MESSAGE
| DATE | 2026-01-13 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] The Mamdani resistance - Fighting against
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Heritage:
How Mamdani Aims to Crush Property Owners and Socialize the Skyline
Mike Gonzalez
6–7 minutes
New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is set to move into public housing,
New York City’s Gracie Mansion, next Thursday, when he assumes power on
New Year’s Day. This is good for him and his wife, Rama Duwaji, as he is
about to make owning private property in the Big Apple a riskier
proposition.
Mamdani’s flagship housing policy has been to completely freeze rents on
all rent-stabilized housing, which already limits how much landlords can
raise rents.
Other aspects of his designs on private property have been taking shape
for some time. While it looks like he may not have his commissars
expropriate landlords by force, he will use regulation to achieve the
same outcome.
Three weeks after being elected, Mamdani appointed Cea Weaver to his
housing transition committee. An organizer, Weaver works for Housing
Justice for All, a left-leaning organization also known as the
Upstate-Downstate Housing Alliance. She also heads the New York State
Tenant Bloc.
“Tenants are half the state and a majority in every major city. United,
we have the power to reclaim our homes from the stranglehold of the real
estate industry,” she said when she founded the bloc earlier this year.
Two months ago, Weaver wrote an essay calling for “policy interventions”
to solve “New York’s housing crisis,” which she characterized as
“sky-high rents, extraordinary waitlists for affordable housing, and
low-quality housing stock.”
Weaver made a good point when she wrote that the city’s housing policies
“are defined by acute competition” between two Goliaths. One is “a
robust tenant movement that has secured the strongest rent stabilization
laws and public-housing tools in the United States,” and the other is
“the country’s most powerful real estate lobby, accustomed to shaping
our city in its image.”
>>> Mamdani’s “Mom-and-Pop” Plan Doesn’t Cut Red Tape
New York City is indeed known by the most famed skyline in the world,
and by its strong-willed real estate developers (one of whom sits in the
White House), but also for an aggressive, Marxist tenant movement, which
has pushed for rent-control laws that have ironically given Gotham rents
that are as high as the city’s skyscrapers.
How do you resolve this tension? Weaver wants to do it by putting
regulations and taxes on steroids; then, when landlords cry “no mas” and
are “no longer interested in ownership,” the city will step in, buy out
their properties, and presto, Gotham becomes the city’s biggest
landlord. What’s not to like?
This is how it works: Weaver recognized that the rent freeze could have
adverse consequences. She’s not dumb.
“It is true that a rent freeze, without additional intervention, risks
deepening the crises within the market,” she wrote in her essay. “Owners
of rent-stabilized buildings may choose not to invest in their
properties.” That would make an already deteriorating housing stock
worse, and Mayor Mamdani would get the blame.
Effective code-enforcement programs would help, and make Mamdani appear
to care, especially with the help of a sympathetic media.
“But investment in enforcement is not in itself enough,” Weaver wrote.
The city, as the New York Post aptly put it in an editorial, can then
pass “laws that cause real-estate values to collapse.”
In Weaver’s world, the city’s “lack of a profit motive” is actually an
advantage, not a hindrance to making decisions that make economic sense.
Mamdani could then combine that ability to ignore profit and loss with
the city’s awesome “taxing power,” and have the Big Apple “intervene”
and “acquire rent stabilized housing as a market actor.”
“With its multibillion-dollar capital budget, the city has the capacity
to act as a non-speculative market actor: purchasing buildings where the
landlord is no longer interested in ownership,” she wrote.
>>> Does Mamdani Know Best? New York City Is About to Find Out
But first, you must pass laws that crush people who own property,
precipitate a housing crisis, have prices plunge, and then force these
property owners to sell to Big Brother.
“We need to combine the power to enforce housing standards and the power
to finance and acquire rental housing — two capacities the city already
has,” Weaver wrote.
Of course, none of this will touch the truly rich. Just as Trump
decamped to Florida and resides in the District of Columbia, the rich
can (and will) abandon New York City. Even if they stay, the city will
never buy the buildings where they live.
No, it will be middle-class property owners who will be squeezed until
they can no longer make ends meet, and have to sell to the city at
bottom prices.
Add to this that part of Mamdani’s housing plan is already to have the
city construct 200,000 new, “publicly-subsidized, affordable,
union-built, rent-stabilized homes” over the next 10 years.
How will he pay for it? Tax and spend, of course.
“Zohran will allocate $70 billion new capital dollars in the city’s
Ten-Year Capital Plan to create new affordable housing, raised on the
municipal bond market. This is on top of the about $30 billion the city
is already planning to spend,” says the plan. Crush owners with
regulation and citizens with taxes.
WHY IS ZOHRAN MAMDANI SURROUNDED BY ANTI-SEMITES
The history of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, etc.,
tells you that governments make for really bad owners, precisely because
they lack the profit motive. Block after block of ugly, decaying
buildings was always the legacy of communism.
This means that we might all want to visit Gotham soon if we want to
catch one last glimpse of its great skyline. Mamdani becomes mayor next
week.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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