I don't like his policies but Zohran's videos are so good that every other politician's videos look terrible by comparison

Multiple people have commented saying he's doing great work for affordability for New Yorkers and asked why I don't like his policies. His policies sound great but actually will exacerbate the problem. Freezing rents might sound like a way to make the city affordable, but it worsens the affordability crisis. When you cap rents without addressing supply, landlords stop maintaining units, developers stop building new ones, and the housing stock slowly decays. You get a two-tier system: lucky tenants (not poor ones, just lucky ones!) in older units, and everyone else fighting over a shrinking pool of market-rate homes. As I mentioned in the tweet below, one of the richest people I know lives in a rent-controlled apartment in Bombay for $8/month. It doesn’t help the people moving to New York, or growing families who need more space and have to move out of their rent-frozen places. Instead of affordability, you get scarcity and stagnation. City-owned grocery stores are another well-meaning idea that sounds better than it works. Running supermarkets is hard, low-margin, and operationally intense. The city has no competitive advantage in logistics, retail operations, or supply chains. Zohran created the $ for this idea from misreading a city website, thinking that we were already subsidizing grocery stores by $140M, but we are actually only subsidizing $3.3M! Past attempts at public retail have failed or ended up subsidizing inefficiency. If the goal is to address food deserts (which I'm not convinced is a real problem) and high prices, better solutions include cutting red tape for small grocers, incentivizing stores to open in underserved areas, and allowing mobile food markets or zoning flexibility for corner stores. A vibrant private market, if allowed to function, can deliver fresh food far more effectively than City Hall. Free buses sound appealing, but they don’t fix the actual problems with New York’s bus system: speed and reliability. Buses are slow because of traffic congestion, poor bus lane enforcement, and outdated infrastructure. Making them free doesn’t change that. It also comes at a high cost! Hundreds of millions in lost fare revenue each year, which would either require service cuts, higher taxes, or more state subsidies. And like the rent freeze, it’s not well targeted: free fares benefit everyone, including wealthy riders, rather than focusing help on those who need it most. A better approach is to invest in faster, more reliable service through dedicated bus lanes that get more people to choose public transit. There are simple fixes like signal priority and off-board payment that would help too, while expanding programs like Fair Fares that reduce costs for low-income riders. If the goal is better, more accessible transit, free buses are a flashy but ineffective solution. All of these are simple slogans that sound good—just like Trump’s “no tax on tips.” They’re feel-good policies that avoid real tradeoffs and sound like solutions without actually solving anything. If you actually want to improve affordability in New York, the focus should be on increasing supply, lowering costs, and reducing barriers. That means upzoning near transit and job centers, streamlining permits to cut delays, and reforming property taxes so they stop penalizing rental buildings. It means incentivizing mixed-income housing on underused public land, investing in transit infrastructure that works, and making it easier to open grocery stores, childcare centers, and small businesses by cutting red tape. The goal isn’t to control everything, it’s to create more! Instead of rigid controls and government-run services, New York just needs to build more. Build more housing by fixing zoning, streamlining permits, and encouraging dense, transit-oriented development. It means smart tax reform to align incentives and lower barriers to entry, for housing, food, and business. The problem isn’t too much capitalism; it’s too little room for it to work. Zohran is a smart and likable guy. I hope that he matures his thinking on these and other topics.

@LesEnders You missed a news cycle. NY does not subsidize big grocery stores with $60M.