more effective than its neighbor’s rent control
Minnesota’s twin cities are a tale of two housing policies.
In St. Paul, a rent control ordinance that capped increases at 3% didn’t bring down rents — in fact, a Wall Street Journal analysis found that rents there rose faster than in nearby Minneapolis. One study found the policy regressive, with higher-income renters seeing greater absolute benefits. Rent control was eventually walked back for newer builds.
In New York, a rent freeze on the nearly 44% of rental units that are stabilized would keep costs steady, but would put upward pressure on prices for the remaining market-rate tenants.
“We can freeze the rent, but I don’t feel it’s a long-term solution,” said Zhan Guo, a professor of urban planning and transportation planning at New York University. “You can solve the problem, mitigate the problem for the short term — maybe for the next several years — but that’s not the way to solve the problem for the long run. You need to increase the housing supply.”
Meanwhile, St. Paul’s rent cap discouraged new housing supply, dampening both new construction and property values, according to the Journal’s analysis.
“You are not going to have as much supply coming onto the market if investors suspect that they are going to be caught up in rent regulation,” Ketcham said.
Across the river, Minneapolis grew its housing supply with the “2040 plan,” which encouraged denser housing and affordable units; a paper by Middlebury researchers Helena Gu and David Munro estimated that rents and home prices there were 17% to 34% lower than they would have been without the reforms.
“We see [landowners] responded quite strongly to those incentives,” said Munro. “That’s a natural mechanism as to why rental prices grew, but didn’t grow as rapidly as other cities, because there’s more affordable units coming online and keeping a lid on rental prices.”
Mamdani has also pushed to create affordable housing and fast-track development on city property.
Universal childcare is great — if there are spaces available
Mamdani wants universal childcare in New York City; he’s already rolled out a 2-K pilot and expanded 3-K slots. But so far, the state has only committed to funding the first two years of the 2-K program.
In November, New Mexico expanded childcare subsidies from families making at or below 400% of the federal poverty level to everyone. This has saved parents an estimated $12,000 annually — if they can find space in the program.
While subsidies have increased demand, there aren’t enough licensed seats available, said Kate Noble, president and CEO of advocacy organization Growing Up New Mexico. “We have a supply problem,” she said.
From July through mid-December, a period largely before the expansion, the state added only 10 childcare slots, according to Searchlight New Mexico. By year end, about 10% of the 326,000 eligible children were enrolled.
In New York, a 2025 comptroller report found that universal childcare would save families about $420 per child each week, and that around 14,200 mothers could enter the labor force and earn $670 million in total annually.
The appeal is obvious: for families that get access, the savings are substantial. But New Mexico suggests that “universal” doesn’t necessarily mean widely available right away.
The rocky road ahead
The biggest obstacle to all of these ideas is funding. Boston’s free buses have relied on temporary federal aid. New Mexico’s childcare expansion is backed by oil and gas taxes.
Mamdani wants to pay for his programs by taxing the rich — but can’t do that without the governor and state legislature. Hochul has pushed back on increasing corporate taxes and income taxes on high earners, though the two have teamed up to propose a pied-à-terre tax on empty second homes worth over $5 million.
And if Mamdani does raise the money, none of these policies work in isolation. Quick fixes like eliminating bus fares or freezing the rent might boost affordability for lower earners, but likely won’t have the widespread results of more comprehensive policies.
“Even if the mayor accomplishes his childcare and bus program, the vast majority of New Yorkers are going to feel that they’re worse off if housing costs continue to accelerate at the pace they have been since the pandemic,” said Ketcham. City government has the power to freeze the rent overnight, but building new housing is a yearslong endeavor. “You might be able to save New Yorkers $3 on a bus fare, but if their rents are going up 3%, 4% or more every year, they’re going to be materially worse off.”
Read the full article here
