New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani swept to victory Tuesday evening on a platform of affordability, anchored by a plan to freeze rents across nearly two million rent-stabilized apartments. But economists, universally, hate rent control. In a 2012 poll of top economists, just 2% agreed that rent-control laws have had "a positive impact" on the supply and quality of affordable housing. The Nobel laureate Richard Thaler even quipped in the survey that the next question should be: "Does the sun revolve around the earth?"
The remote work trend that gathered steam during the COVID-19 pandemic gave many people a taste of a lifestyle without commutes and office buildings. Reading the headlines, a casual reader feels there was a rush to remote work in 2020 and 2021, followed by a reversal in recent years. But that's not what happened, exactly. In reality, on the whole, remote work rose steeply in the first two years of the pandemic and more or less stayed up.