What Subway History Says About Zohran Mamdani’s Rent Freeze

6 November 2025

I bet Zohran Mamdani loves the new upgrades to Grand Central Terminal.

The mayor-elect should ask himself: Would they have happened if we treated transit stations like he does rent-stabilized apartments?

The MTA just finished a $700 million overhaul of Grand Central, giving the terminal 30 new turnstiles, 38 new or wider staircases and a wider mezzanine outside the entrance for the 4, 5, 6 and 7 trains. It also replaced 10 escalators and 10 elevators.

No such overhaul has happened to a rent-stabilized property since the Mamdani-backed Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 capped rent increases to pay for major capital improvements at 2 percent and at $83 a month for individual apartment improvements.

Meanwhile, the MTA snagged $15 billion from congestion pricing, which it is using to fund renovations across the transit system. Attention, socialists: Stuff costs money. More than taxing the rich would yield.

Some landlords think the state legislature is following socialists’ plan to take over their properties by starving them of revenue. As it happens, that is exactly what the government did to the city’s subways, following a long period of deterioration.

By limiting the fare to 5 cents, it forced the subways’ private operators to defer maintenance — rendering service horribly unreliable — and to eventually go bust. The public takeover was completed in 1940.

The government then did what it wouldn’t allow the private subway companies to do: It doubled the fare to a dime in 1948 — the first increase since 1904.

The parallels with rent stabilization are almost eerie. To recap:

The government capped private subways’ revenue, forcing their decline, bankruptcy and government takeover. The HSTPA, Rent Guidelines Board (which reduced rents for 10 consecutive years relative to inflation) and Mamdani’s promised four-year rent freeze are doing the same for fully rent-stabilized buildings.

To be sure, a sweeping public seizure of buildings is not imminent. They have thousands of owners, not just a handful as the subways did, and every building’s financial distress is different. They would go down one at a time, not all at once, if nothing is done.

It’s likely that something will be done. We just don’t know when and by whom. Even Mamdani might do something.

He won’t back down from freezing the rent (upon taking control of the Rent Guidelines Board in 2028), but he could pull other levers that help owners. He could ask the state to reduce property taxes and to allow landlords to keep the full value of rental vouchers. He could provide low-interest loans for renovations of vacant units.

“The campaign has ended,” tweeted Jay Martin of the New York Apartment Association, “but the battle to save New York’s regulated housing from being squeezed to death is just beginning.”