Removing tiny pieces of red tape (a permit to sell ice cream) is a token gesture when he decided to install Lina Khan as Chair Of New York City Economic Development. Her entire reputation is built on being incredibly hostile to business.
General NIMBY-ism within the city combined with a ED chair who hates big business does not seem to bode well for the success of large projects.
She also failed to secure wins when suing most big businesses because their strategy and evidentiary standards were subpar. Her ideological positions haven't really held up to court scrutiny.
And it couldn't possibly be that courts also have ideological bents, right?
Like the SCOTUS that decided Biden couldn't forgive student loans because it exceeded his authority, but that Trump could try to dissolve the entire department that manages them?
Do you really consider "noncompetes bad" to be an ideological obsession?
Mamdani explicitly campaigned on building more, especially housing, so not sure where you got that idea. NIMBYs show up at community board meetings, sure, but your post makes it sound like that's somehow the mayor's fault?
I'm also not sure if you're a New Yorker or not but the NYC EDC remit is a hell of a lot more than just "encourage big business". They run the ferry, for example, and other infrastructure projects
There's pretty consistent reporting that rental building owners are earning considerable returns from rent. Rent freezes are one (of several) ways to encourage building owners to reinvest those returns to build/improve properties.
Whether it'll work at large scale is an unproven experiment (Detroit, Paris, Estonia, and many others all show competing possible futures here), but it doesn't seem hypocritical--not any more than, say, the idea of using high tax rates on businesses to encourage reinvestment of profits to drive growth/hiring/expansion.
How do rent freezes encourage building owners to reinvest? They can't raise the rent to recover the cost of any improvements they make. And new buildings would presumably be at risk of becoming rent controlled which reduces or eliminates profits. From my understanding rent controls just encourage maintenance at the lowest possible level.
Neither do high tax rates on businesses encourage (re)investment. They reduce the reward for any given investment. In combination with tax breaks for investment, that does incentivise investment, but that's not the high tax rates doing that.
In any Mamdani's interview that I've heard him talk about housing, he always talks about short-term solutions like temporary rent freeze and long term solutions of building new housing.
Rent control is just one of many factors that affect an incentive to build. For example (and these are hypothetical numbers just to show the point), if rent control made developers 10 percent less likely to build but easing building restrictions made them 50 percent more likely, it would result in a net gain for building overall.
Rent Control is a settled topic in economics, bar some fringe theorists. It would be impossible for me to explain all the negative externalities that rent control has on both existing and new housing stock in a single comment. I implore you to do some academic reading.
> It would be impossible for me to explain all the negative externalities that rent control has on both existing and new housing stock in a single comment.
The same is true for pricing out 40% of the population.
General NIMBY-ism within the city combined with a ED chair who hates big business does not seem to bode well for the success of large projects.