Grimm 
Not a real estate guy but, as I understand rudimentary market economics, if the number of racist xenophobe cunts who vowed to leave New York if #Zohran won, in fact, leave New York, the drop in demand will see rates going down even before the rent freeze. So win-win, right, capitalism fetish goons?
To be very clear, rental rates won't go down, cuz landlords suck and developers are space-optimization vermin and they work with corrupt assholes to make sure "the market" doesn't actually work for normal people. Which, yes, is the thing Smith got wrong.
I do believe I recall a mostly sourceless story in a conservative rag then picked up by CBS News because they were suddenly under the helm of the editor/genocide-fan who'd founded the conservative rag with startup money from the same billionaire pillocks who funded Cuomo's campaign and that story said a bunch of NYPD cops were going to retire if the citizens of the city elected Zohran so A) put up or shut up, you petulant twats who have no business being given a gun, and B) here's your reminder, every time the NYPD does a slow-down strike, actual crime rates in the city drop because C) don't start no shit, won't be no shit.
My last year in NY, the whole city had a blackout, and there were basically zero crimes, but what there WAS was everybody went outside and checked on neighbors and went to bars, who did deals on warming beer, and all the traffic lights were out, so I went out to Eighth Ave where our nearest stoplight was and directed traffic going both ways for about an hour/hour-and-a-half until neighbor came up and said "You need a break?" and we all kept doing that until it was late enough that cars could proceed carefully and the stoplights didn't matter that much anymore - and people did this ALL OVER THE CITY cuz they see traffic snarls and hear honks down the block and it's fucking organic thing to do, right? I wandered around later, did a bar-hop with my buddy Carlos, and we didn't see a cop the whole time. Because we didn't need them. Not saying there weren't material USES for cops, then or ever, but New York's a bigger, safer, more communitarian thing than every dumbfuck Republican who has never been there and demonizes it can even conceive, cuz those people are, uniformly, dumbass redneck fuckstumps who think EVERY city is Saigon in 1975 or something. New York doesn't fake being nice like some dogshit burg in Iowa but they, neighbors, businesses, civil society groups, citizens, take care of shit in the neighborhood as needs be and nobody asks for your fucking papers when doing it.
And just to keep it 100 here, I pick on small towns in Iowa cuz that's where I come from and they all tolerate every racist prick in their midst because of that same "Iowa nice" and they do that either because they don't care about the racism or they agree with the racists and, thus, also vote overwhelmingly for racism and ethnic cleansing on a pretty consistent basis. New York doesn't do that.