Zohran Mamdani, like every modern mayor of New York, takes on the devilishly difficult job of attempting to master municipal challenges for which, in reality, there are no true solutions. Every New York native possessing more than a surface-level understanding of the city knows that no single man can wave a magic wand and cure poverty, end homelessness, abolish violent crime, or make the subways run on time. If perfection is the metric, every mayor must fail; the job’s exacting standards are more akin to those of Major League Baseball, where even elite players like Yankee slugger Aaron Judge fail to get a base hit seven times out of every ten turns at bat.

The new mayor must remember that the most important decisions that land on his desk will be, by definition, problems that none of the other 300,000 city employees could resolve. Here are five big ones he will face on day one.

The Frozen Logic of Regulated Rent
Mamdani’s first campaign ad depicted him plunging into the cold waters of Coney Island and declaring himself to be “freezing … your rent!” Providing relief to renters in rent-stabilized apartments is the central promise of the Mamdani campaign with no wiggle room to back off. That sets up the administration for a battle against the inexorable laws of supply and demand: A famous column by Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning Princeton University economist, laments that “the analysis of rent control is among the best understood issues in all of economics, and — among economists, anyway — one of the least controversial … Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand.”

The side effects, says Krugman, include “sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go — and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended.” In St. Paul, Minnesota, for instance, voters approved a rent-stabilization law by referendum in 2021 — and by 2024,

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