Just weeks ago, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrated as the Rent Guidelines Board approved a two-year rent freeze covering a million apartments across the city. Socialists took a victory lap, hailing it as the fulfillment of one of Mamdani's signature campaign promises. But history offers a stark reminder of what happens when a city pushes rent control too far.
In the 1970s, the vast majority of apartments and homes in New York City were under some form of rent regulation, rent-stabilized, rent-frozen, or otherwise controlled, as the government enacted sweeping policies meant to guarantee renters stable prices. As we now know, while those policies did hold down rents for the units they covered, they gutted the quality of the housing stock. Buildings became infested with vermin, maintenance collapsed, and living conditions deteriorated across entire neighborhoods.
Renters remained unsatisfied, and landlords, meanwhile, found themselves unable to turn a profit, as operating costs rose while the city prohibited them from passing those costs on to tenants.
Some landlords resorted to drastic measures. Rather than keep bleeding cash on properties the city had made unprofitable to maintain, a number of them hired arsonists to burn their own buildings down and collect the insurance payout instead. These were not isolated incidents either. The Bronx alone lost roughly 20 percent of its housing stock, more than 100,000 units, to abandonment and arson between 1970 and 1981, with rent control cited by historians as one of the key economic pressures that made the destruction more profitable than upkeep. Across the city more broadly, over 300,000 housing units were burned down, just over 12 percent of the city's total housing.
How it starts vs. how it ends pic.twitter.com/KrQ1KZn1xs
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) June 26, 2026
Conditions in New York City today may not be ripe for a repeat of that specific catastrophe, but history still offers a clear warning: bad government policy can drive people to their breaking point, especially when it puts their livelihoods on the line. And while Mamdani may be "helping" renters in the short term, the incentive structure he's building, one that demonizes landlords, casts them as villains, and squeezes their ability to earn a living, risks pushing some of them toward the same desperate measures history has already seen.
As the social democrat and Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck put it in 1971: "In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing."