There was nothing at all surprising, in the context of New York housing policy, in the recent news that state government has stepped in to make sure that rents stay artificially low for select apartments built and subsidized through the state’s so-called Mitchell-Lama program.

Owners of 23 such buildings in high-rent neighborhoods like the Upper West Side had naively hoped that the fact that they’d received long-ago mortgage subsidies and tax abatements did not mean that they forever had to accept below-market rents. The state saw things otherwise, however — and interpreted the state’s rent regulations to mean that tenants will, for example, continue to pay $1,000 a month for apartments which could command more than $5,000.

Such decisions are entirely consistent with city and state housing policy broadly, whose default position is to protect residents from the potential vagaries of the marketplace. One can understand why elected officials respond in such a way: stories of those facing sharp rent increases — or mortgage payments, for that matter — elicit an emotional response. And there are more tenant votes than landlord.

But lost in the consistent rush to preserve low-cost “affordable” units is the broader impact on a city that has historically, and still today, relies on talented newcomers to fuel its economic engine. Here’s the connection: tenants protected from price increases — whether in rent controlled, rent-stabilized or public housing — are inevitably more likely not to move, even if they no longer need as big a place, even if good substitutes are available elsewhere. Newcomers face a game of musical chairs in which the players simply stay in their seats — and can ignore the music.

The risk is this: New York will become what can be called a frozen city, one in which housing turnover is sharply limited and opportunities for new arrivals, notwithstanding their potential contribution to the economy and culture of the city, are curtailed.

There is evidence that this is already starting to happen. In an as-yet unpublished paper, “How New York Housing Policies Are Different — and Maybe Why,” two economists, Ingrid Gould Ellen of NYU and Brendan O’Flaherty of Columbia, use decennial census data to compare housing turnover in New York to that of other major cities whose density is most comparable to New York.

They found that renters in New York were almost twice as likely to remain in the same unit for a 10-year period than tenants in the nine next most populous cities: 35% of New York tenants stayed put; only 17%, for instance, in Chicago. Even when compared to tenants in other high-density cities, the turnover difference is large: only 23% of San Francisco tenants did not move for 10 years, only 18% of Boston’s.

There is an unavoidable connection between such figures and the fact that New York has more rent-controlled, public and otherwise subsidized housing than any other U.S. city.

Indeed, no other major city has any rent control program remotely as extensive as New York’s — Los Angeles and San Francisco have modest programs — nor a public housing program even close as big. Chicago was once second with nearly 40,000 units but has demolished some 10,000.

Of roughly three million housing units in New York, more than one million are rent-controlled or rent-stabilized. Another 178,000 units are owned by the city’s public housing authority. There are another 58,000 Mitchell-Lama rental units, whose price is brought down by construction and tax subsidies.

Thus, well over a third of all housing is buffered from the market. Tenants in such situations are artificially shielded from the sort of decisions that Americans elsewhere make every day: is it still worth it to live here now that the kids are grown? Might a smaller place in a better school district be a good idea? It is certainly no surprise that the city’s housing authority believes that tenants in some 39,000 of its units are “over-housed” — i.e., they have one or more empty bedrooms.

It is tempting to see community stability as a virtue — and to a certain extent it is. This is not to say that New York should aspire to high turnover for its own sake. Clearly, many cities with higher housing turnover, and less subsidized housing, have far less healthy economies.

Nonetheless, over-consumption of housing — using too much because it’s made artificially cheap — logically leads to fewer available units for those who need one, or less supply. So it is that housing subsidies lead logically to long waiting times for subsidized units and higher prices for those units that aren’t subsidized. Subsidies, in other words, create pressure for more subsidies.

But healthy cities are also changing cities. Urban vitality depends, as Jane Jacobs wrote, on such matters as new uses for old buildings, as well as new buildings for old sites — and attracting new people for new sorts of jobs.

To his great credit, Michael Bloomberg, more than any other recent mayor, has understood that city government has to facilitate change, not impede it. Indeed, at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Rethinking Development October conference, titled “Thinking Big for New York City,” Mr. Bloomberg specifically singled out the dangers posed by outdated zoning that “was freezing out development in areas where growth made sense, and sending it to places that didn’t have the infrastructure to handle it.”

The very same can be said of the existing constraints on turnover in the city’s residential housing market. Its potential, too, must be unlocked, whether through selective sale of public housing units, as this newspaper has urged, or through a humane transition away from price controls of all sorts on housing.

It is true, of course, that change is difficult, indeed sometimes painful. But the city that does not embrace it will surely wither.

Mr. Husock, author of “America’s Trillion-Dollar Housing Mistake,” is vice president for Policy Research at the Manhattan Institute.