Would Zohran Mamdani's Rent Freeze Keep Rent-Stabilized Apartments Empty?

Imagine a purely collectivist society. All land, all structures, all buildings, all homes, are controlled by govt or non profit or coop or whatever. All rents in all homes in all locations are set at $100/month.

Over time the leaders of the vanguard notice waitlists for decent accommodations growing longer in some places and they resolve that they must take action.

3 possible solutions are presented to the revolutionary committee:

- waitlist freeze - if the average waitlist for a home of a given size, for $100/month, in a given city is now 20 years, simply dictate that it is now illegal to offer housing with a waitlist of longer than 20 years. (or 10 years or five years or whatever) Facing prosecution for too long waitlists, operators start finding reasons to kick people off, or find reasons not list openings at all.

- Hokou - simply tell the ppl they are not allowed to choose where to live. If there is an available shack on the side of a highway in New Mexico, tell the New Yorker who just had a baby to move there (or tell someone else to move to make room). If it is difficult to build enough housing in New York, then simply build it somewhere else and have a committee dictate who has to move away from their family/friends/job/school.

- abundance - build enough housing in any given location to accommodate the entire waitlist to live in that location at $100/month and then some. If after that, yet more ppl sign up to live there or nearby, keep building until the waitlist is as close to 0 as practical. This takes time and the construction and disruption will annoy incumbent comrades who already have nice homes in good locations.

I can’t predict what the wannabe revolutionaries in the DSA would do in this scenario, but the historical track record of mass collectivization is not reassuring. I would take their arguments a lot more seriously if they were willing to talk about unintended consequences, and 2nd/3rd order effects. However, I feel like they only ever operate on the surface – simply decide the outcome you would like and say, “make it so“.