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for me the question is, if a rent freeze happens, how is that different than all the other "progressive charities" that do genuinely provide a lot of necessary support for poor people but do not mobilize those people in any way to scale up the project and seize more power?

If there isn't a coherent political program that each voter gets plugged into and participates in daily/weekly/monthly at least, all you are doing is bribing people to vote for you again the next time. FDR famously said he "saved capitalism" with the new deal, and this is the type of imagery people like AOC have used as well with the green new deal. providing charity is nice and really helps people who need it, and probably gets you reelected next time, but how does that become a greater movement? If the only answer is to have thousands of Mamdanis run for every office and take over, maybe if every major local office is taken and held for the next 15-20 years they can begin to do something, but this isn't possible or realistic with the timeline of climate change. slowly take over city by city with socialist cities, and then the greater state? through bourgeois electoral cycles?

I'm hoping the DSAers organizing this are actually creating an engaging program that turns at least 10-20% of the workers who vote for Mamdani into political cadre because without that crucial piece this isn't really political organizing in a revolutionary way, it is just doing populist bourgeois political organizing the way plenty of populist bourgeois politicians have set out to do in the past. Since DSA hasn't managed to have a membership reflective of average workers, it is obvious they don't yet have a way to turn this campaign into a political project that average workers will be involved in and dedicate their precious free time to, or else they would already have unleashed it.