Working-class New Yorkers are being robbed by their landlords. Zohran addressed this question in his election campaign, and was rewarded with 60% of votes cast by renters.

Bloomberg reported last year that fewer than 5% of NYC apartments were “affordable for the average local worker.” NYC defines affordable rent as housing that costs no more than one-third of a household’s gross income for both rent and utilities.

Huge numbers of working people have been priced out of the housing market altogether. The Coalition for the Homeless estimates that more than 350,000 people were homeless in NYC as of August 2025, including 103,000 in city shelters and 200,000 crammed into other people’s homes.

Zohran’s central plank is a four-year “rent freeze” on rent-stabilized apartments, with its expiration coinciding with the next mayoral election. This would apply to just over one million of the 2.3 million occupied rental units in the city. The proposal would not bring down rents on any of the 95% of “unaffordable” apartments, but rather keep a minority of those rents at the current already painful level.

For market-rate apartments, the proposal is that annual rent increases be limited to 5% plus the local inflation rate, capped at 10%. Without a matching increase in wages, this measure simply ensures the continued immiseration of renters by landlords.

Along with the rent freeze, he proposes building an annual average of 20,000 more affordable publicly owned housing units over the next decade, paid for by a $100 billion fund. This number is only a slight increase over the 185,000 new multifamily units built in the 2010s—hardly a break with the past.

These modest proposals, while raising hopes among renters that relief may be on the way, have been met with hostility from real estate brokers, developers, housing speculators, and landlords. Any measure that promises to change the balance of payments to the benefit of the renter proportionally decreases the amount pocketed by the landlords and brings uncertainty into the market.

Mamdani’s plan includes compensating landlords for the caps on rent raises, in the form of tax breaks, which ultimately replace the tribute paid to the landlord by individual renters with money diverted from public funds. In this way, the housing owners still get their pound of flesh, while balancing the city budget will require cutbacks in social services.

Landlords and finance companies buy real estate for one reason only: to make money. They make simple cosmetic improvements that allow the property to be flipped for immediate gain; lease it out for steady rental income; or hold onto it in hopes that the inflating price bubble for housing will bring them windfall gains from sale at a later date.

Any reduction in the expected rental income will discourage the owners from spending for repair and maintenance—what is the point of sinking more money into an investment that yields no additional return? If the yield on their investment falls below that gained from stocks and bonds, they will be incentivized to dump the property and redirect their capital elsewhere. And when a whole housing area becomes unattractive to investment, over time, the stage is set for a new round of speculation and gentrification.

There is a way to resolve the housing question—but it cannot be done within the framework of maintaining capitalism. A socialist program for housing revolves around three measures:

• Public ownership and administration of all dwellings and the land beneath them
• Expropriation of the banks and finance corporations—putting their ill-gotten wealth to work serving human needs
• Nationalization of the building developers and large construction and building materials firms, under workers’ control

Bringing the entirety of the housing industry and the rents and mortgages system under control of a socialist plan of development would be a step forward in the socialist transformation of society.

But this cannot happen when political power is monopolized by the two ruling parties, whose main point of agreement is the defense of capitalism. A new party must be built to organize the working class to win power, dispossess the capitalists, and eliminate their domination over economic life.

We must not forget that capital knows no boundaries; living conditions in other cities are just as dire. The workers’ party must be national, and ultimately international in scope. The fight for decent accommodations for all is ultimately a fight for world socialism.