“The [New York City] Rent Guidelines Board has stopped being a fact-finding body. It has become a body that starts with an answer and vibe codes its way backward to justify it.” That quote was from the resignation letter of Christina Smyth, a now-former member of the New York City Rent Guidelines Board who left the body hours before it signed off on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s extensive rent freeze in the city. The proposal passed by a 7-1 vote Thursday and will allow a rent freeze on about one million rent-stabilized apartments in New York City. This new policy delivers on one of Mamdani’s big campaign promises, but Smyth wrote that the decision was made on the “campaign trail” and not by compelling facts that it would be a successful policy for renters or landlords. She further wrote that the board “stopped being a fact-finding body” and was reconstructed by Mamdani to deliver a rent freeze that he wanted no matter what. The board chair responded to Smyth’s resignation by writing that it remained independent. However, Smyth insisted that the board’s own research revealed major warning signs for the rent freeze policy. “Here is what the board’s own research shows: Operating costs for rent-stabilized buildings have risen faster than inflation,” she wrote. “Property taxes are up. Fuel, water, and labor are up. The NYC Water Board, just last week, voted for a 6% increase for Fiscal Year 2027, right when the freeze will be in full swing. Net operating income is falling. Buildings are running out of room to absorb these costs.” Smyth wrote that the rising cost of running buildings and suppressed rents will mean that landlords will avoid the costs of maintenance with increasing frequency. “When these buildings fail, it is not the people who cast these votes who pay the price,” she wrote. “It is a building with a broken boiler. It is the family in the building no one is maintaining. They are the ones with the most to lose, and they are the ones I am most worried about.” She’s essentially saying that the policy will incentivize landlords to become slum lords. And she wasn’t alone in her criticism of the process and the result. Ann Korchak, board president of the Small Property Owners of New York, called the decision an “absolute farce,” CBS News reported. She said that while the vote had a quorum, only half the members of the board—nearly all Mamdani allies—were present. “The resignation of the only principled RGB member and the board’s only meaningful advocate for small owners validated our greatest fear, that the majority Mamdani-appointed RGB would cave to the political demands of City Hall,” Korchak said. The lone dissenting vote, Arpit Gupta, wrote in City Journal Thursday that the policy threatens “the long-term viability of a large share of the city’s rental housing.” That’s because such rent freezes have proven to create “severe” long-term costs. Gupta, an appointee of former mayor Eric Adams, pointed to some historical examples of the unintended consequences of rent freezes. “Mumbai, for instance, froze rents in 1947 as a temporary relief measure; the consequences are still visible today in dilapidated buildings so starved of maintenance that many have fallen down. New York City has experienced a version of this dynamic, too, in the form of the nickel subway fare. Held at 5 cents from 1904 to 1948, the fare slowly bankrupted the private transit companies that had built out the system, until they collapsed into public ownership and the system entered a long decline that took decades to reverse,” Gupta wrote. He added that the rent freeze may provide temporary relief for some renters, but that it ultimately “produces deteriorating assets and, eventually, public bailouts and takeovers.” I’d suggest that Mamdani and his socialist friends don’t care. In fact, ruining the market before a public takeover might be the point. After all, Mamdani’s communist housing czar, Cea Weaver, has said that she’s in favor of moving away from the idea of private property ownership. She hoped that this policy would hurt white property owners in particular. The ultimate effect of the policy will be to spread misery to people of all racial and religious backgrounds: quite progressive. Smyth and Gupta are almost certainly correct that the rent freeze is bad, that it’s unsupported by history and data, and that there are other policies that would produce better outcomes. But those facts are going to get steamrolled by the feelings of Mamdani’s democratic socialist army that this time it’s all going to work out, the kulaks must pay, the proletariat (well, actually the young, downwardly mobile upper middle-class elites) will triumph. If it wasn’t clear before it should be obvious now: Mamdani may make some concessions to reality, but he does plan to govern like a socialist as he promised. But the voters of New York City made this choice; they’ll have to suffer the little children.