Election Day
What races in New York City, New Jersey, and Virginia can tell us about the future of housing policy.
Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. As this Tuesday also happens to be an Election Day, this week's newsletter takes a look at the races and referendums that will have the biggest impact on housing policy in the coming years. That includes:
- New York City's mayoral race, where we investigate whether Zohran Mamdani, the candidate of "freeze the rent," can also be the candidate of housing supply.
- Also in New York, we look at three proposed charter amendments on the ballot that aim to streamline housing production…whether or not the city council agrees.
- Lastly, we have a look at the gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia, and what they have to say about how to make housing more affordable.
Can the 'Freeze the Rent' Mayor Really Be the Champion of Housing Supply?
Today, New Yorkers go to the polls to vote on the next mayor. If polling is to be believed, New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani will win a comfortable victory over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Swila.
Given some of the positive comments he's made about the need to speed up permitting and boost private housing production, yes in my backyard (YIMBY) housing supply advocates can plausibly see a Mamdani victory as the best result for new housing, despite the self-described socialist's promise to "freeze the rent."
Rent Free Newsletter by Christian Britschgi. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.
Cuomo has said he wants to roll back portions of the recently passed City of Yes citywide upzoning plan. Sliwa has opposed City of Yes from the beginning as a developer giveaway.
In a provocative essay over at The Atlantic, Rogé Karma argues that Mamdani is the best candidate for housing because of his ardent support for rent control, not despite it.
While accepting the mainstream view that rent control reduces investment in new housing supply and/or building upkeep, Karma argues that providing immediate relief to renters through price controls makes them politically more supportive of necessary new construction.
Rent control, he notes, voter surveys show that rent control is very popular. A recent study of Berlin tenants found that those in rent-controlled units looked more favorably on new construction.
The basic theory is that if rent-controlled tenants are less worried about being priced out, they'll be less likely to oppose new market-rate construction on anti-gentrification grounds.
"Rent control could be very useful to a politician seeking to woo voters, and to make residents more open to new housing development," he writes.
YIMBY activists quoted in the article likewise assert that rent control policies and tenant protections have helped quiet opposition to their housing supply initiatives.
Mamdani also made this exact case to Karma in an interview, saying that "it's important that when a New Yorker sees housing constructed in their neighborhood, they know that this is actually part of a larger housing plan" that includes rent control and eviction restrictions.
It's an interesting thesis, but on closer inspection, I don't think it makes much sense.
While the attitudes of Berlin tenants to a brief, quickly reversed rent freeze enacted in 2020 are interesting, we have plenty of homegrown examples of rent control's impact on American urban politics.
The alleged link between robust price controls and pro-supply policies is largely absent here in the states.
The most obvious example would be New York City, which has long had rent stabilization. In 2019, the New York Legislature enacted a law that made the city's rent regulation regime arguably the most restrictive in the country.
Notably, the New York Legislature did not follow up on that law with a whole bunch of state-level zoning reforms. The Empire State lags far behind California and Texas when it comes to passing pro-supply legislation.
Various efforts to craft a housing "grand bargain" of state-mandated upzonings with universal rent controls (deceptively called "good cause eviction") have failed.
In 2024, the New York City Council did pass the "City of Yes for Housing Opportunity" plan, which upzoned neighborhoods across the city. The general assessment of the reform is that it was a productive, but modest, liberalization of the zoning code.
Supposing that one could draw a straight line from the 2019 rent law to City of Yes, one has to wonder if it's worth trading a modest upzoning for an extremely costly rent control law that's pushing more and more buildings into financial insolvency every day.
Even with the 2019 law, we're still being told that the city needs more rent control in order to get people on board with supply-side reforms.
Looking beyond New York City, examples of rent control begetting pro-supply housing politics are few and far between.
Los Angeles and San Francisco both have legacy rent stabilization schemes. Neither could be described as a hotbed of radical YIMBY policymaking.
Los Angeles politicians have fought tooth and nail against this year's most far-reaching upzoning bills in the state Legislature. San Francisco is on the cusp of passing a modest, citywide upzoning policy after years of state pressure to do so or completely forfeit their zoning powers.
It's true that California, Oregon, and Washington have passed both statewide rent control schemes and a long list of YIMBY reforms. It's not obvious that former policies begat the latter.
California passed a statewide rent control policy in 2019 and then promptly rejected a statewide transit-oriented development bill in 2020.
Washington passed rent control in 2025, alongside more supply-side reforms. But the state also passed a sizable housing supply package in 2023, two years before it enacted rent control. Seattle has been a leader of local upzoning, despite being forbidden by state law from adopting rent control.
Only Oregon's timeline of reforms neatly fits Karma's thesis. In the early months of 2019, the state Legislature passed a rent control law before passing a statewide "middle housing" law a few months later.
This example has to be contrasted with the successful record of zoning reform in Texas and Montana, both of which remain rent control-free.
In short, the political case for rent control seems weak. Even if it weren't, the practical downsides of rent control remain.
It generally seems like a bad idea to trade policies intended to increase housing supply for policies that reduce housing supply.
The Palisades fire in Los Angeles destroyed a lot of homes. It's also encouraged state and local officials to embrace emergency waivers of various permitting and environmental regulations.
Should the conclusion be that we should embrace well-designed wildfires to build political support for regulatory streamlining?
To the degree that tenants' fears of being priced out need to be assuaged in order to build political support for zoning reform, there are lots of other policies besides rent control that could do that job.
In their landmark paper showing the negative impact of rent control on rental housing supply in San Francisco, researchers Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian propose the alternative policy of giving tenants government-funded subsidies or tax credits as a form of insurance against rising rents.
Whatever one thinks of that policy, it would at least not destroy some housing units in order to build political support for creating others.
New York's Housing Questions
If New York voters are feeling glum about housing policy under any prospective mayor, they do at least have the option of voting for more housing directly.
Also on the city's November ballot are three proposed charter amendments, Questions Two, Three, and Four, that would limit the City Council's ability to disapprove individual housing projects and zoning changes.
Question Two would cut the city council out of the process of approving some affordable housing projects in need of zoning or other regulatory relief. New York City's current Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP) gives the city council the power to review, modify, and even disapprove projects that need zoning changes.
That could speed up the approval of a lot of projects, because, as Nolan Gray notes on his Substack, "zoning is so restrictive in New York City, most new housing developments require some sort of ad hoc relief in order to start construction."
Question Three would likewise deprive the city council of its power to review zoning changes that would allow for smaller housing projects and minor infrastructure projects.
And for projects still subject to city council review, Question Four would create an affordable housing appeal board, consisting of the mayor, the city council speaker, and the affected borough president, that could override the city council's disapproval of projects.
The three questions are obviously intended to speed up housing approvals. They're also meant to route around the current city council practice of rejecting projects that are opposed by the member whose district they'd be built in.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the City Council has been pulling out all the stops to quash the three ballot questions.
Earlier this year, the Council urged the Board of Elections to pull the three questions from the ballot on the grounds that they used deceptive language that hid their actual effect.
When the board declined that request, the council began sending out mailers and running ads on social media claiming that the three proposed charter amendments would not do much to streamline housing while removing the council's "democratic vote."
Mayor Adams' misleading ballot proposals 2 & 3 claim to "fast-track" housing but they don't fix the source of delays: 700+ days of agency reviews.
Instead, they just remove our democratic vote and review, which is *65 days* max. That's not a fast-track. pic.twitter.com/IB9XjLpxHT
— New York City Council (@NYCCouncil) October 29, 2025
The obvious counterargument is that "democratic vote" includes the power to vote "no" on projects. We'll know soon enough whether it'll be enough to convince voters.
In New Jersey and Virginia, Candidates Spar Over How Best To Boost Housing Construction
In New Jersey and Virginia, voters will also go to the polls to select a new governor. Pleasingly for housing supply advocates, all four major party candidates have talked about the need to cut regulation and increase housing production as a means of bringing down housing costs.
Nevertheless, there are major differences between the candidates in how much they've emphasized housing issues and their proposed solutions to high housing costs.
New Jersey
For decades now, the Garden State has taken an active role in local land use decisions. As a result, housing policy questions have loomed larger in New Jersey's gubernatorial race.
Democratic candidate U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D–N.J.) has pitched herself as a defender of the state's "fair share" housing law, which gives most municipalities affordable housing quotas, and then requires them to change their planning regulations to meet that quota.
She'd also increase subsidies for affordable housing production and have the state offer "technical assistance" to localities to help them zone for "missing middle" housing and starter homes.
Her platform includes language about cracking down on "predatory investors, negligent landlords, and deceptive lenders" who collude to raise rents above market rates.
In contrast, Republican former Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli has proposed significant changes to the state law that would turn those local quotas into regional quotas and allow municipalities to pay other communities to take on their affordable housing obligations.
Ciattarelli would also like to shift more affordable housing production from smaller communities to "urban aid municipalities" that are generally exempt from mandates to build new affordable housing.
Virginia
Virginia, in contrast, does not have nearly as robust a history of state involvement in local land use decisions. Incumbent Gov. Glenn Youngkin has made some positive moves to speed up permitting and cut state-level regulation where it exists. But neither he nor the legislature has made much effort to enact the kinds of state-level zoning reforms passed by the likes of Washington, California, Montana, and Texas.
As a consequence, housing policy has very much been a backburner issue in the gubernatorial race between former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D–Va.) and Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.
Earle-Sears, for instance, has no written housing platform and declined requests from local papers to elaborate on her housing policy views. Nevertheless, in the few comments she has made about housing, the Republican candidate has expressed a pro-supply position.
She's said cutting regulations that stymie housing construction would help bring costs down and that zoning codes that restrict the "free market" need to be reformed.
Spanberger does have a written housing platform, although it's not incredibly detailed.
She would "streamline reviews and permitting processes for properties identified for redevelopment" and make recommendations for increasing housing supply, but without "one-size-fits-all" solutions or compromising "quality and safety."
Most of her more specific proposals for increasing housing supply involve increasing state funding for affordable housing construction. She also proposes enhancing tenant protections and limiting evictions, which could end up raising rents.
In a sign of the times, both Sherrill and Spanberger have criticized President Donald Trump's tariffs on imported building materials for raising housing construction costs.
Quick Links
- Mercatus Center Scholar Emily Hamilton has a column in Governing arguing that simply building more single-family homes will not lead Americans to have more children.
- The state of California has spent $17 million since 2020 to keep squatters out of homes seized for highway construction that never happened.
- San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie is getting rid of permitting requirements for sidewalk tables and chairs. Now, all business owners will have to do is fill out a form.
Putting out sidewalk tables and chairs for your business is easy: fill out a free form, learn the rules like keeping sidewalks accessible, and you're good to go. No permit or free required. We want San Francisco's businesses to bring our streets to life—just follow a few simple… pic.twitter.com/o2aAJVWY34
— Daniel Lurie 丹尼爾·羅偉 (@DanielLurie) November 3, 2025
- Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott signed a suite of housing bills that relax setback requirements, eliminate off-street parking mandates, and permit taller single-stair apartment buildings.
- San Francisco's chief economist estimates the city's proposed citywide upzoning plan would produce just 14,000 homes, not the 36,000 its proponents had promised.