Mamdani Moves on Housing—but Relief Could Still Be 3 Years Away for NYC Renters

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Zohran Mamdani is wasting no time. In his first week as New York City mayor, he’s already signed executive orders to launch two new task forces, one to unlock city-owned land for housing and the other to remove red tape that slows down production. He’s also announced public “rental ripoff” hearings to spotlight unfair or illegal landlord practices.

His message is clear: The city’s housing affordability crisis demands urgent action, especially for the renters most at risk of being priced out. It’s the message that helped catapult the 34-year-old into office, and it’s now shaping every move he makes.

But Mamdani is now facing the most stubborn challenge in politics and housing: time. No matter how bold the plan, it can take years for renters to feel relief, and even longer for a citywide shift in affordability to take hold.

“These projects take quite a while to be built and even longer for their impact on the overall rent level to be felt,” explains Realtor.com® senior economist Joel Berner. “Expect at least three years before the supply-side relief to come online.”

Mamdani’s office did not immediately return Realtor.com’s request for comment.

Even that timeline is optimistic and only just brings relief into view before Mamdani’s first term is up. We took a detailed look at Mamdani’s housing platform to understand how soon New Yorkers could feel housing price relief, and where it might show up first.

Rent freeze: Immediate relief, followed by hard choices

Of all the tools in Mamdani’s housing arsenal, a rent freeze is the most immediate and the most politically symbolic. It was the centerpiece of his campaign and could impact more than 1 million rent-controlled and stabilized units across New York City.

If all goes smoothly, Mamdani could push through a freeze in time for lease renewals starting Oct. 1, 2026, just nine months from now. That’s unusually fast for housing policy and unusually important for renters already at their breaking point.

Widespread scarcity in units has pushed median asking rents to $3,491 in the second quarter of 2025, or 55% of the typical household income, according to Realtor.com data. And for the city’s most affordable apartments—defined as units priced at $1,100 or less—the vacancy rates have dropped to just 0.7%, according to the most recent Housing and Vacancy Survey.

Meanwhile, parents and their children are making up a greater share of the population of the city’s shelters, according to data from the NYU Furman Center, in a dire warning sign of just how unaffordable New York has gotten for working families.

And while New York City’s rent-controlled apartments already enjoy some price protection, delinquencies on rent-regulated units peaked in 2025 at almost 17%.

A freeze would provide some relief to these renters by holding their monthly housing costs in place, but the decision ultimately lies with the Rent Guidelines Board, an appointed panel that sets renewal rates for stabilized leases each year.

While the administration of Mamdani predecessor Eric Adams attempted a last-minute board-stacking maneuver before leaving office, that effort fell apart. Mamdani now has his opening: He could appoint enough new members in the coming months to push through a 0% increase. But it won’t be frictionless.

What happened in St. Paul shows the power and risk of rent freezes

A glimpse of what could come next is playing out in St. Paul, MN. In 2022, the city passed rent control measures that capped the amount that rent could increase at 3% annually. The impact on tenants was nearly immediate: While rents rose in neighboring Minneapolis, they fell in St. Paul through late 2022 and early 2023.

But then came the backlash. New housing development plummeted. By 2024, housing permits in St. Paul were down 80% from the previous three-year average, according to a MinnPost analysis—a dire sign for prices more broadly, as any constraint on supply eventually drives prices up.

Already, New York City landlords, particularly smaller “mom and pop” owners, are warning that a rent freeze could have a similar effect in the Big Apple by deepening an already growing problem: vacant units that never make it to market. More than 50,000 rent-stabilized units sit vacant across the city, according to recent estimates, many of them in disrepair or priced below feasible operating margins.

Owners say a freeze could make those units permanently unaffordable to maintain, further shrinking the city’s available rental stock and undermining the very tenants the freeze is meant to help.

‘All supply is good supply:’ The only path to broad price relief is more homes

While a rent freeze could deliver targeted relief in the short term, long-term affordability hinges on one thing: building more homes. That’s why one of the most ambitious planks in Mamdani’s housing platform is a plan to bring 200,000 deeply affordable units to market over the next decade.

It’s a bold number, but even if all goes according to plan, New Yorkers likely won’t see meaningful relief from that new supply until at least 2028, Berner says, assuming an absolute best-case scenario.

Once again, the biggest constraint here is time. As Berner previously mentioned, it takes a long time for these projects to get built and even longer for that relief to be felt.

Permitting reform could speed things up, but only by so much

But on that front, Mamdani has a plan.

A major part of his strategy is to shorten New York’s notoriously long permitting timeline by granting “fast track” status to any new affordable housing project. That could shave years off the land-use review process, but only if it’s implemented aggressively and avoids legal or procedural setbacks.

His new task force to identify city-owned land for housing is a key step toward unlocking buildable sites. But those projects will still require approvals, financing, design, and construction, each of which can stretch across years and in some cases requires cooperation from Albany and even Washington.

And even if all 200,000 units are delivered, it won’t close the gap entirely. The Independent Budget Office and other housing experts estimate New York is short by as many as 500,000 units over the next 10 years—more than double Mamdani’s goal.

Of course, this is where he’s hoping the private sector will come into play. But this is also where critics argue Mamdani’s plan doesn’t go far enough. To truly stabilize prices, all types of housing need to be fast-tracked, not just affordable units. That includes market-rate and even luxury developments, which contribute to easing pressure further down the rental chain.

“Even building luxury rentals is helpful because of the ‘filtering effect,’ where mid-tier renters move up into the new units, rents at the middle of the distribution fall, and lower-tier renters can move up into those. All supply is good supply,” explains Berner.

If Mamdani needs a cautionary tale, he can look again to St. Paul and the 80% drop off in new construction permits following rent caps.

Austin’s relief timeline: Proof that supply can work on a faster clock than NYC

If Mamdani’s housing goals sound ambitious or even unachievable, it helps to look at a city that’s already done what New York hopes to: Austin, TX.

“Austin’s story is a construction one,” says Berner. “The city had been building a lot of new rentals prior to the pandemic, and then when Austin became a boomtown during the post-pandemic buying frenzy, even more homes were built.”

That construction surge paid off. Rents in Austin began falling steadily in late 2022, just after the peak of new housing completions. By 2025, the city had one of the highest year-over-year rent declines in the country.

“Again, roughly that three-year window seems to be when significant relief is felt,” Berner says.

In other words, supply worked—not instantly, but fast enough to matter. Within three years of Austin’s construction boom, tenants started seeing real relief in their monthly rent checks.

Of course, New York can’t simply replicate Austin’s timeline. Permissive zoning laws, faster permitting, cheaper land, and lower labor costs gave Austin a huge head start. Developers could build quickly and at scale—without the delays, legal challenges, and cost barriers that often stall projects in New York.

Still, the lesson is clear for both Mamdani’s administration and New Yorkers eagerly awaiting relief: When cities build enough housing—at any and all price points—rents fall. But there’s a crucial catch. In Austin, the rent declines came three years after construction ramped up, not three years after promises were made.

In New York, that construction boom hasn’t started yet. The policy groundwork is being laid now, but until new housing actually starts getting built at scale, the clock hasn’t even begun. And that means for renters, meaningful relief could still be years away.