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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has followed through on the signature promise of his underdog campaign, securing a “rent freeze” for roughly 1 million rent-stabilized units beginning Oct. 1. When the nation’s largest city takes a policy leap like this, it raises the question: Will other cities follow?
Sometimes, city politics are like falling dominoes. Take the fight for $15, for instance. Seattle first introduced a $15-per-hour minimum wage in 2014, and support quickly spread to high-cost cities like San Francisco before growing into a national movement. Sixteen states now have minimum wage rates of at least $15.
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Right now, New York is on an island when it comes to freezing rents. But it’s not the only city known for its jaw-dropping rent costs, and Mamdani is not the only democratic socialist in charge. So could this freeze be the start of something bigger?
Money emailed 20 mayors to ask whether they would support a rent freeze like New York’s in their cities. We sought out Democratic mayors and cities known for progressive housing policy. And yet not one of the mayors we contacted said they would back a Mamdani-style rent freeze.
Experts say the question may be awkward for elected officials who see no path to a rent freeze but recognize that their constituents are deeply concerned about high housing costs. Rent control is a red-hot debate that’s likely strategic to avoid.
“There’s obviously a reason why they don’t want to comment on New York City: It’s someone else’s problem. It’s not their problem,” says David Schleicher, Yale Law School professor of property and urban law.
Will other mayors copy New York’s rent freeze?
Schleicher says Mamdani was uniquely positioned to freeze rent because New York City had rent stabilization in place, meaning rent increases for covered units were already subject to a legal limit. The mayor appoints the members of the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, which decides the allowable rent hikes each year. This setup enabled Mamdani to celebrate a rent freeze — a policy that prohibits increases for stabilized units — just six months into his term.
In most other cities, a campaign to freeze the rent would need support from the city council, at a minimum. An even bigger obstacle: More than 30 states ban local regulation of rent increases.
Nationally, rent control policies are popular among voters. Over 80% of residents of U.S. cities support limiting how much landlords can raise rent, according to survey data collected from 2020 to 2023 for a working paper by Harvard, Boston University and Georgetown researchers.
Regardless of where some mayors may stand on rent control, their ability to do anything about it is essentially nonexistent, Schleicher says. (This could explain the silence when Money asked whether they would back a rent freeze in their city.)
“It’s like asking someone, if they could fly, would they do it?” Schleicher says. “They can’t.”
State bans haven’t always stopped cities from trying to implement rent control. But they do make it twice as hard.
Look at what happened recently in Boston. In February, Mayor Michelle Wu, whose office did not respond to our July request for comment, came out in support of a Massachusetts ballot initiative to overturn the statewide ban and cap rent at 5% or the inflation rate — the lower of the two. It would have also given Boston the ability to implement rent control.
But in June, the Massachusetts Supreme Court removed the question from the November 2026 ballot, finding that a religious facilities exemption violated the state constitution. It was a setback for affordable housing advocates, who could attempt again in 2028.
Even in the dozen-plus states where rent control is not banned, though, Scleicher says it’s “very unlikely” that any city will soon follow New York City’s lead. Mayors not named Mamdani are simply not talking about rent freezes right now.
“I suspect they’re all looking at New York and saying, ‘I don’t know, man. That’s just really complicated. Not for me,'” Schleicher says.
Surveying 20 mayors on freezing rent
All 20 mayors Money contacted identify as Democrats. Our list intentionally included cities known for progressive politics and renter protections.
One such example is Providence, Rhode Island, a liberal stronghold with a reputation for being one of the country’s least affordable cities for renters.
The city council passed an ordinance earlier this year that would have capped rent increases at 4%. Mayor Brett Smiley vetoed it, and the council fell one vote short of the 10 it needed to override the veto.
Smiley says that rent control has not historically improved housing affordability in the cities that have tried it.
“The Smiley Administration’s main goal is making housing more affordable for Providence neighbors. Too many Providence residents are feeling the strain of rising rents and limited housing options, and addressing this challenge remains central to our work. That urgency requires solutions that are proven to work and built to last,” Smiley spokesperson Austin Grondin tells Money in an email. “Rent control does not meet that standard.”
The history of rent control laws in the U.S. goes back over 100 years. One of the highest-profile recent experiments with rent control occurred in St. Paul, Minnesota, where rents are actually below national levels — but so are household incomes.
In 2021, voters in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul both passed rent control ordinances. St. Paul enacted a firm 3% cap on rent increases the following year; Minneapolis never did. (The Minneapolis ordinance merely amended the city charter to allow the council to implement rent control.)
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey had a close-up view of the St. Paul rent control saga next door — often cited by critics as one of rent control’s great failures — and it has only solidified his opposition.
“Mayor Frey supports the goal of making housing more affordable, but he does not support a rent freeze or traditional rent control because the evidence shows these policies reduce housing production and ultimately make it harder to address affordability over the long term,” Jennifer Lor, press secretary for the mayor, tells Money in an email. “Policies that discourage new rental development move the city in the wrong direction.”
A June analysis from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis researchers was more measured, confirming that rental housing development “slowed after the rent-stabilization measure” while featuring interviews with owners and developers describing a “chilling effect” from the law. The report acknowledged that there isn’t “hard data” about what caused the slowdown.
Frey argues that better solutions to rising rents include government investments in affordable housing and eliminating single-family zoning.
“These pro-housing policies have helped Minneapolis lead other cities, including St. Paul, in housing production,” Lor says.
In 2025, St. Paul walked back its rent control when then-Mayor Melvin Carter asked the city council to exempt buildings constructed after 2004 from the stabilization law, arguing that developers were struggling to access capital for housing construction. The council agreed in a 4-3 vote, although many older buildings in St. Paul are still subject to the 3% rent stabilization rule.
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The search for a mayor in support of a rent freeze, cont.
Some West Coast cities have rent stabilization laws that have limited rent hikes to smaller percentages than St. Paul.
In San Francisco, where 172,000 units are rent controlled, the allowable rent increase is 1.6% through Feb. 28, 2027. Another 43,000 units in Oakland, California, are covered by a similar program, which will allow a maximum 2.3% increases for the year ahead. Los Angeles froze rent for about 650,000 stabilized units during the pandemic; the allowable increase is now 3%.
Even in these California cities that regulate rent older units, no mayors’ offices we contacted would say whether they support a rent freeze today. Nor would Nithya Raman, a progressive council member in a competitive race to potentially unseat Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
In Seattle, Mayor Katie Wilson took office in January after running a successful campaign on her background as an activist co-founder of a local transit riders union. A democratic socialist inaugurated a day after Mamdani, Wilson is often compared to him.
While Mamdani was campaigning in 2025 to freeze the rent in New York City, Wilson was asked directly during an October mayoral debate whether she favored a rent freeze.
“Not a rent freeze, no,” she said, according to The Center Square. “I support rent stabilization, and I think that the devil is in the details in terms of how we design a policy like that, and we’re actually not allowed to in Seattle according to state law. But, yes, I certainly support — if we could do it locally and certainly statewide — a rent stabilization policy.”
Like California, state laws in Washington (and Oregon) cap rent increases and also preempt cities from implementing rent control.
“We currently have no comments on this topic,” Wilson’s office tells Money.
The current and probable future mayors of Washington, D.C., didn’t engage with our question, either. Mayor Muriel Bowser, whose term ends in January, will likely be succeeded by Janeese Lewis George, a democratic socialist member of the city council.
Bowser’s staff responded to our request — touting progress toward “restabiliz[ing] our housing ecosystem post-pandemic” with investments in affordable housing — but avoided the specific question about a rent freeze. Lewis George did not respond.
Rather than demanding an outright rent freeze, mayors often say that inventory is their priority. Bowser’s administration reports that D.C. has gained about 73,000 housing units since 2015, including 22,000 affordable units.
“Building more housing drives down rents,” the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development writes in an email.
Schleicher says that it makes sense for mayors to stay focused on housing supply as it’s both within their power to address and the root cause of high prices — the constituent issue they’re ultimately trying to solve.
“There are politics around rent control in many different places, but on the other hand, the thing that has been pretty universal across mayors in the recent period is this focus on increasing supply, including in New York City,” he adds.
The issue: A 20-point platform about affordable housing development and rental junk fees lacks the bite of a call for a rent freeze, an idea so simple it fits on the back of a shirt, and doesn’t feel immediate to voters.
Even so, much of New York remains warm to Mamdani, and if the mayor’s freeze delivers some relief without the woes of St. Paul, views could change outside of the city.
The mayors of Los Angeles; San Francisco; Chicago; Boston; Seattle; Philadelphia; Phoenix; Miami; Denver; Detroit; San Diego; St. Paul; Portland, Oregon; Raleigh, North Carolina; Santa Ana, California; Oakland, California; and Salem, Massachusetts; did not comment for this story, but they will almost certainly be watching what happens in New York.
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