New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on freezing rents for rent-stabilized tenants. Since taking office earlier this year, he has done just that. How? By appointing two-thirds of the supposedly independent Rent Guidelines Board. Last month, the board voted to freeze rents on one and two year leases, affecting a million properties. It’s the biggest NYC rent freeze in living memory.
Right-wing populists have long been accused of attacking independent institutions and undermining their credibility. Their left-wing counterparts appear to have developed a subtler, more insidious approach. Instead of attacking institutions, they capture them. In doing so, they predetermine outcomes and present the result as an independent judgement.
Both left and right populists seek to bend nominally independent bodies to their will. The left, however, is proving more effective
The Rent Guidelines Board is not designed to function as an extension of the mayor’s office, and the Mamdani administration itself describes it as an independent body. It is, on paper at least, responsible for considering housing conditions and associated trends, statistics, and research. The board exists precisely because rent-setting policy is meant to emerge from a balanced analysis of competing evidence rather than mayoral edict.
There is, of course, no such thing as an apolitical appointment. Every leader appoints officials whose values broadly resemble their own; however, there is a meaningful difference between appointing someone whose judgement you trust and appointing someone because you have predetermined the outcome of their vote. The board’s vote is now subject to a legal challenge brought by a group of landlords. Their lawsuit alleges that Mamdani packed the board with loyalists inclined to fulfill his campaign promises, a board that ultimately disregarded evidence of rising operating costs and turned a statutory fact-finding process into a rubber stamp machine for Mamdani.
Consider what happened in the run up to the rent stabilization decision. On the morning of the final vote, landlord representative Christina Smyth resigned, claiming that the decision had effectively been made on the Mamdani campaign trail and alleging that rental policy had become “theater.” She’s right that on the economic evidence, a total freeze is indeed hard to justify. The Price Index of Operating Costs increased by 5.3 per cent between April 2025 and March 2026. While the board must consider factors like tenant incomes and overall affordability, that’s only one side of the equation. They also need to consider whether landlords could absorb rising costs without neglecting maintenance. It’s unclear whether a full consideration took place. What we do know is that Mamdani’s political promise of freezing rents preceded the evidentiary process.
There is a wider story here. Right-wing populism announces its hostility towards institutions through open confrontation: denouncing them as corrupt, attacking their leadership, attempting to overrule policy decisions, and threatening their funding. Left-wing populism, meanwhile, is more comfortable operating through the language of procedure and expertise. It preserves the original form of an institution while ensuring that those in control of each stage of the decision-making process understand which conclusions are acceptable. It’s ironic, because the far-left of old is famous for their love of revolution and the destruction of institutions. Nevertheless, among the new generation of socialists, the institution survives while the democratic process dies. Both left and right populists seek to bend nominally independent bodies to their will. The left, however, is proving more effective.
Mamdani’s pied-a-terre tax reflects a related populist instinct. Unlike the rent freeze, the measure was enacted legislatively and did not depend upon the seizure of an independent board. But look at the messaging. City Hall says the tax is a means of compelling the elite to pay their fair share, publicly identifying individuals and properties expected to fall within its scope. Mamdani’s rhetoric and behavior (notably, the doxxing of Ken Griffin on social media) is emblematic of this new brand of left-wing populism. A disfavored economic class is identified; administrative power is then presented as the neutral mechanism through which an obvious moral conclusion must be enforced.
But a democratic mandate does not erase the distinction between political power and independent judgement. An institution can only be meaningfully independent if it is able to reach a conclusion that politicians dislike. Elections determine direction; independent bodies are supposed to test whether particular interventions are justified by the evidence. When those functions collapse into one another, expertise simply becomes a means by which political preference can be laundered through institutional authority.
Progressives were correct to fear a politics in which institutions exist solely to ratify the wishes of the executive. Leftists of conscience should recognize the same danger when it appears from their own side. Trump attacks institutions when they resist his will, but the emerging Mamdani model presents a more surreptitious risk: staff the institution, narrow the range of acceptable conclusions and cite the decision as proof that politics had nothing to do with the result. Their methods might differ, but the outcome is the same. Mamdani is proving himself a more effective Trump.
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