From rent freeze to free buses: Zohran Mamdani’s big five promises and why it doesn't make economic sense

When a politician promises to freeze rents, make buses free, pay childcare workers like teachers, open city-run supermarkets and raise the minimum wage to thirty dollars an hour, you don’t need an economics degree to sense trouble. Zohran Mamdani ’s platform reads like a revolutionary dream of economic justice, but economists warn it’s a dream that breaks as soon as numbers meet reality. His goals are moral. His math is magical. 1. The Promise: A rent freeze for roughly one million rent-stabilised apartments. According to economists Rebecca Diamond, Timothy McQuade and Franklin Qian in a 2017 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research titled The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco, rent control reduce