Unsurprisingly, Zohran Mamdani has absolutely no idea how economy works

Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York City, and not only is he very openly and brazenly socialist, but he ran his campaign on very socialist promises, like promising free public transport and free food, and to "tax the rich".

Unsurprisingly, when the actual reality of the economy of the state of New York hit, it turned out that creating his Socialist Utopia isn't actually as easy as he promised. He can't increase income tax (because that's decided at the state level, not at the city level, and the New York State Senate has clearly indicated that they have zero intent in raising income taxes), running free public transport actually requires money that the city doesn't have, and trying to build new state-owned Socialist grocery stores is not only enormously expensive but also very inefficient, and would be a constant money sink. (Such a construction project is also likely to last longer than his 4-year term as mayor. It assumes that he will be eternally re-elected.)

So what did he do? Well, he raised taxes that the city is legally allowed to raise. In this case, property tax. And what do you know, rich people and businesses started leaving the city, and rent started soaring for everybody, which hurt the poorest citizens the most. The exact opposite of what his Social Utopia was supposed to do.

So what did his administration do recently to combat this? A law-enforced two-year rent freeze. No rental apartment is allowed to raise their rents for two years.

He quite clearly just has absolutely no idea how economy works. He is an absolute moron. How on earth did he even get to that position of power?

His attitude seems to be that he thinks that rental apartment companies are just raising their rents because they are so greedy, exploiting the people, and thus the government has to intervene. He is completely ignoring the fact that rents have been soaring because of his property tax increases, the overall inflation of the country (which is still pretty high, at about 4.2%), and the economy as a whole. Rental apartment companies and owners have no choice but to increase rents or else they will just go out of business.

So what happened? These rental companies now just don't have the funds to keep apartments on the market. That's because every apartment is a running cost for the company and, especially, when an inhabitant moves out, the company is required by law to invest in renovations to bring the apartment up to the latest building codes (obviously the older the freed apartment is, the more expensive the legally mandated renovations will be.)

Indeed. There is right now a substantial amount of rental apartments in New York City that are uninhabited and not legally allowed to be rented because they are not up to building code. They just remain empty and unused, and there's no incentive for the rental companies to even try to renovate them. 

So by freezing rents Mamdani has now worsened the housing crisis because there are less apartments on the market, and rental companies can barely make ends meet even with the apartments that are still being rented. All this while inflation and the economy in general keeps raising costs.