Last week, at a candidates’ forum for New York City’s mayoral contenders, a questioner asked frontrunner Zohran Mamdani whether his signature plan to freeze rents would survive legal scrutiny.

He refused to answer.

In fact, the word-salad response from the 33-year-old political wunderkind undercut his own arguments for his most celebrated campaign promise.

First, Mamdani laid out his stump-speech condemnations of rapacious landlords’ ever-increasing profits.

Then he turned on a dime: “To freeze the rent,” he said, “does not also preclude you from working on the necessity of a property tax reform agenda that is currently part of the reason why it’s so difficult to maintain rental housing across the city.”

So which is it: Are landlords earning too much money and therefore deserve 0% r

See Full Page