Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, isn’t just a self-described democratic socialist; he’s a wealthy democratic socialist. The son of a Columbia professor and a successful filmmaker, Mamdani grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and attended a prestigious and pricey private school. He owns four acres of land on Lake Victoria in Uganda and draws a salary of $142,000 as a member of the state Assembly.

“I had a privileged upbringing,” Mamdani acknowledges. “I never had to want for something.”

His privileges haven’t stopped.

As former governor Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani’s leading rival in the mayoral race, noted in a blistering attack earlier this month, the frontrunner and his wife have lived for years in a rent-stabilized apartment in Queens. They pay just $2,300 a month for a one-bedroom in the trendy Astoria neighborhood, where comparable apartments typically rent for 30 percent more. Cuomo accused Mamdani of occupying an affordable unit that ought to be going to “a single mother and her children,” who instead had to sleep at a homeless shelter. The incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, likewise accuses Mamdani of “exploiting a system designed to serve the most vulnerable.”

While Cuomo has called on the frontrunner “to move out immediately and give your affordable housing back to an unhoused family who need it,” Mamdani appears to have no intention of relinquishing his coveted lease. Nor does he favor means-testing to make sure rent-regulated units go only to the needy. “I believe that government’s job is to guarantee dignity for each and every New Yorker, not determine which ones are worthy of it,” he glibly told reporters.

Mamdani’s bargain is not an anomaly. Wherever rent control exists, subsidies all too often flow to the well-off and the well-connected. In the words of a 2022 Johns Hopkins University analysis of New York’s rent caps, the discounts “are not progressively distributed” — i.e., low-income residents don’t get a bigger break on their rent, and “many with high incomes get very sizable discounts.”

Massachusetts learned that lesson three decades ago, when voters approved a ballot question banning rent control statewide. Researchers had found that rent-controlled properties in Cambridge were disproportionately occupied not by the elderly but by tenants in their prime earning years. When tenants were analyzed by occupation, there were many highly skilled professionals and managers among the rent control beneficiaries — including Cambridge’s then-mayor, Ken Reeves; Justice Ruth Abrams of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court; and the crown prince of Denmark, who last year acceded to the throne as King Frederik X.

When rent control ended in Cambridge following the 1994 vote, the effect was eye-opening: Of the nearly 6,100 tenants who moved out of their apartments, 21 percent had been earning over $80,000 — more than twice the median household income in Massachusetts at the time. Among Cambridge renters as a whole, by contrast, only 9 percent earned as much. As for those moving into the newly deregulated units, most earned less than $40,000 per year. In short, rent control turned out to be largely a boon for the well-to-do. Once it ended, those beneficiaries finally moved, opening up apartments for those who needed them. Again and again, the pattern recurs.

In Washington, D.C., rent control isn’t restricted to the needy, so affluent tenants can and do capture units with below-market rents, while poorer renters are forced to compete for apartments on the open market. The District’s own auditors have acknowledged that generous rent discounts often go to households with no financial hardship. In a study published this month, the nonpartisan D.C. Policy Center underscores the point: “In many cases, more educated and wealthier tenants benefit disproportionately from rent control,” the center’s researchers write, “while lower-income tenants — who need the support the most — are left out.”

California’s experience reinforces the point. Berkeley and Santa Monica adopted stringent rent control in the 1970s. Within a decade, census data revealed that the proportion of less-advantaged households in rent-controlled units had declined, while the proportion of more-advantaged households had risen. Once again, rather than focus protection on the vulnerable, rent control reshuffled housing access in favor of those with the most leverage.

Sweden provides an even more extreme illustration. Because rent-controlled apartments in Stockholm are allocated through a rigid government-run queue, those willing and able to wait the longest reap the biggest discounts. In coveted central districts, waits can last decades; a 2025 report put the citywide average at an astonishing 28 years. As of 2015, the number of would-be tenants in the Stockholm public housing queue had reached half a million. That’s not a safety net for the needy. It’s a reward for those with the luxury of patience.

Why does this keep happening? Because when governments prohibit landlords from allocating rental units by price, they turn instead to other screens — waiting lists, word of mouth, credit checks, personal connections. Those screens invariably tilt toward the educated and the employed — the people with stability, patience, and pull. Rent control is always sold as a tool to protect the needy. In practice, it is more likely to prove a windfall for the comfortable.

All of which helps explain why rent control “has been about as disgraced as any economic policy in the toolkit,” to quote Jason Furman, who headed the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. From the liberal Paul Krugman to the conservative Thomas Sowell, economists across the ideological spectrum agree that rent control tends to exacerbate housing shortages, embitter landlord-tenant relations, worsen the quality of apartments, fuel gentrification, and redistribute benefits upward.

And yet, this zombie idea refuses to die. Mayor Michelle Wu has tried to revive rent control in Boston, so far unsuccessfully. A proposed ballot question would relegalize rent control statewide, dragging Massachusetts back to the bad old days voters wisely ended in 1994. Activists always employ the same rhetoric about protecting vulnerable tenants. But from Cambridge to the Bay Area to Stockholm, the empirical evidence is clear: If landlords are barred from charging market rents, many rent-controlled apartments will end up in the hands of higher-income tenants.

If the goal is to help struggling families afford housing, suppressing rent is among the worst policies to adopt. The only real cure for high rents is the same cure that works for every other scarce good: Allow more of it to be produced. The freer the housing market, the more units get built, the more choices renters have, and the more affordable the options become.

That lesson was clear in Massachusetts three decades ago. It remains clear today, even if politicians refuse to learn it. Rent control locks out the poor and locks in the comfortable. That’s why Bay State voters were right to bury it 30 years ago. And that’s why Mamdani’s coveted Astoria lease is more than just an outrage for his rivals to fume over — it’s a reminder of what rent control invariably produces, and what it will produce again if it makes a comeback in Massachusetts.