Zohranomics Wins Elections But Won’t Make Housing Affordable

8 July 2025

A magazine writer went looking for an economist to bless Zohran Mamdani’s policies and found one in Massachusetts: Isabella M. Weber.

Unfortunately, Weber overlooked some important facts that someone more familiar with New York would know.

But even as an outsider, she should have known better.

Take her argument that Mamdani’s rent freeze is okay, even though rent control stifles the production of new homes and makes it nearly impossible to find old ones.

“If you only do a rent freeze without ensuring that you also build, I don’t think that’s a great idea,” Weber told writer John Cassidy. “Given the severeness of the affordability crisis in New York City, the combination of a rent freeze and an aggressive build-out of affordable housing is a good idea.”

The University of Massachusetts Amherst associate professor said that is because Mamdani will compensate for near-zero vacancy and lack of private development by building 200,000 affordable apartments.

The problem is, Mamdani cannot build that much social housing, and it would be years before any of those homes hit the market. Meanwhile, the rent freeze would crater the finances of many rent-stabilized buildings, while curtailing private development, which typically must have a sizable number of rent-stabilized units.

Weber is basically saying, “I’m going to eat a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts every day, but don’t worry — in a few years, I will start exercising 10 hours a day.”

Everyone loves doughnuts, just like they love to pay below-market rent. But on the Krispy Kreme diet, by the time you start exercising, you will be obese and diabetic. And working out 10 hours a day is impossible for anyone.

Mamdani’s plan for 200,000 union-built homes at $500,000 apiece is unrealistic for at least three reasons:

The city has never built social housing at that scale. It took decades to build NYCHA’s 177,000 apartments, and that was with ample federal funding, which by law is no longer allowed for that purpose.
Mamdani cannot borrow the $70 billion he wants without state approval, which is unlikely. The state bailed out the debt-ridden city in the 1970s and set up safeguards to prevent exactly the kind of borrowing Mamdani wants to do.
The cost of union-built affordable housing is about $1 million per unit. Even if Mamdani finds $100 billion in his couch, he could only build 100,000 homes with union workers.

Cassidy’s story points out that a “public option” works for some things, such as mass transit. I would include public schools on that list. These examples are not pure socialism, in which the government controls production. Americans can still drive in private vehicles and go to private schools.

But public housing has been a dismal failure in this country, and sending politicians on junkets to Vienna to see how the Austrians do it is not likely to change that.

Mamdani acknowledged late in his campaign that the city needs private development to end the housing shortage. But if he persuades the Rent Guidelines Board to freeze stabilized rents, as he promised, financing new apartment buildings will be even more difficult than it is now.

At the end of Cassidy’s story, Weber seems to admit that what she likes about Mamdani’s plan is not its economics but its politics.

“We are at a moment where the crisis of economic security, of affordability, that comes with basic questions of dignity and identity are being used by the far right in ways that fuel the return of fascist tendencies,” she said, and Zohranomics mobilizes voters to counter that.

Essentially, she is saying, “Our rhetoric is better than yours.” I would say it’s less bad. But it’s still rhetoric.