Ray Niles has lived in New York City his whole adult life. All over Manhattan and Brooklyn, across decades of a city that has never quite figured out how to let people build the housing it desperately needs.
He spent fifteen years on Wall Street before walking away to earn a PhD in economics to study exactly why cities like his keep making the same mistakes.
He’s watched New York make the same housing mistakes for a long time. And this week, we asked him to tell us what’s coming next. Because New York’s already been through this once, and it didn’t end well last time.
The City of New York Rent Guidelines Board is about to vote on whether to freeze rents for a million apartments. Mamdani has appointed six of its nine members. The freeze is likely. And Niles knows what the last chapter of this story looks like.
The Bronx didn’t burn by accident.
This conversation is about what rent control actually does to the real people living inside it. And about whether a locked-out generation that is increasingly drawn to the language of “housing as a human right” can be brought back to a framework that actually delivers the thing they’re looking for.
The people who passed rent control in New York before weren’t evil. They were trying to help.
That’s what makes the story so hard. And so important to understand.
I hope you enjoy it.
**This conversation was recorded before the vote on the rent freeze.
