One of Zohran Mamdani’s top advisers admits that his key campaign promise, freezing rents, will “deepen the crises” in the marketplace and cause building conditions to “deteriorate” — but apparently sees that not as a bug but a feature, as it’ll make it easier to seize private property.
In an essay for an “ideas” website, Mamdani braintruster Cea Weaver argues that the city should use its “taxing power” to force struggling property owners into foreclosure, then acquire the buildings and so “improve housing quality across New York.”
Forcing a crisis is a prime lefty tactic, allowing them to rush in with a cure to the disease they caused.
In this case, that means passing laws that cause real-estate values to collapse, then using taxpayer funds to “purchase buildings where the landlord is no longer interested in ownership.”
No longer interested because state and city lawmakers have made it impossible to cover taxes, insurance, labor and energy costs by not allowing regulated rents to rise enough to match those costs.
The aim is to socialize the housing market, creating a sort of “NYCHA for all,” rather like Sen. Bernie Sanders’ dream of “Medicare for all.”
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Public housing — with much of the population directly dependent on government as its landlord — is central to the socialist vision of municipal rule.
Weaver says “rents from higher-income buildings” will subsidize the costs of “lower-income buildings in other parts of New York.”
How is the city to come into possession of “higher-income buildings”? Or does she just mean ones that aren’t super-low income — that is, ones where most Mamdani voters now live?
Few truly high-income New Yorkers live anywhere that the city can readily force to sell; this seems like a vision to make the middle class pay to support the poor.
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Either way, the belief that public ownership could yield housing justice was was the idea behind the New York City Housing Authority in the first place.
But Gotham’s long experiment with owning and managing rental units has produced an $80 billion capital-needs gap after decades of deferred maintenance.
This vision, in short, is a fantasy where the city magically transforms into a brilliant manager, and deftly housing millions of tenants in high quality apartments where the rent never goes up.
The math, as they say, doesn’t math.
Putting Mamdani and his crew of steely-eyed socialists in charge of city government is bad enough, but let them seize control of our housing stock and New York City is really sunk.