The economics gap in American classrooms is showing up in city hall, not just on report cards
Zohran Mamdani just froze rent on roughly a million New York apartments and called it relief for working people. Nobody in the room asked the obvious follow up question. If freezing prices actually created more affordable housing, why has every city that’s tried it for decades ended up with some of the highest rents in the country?
That question isn’t complicated. It’s economics 101, and Thomas Sowell has been answering it for years using nothing more advanced than supply and demand.
Watch the video above to see the full clip on rent freezes.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. This isn’t a knowledge gap limited to a mayor’s office. It’s a knowledge gap running straight through the American education system, and it shows up every single time a policy like this gets applauded instead of questioned.
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Sowell laid out the mechanics in a Hoover Institution interview that still holds up perfectly against this week’s headlines. He pointed to New York and San Francisco specifically, two cities that have run some of the longest and most severe rent control policies in the country. Both cities also happen to have the highest rents of any major city in America. That’s not a coincidence sitting quietly in a footnote somewhere. That’s the entire lesson, and it’s one most students never get.
Why does a policy designed to lower prices end up raising them instead?
Sowell’s answer is simple enough for a high schooler to understand, which is exactly the problem. When rent control gets severe, builders either shrink how much new housing they construct or they stop building altogether. Landlords stop maintaining older buildings because the profit that would normally fund repairs has been regulated out of existence. The visible part of the policy looks generous. The invisible part, the buildings that never get built and the units that slowly fall apart, never makes it into the press conference.
That invisible part is exactly the kind of thinking American schools have stopped teaching.
Sowell backed his argument with numbers that should be standard material in any real economics class. At the start of the twentieth century, before heavy government intervention in housing, families spent about 23 percent of their budget on housing. By 2003, after decades of regulation, that number had climbed to 33 percent of a much larger budget. The policies sold as protection for tenants produced the opposite outcome, measurable in cold numbers over a hundred year span.
His Houston versus coastal California comparison makes the point even sharper. Houston has no zoning laws at all. A house running around 155,000 dollars there could cost a full million dollars in San Francisco for the exact same structure. Same materials. Same labor. The only real difference is how much government stands between a builder and a finished home.
None of this is advanced economics. It’s cause and effect, the kind of reasoning students used to be expected to master before graduating.
Instead, generations are coming out of school able to recite slogans about fairness and affordability without ever learning to trace a policy through to its actual consequences. Sowell pointed out that students are increasingly taught it’s important to hold a view, but never taught it’s important to know what they’re talking about. A rent freeze sounds compassionate right up until you ask who stops building, who stops maintaining, and who ends up standing in line for an apartment that no longer gets built.
That’s the real failure playing out in New York right now, and it isn’t really about one mayor or one policy. It’s about an education system that stopped preparing people to ask the second question, the one that comes right after a politician announces something historic.
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