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| DATE | 2026-01-13 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] The Mamdani resistance - Fighting against
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New York Post
307.5K Followers
With Cea Weaver, Mamdani signals the dangerous truth of his housing plan
for NYC
Opinion by Howard Husock
• 1d • 4 min read
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Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Cea Weaver, his pick to head the resurrected
Office to Protect Tenants, are two peas in a progressive pod when it
comes to housing.
Mamdani has infamously promised to jack up property taxes on “whiter
neighborhoods”; Weaver has been pilloried, and justly so, for calling
homeownership a “weapon of white supremacy” and seeking to “impoverish
the ‘white’ middle class.”
But Weaver’s policy confusion goes deeper — and should spark concern
about Mamdani’s broader housing agenda.
In resurfaced tweets, she railed against property ownership as “an
individualized good and not a collective good.”
Private property and homeownership merely “masquerade as ‘wealth
building’ public policy,” she declared.
In other words, Weaver (and perhaps Mamdani) is signaling antagonism
toward the private housing sector itself.
In that light, it very much matters that the mayor is standing by Weaver
despite her inflammatory views.
He’s even announced what amount to a series of show trials for
landlords, in the form of “rental ripoff” hearings in all five boroughs.
He clearly fails to appreciate the extent to which private landlords are
failing in New York as the result of public policies.
A key case in point: the estimated 50,000 rent-regulated apartments now
vacant — held off the market — because the cost of bringing them up to
housing code is greater than the rent owners can collect.
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See Also
With Cea Weaver, Mamdani signals the dangerous truth of his housing plan
for NYC
editorial
NYC housing advocate Cea Weaver must own up to her beliefs and explain
them to rightfully concerned voters
Renovating a vacant apartment can cost up to $600 per square foot,
experts say — that’s a $60,000 bill to bring a 1,000-square-foot
apartment back to rentable condition, for critical costs like updated
electrical wiring, new appliances and plumbing replacement.
Related video: Mayor Mamdani announces Cea Weaver as director to protect
tenants (New York Post - Video)
It is now a great pleasure and an honor of
Current Time 0:00
/
Duration 1:43
New York Post - Video
Mayor Mamdani announces Cea Weaver as director to protect tenants
0
View on WatchView on Watch
But the state’s 2019 rent-control statute, the Housing Stability and
Tenant Protection Act, sharply limits rent increases, even for major
capital repairs.
The problem here is public policy, not market failure.
If Mamdani really wants to boost the housing supply, he should follow
the example of a fellow progresssive.
Maura Healey, the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, seems to be
Mamdani’s political soul mate.
She’s the nation’s first LGTBQ state chief executive and a fierce critic
of “systemic racism.”
“Yes, America is burning,” she said of the riots that followed the
death of George Floyd. “But that’s how forests grow.”
She has opposed deporting any illegal immigrants, calling it
“intentionally cruel.”
Yet she’s broken ranks with her fellow leftists on a core housing
policy: rent regulation.
With a ballot referendum in favor of statewide rent control looming,
Healey last month just said no.
“Rent control is not going to be the solution to how we get through this
crisis,” she said. “We need to build more homes.”
In other words, she’s one leftist who understands supply and demand.
The latter without the former leads to high prices — like the $3,400 per
month average one-bedroom rent in Boston.
Healey understands, as Mamdani apparently does not, that freezing the
rent inhibits new supply.
She knows the telling history of rent control in her state — and the
benefits that followed the 1994 referendum that abolished it.
See Also
With Cea Weaver, Mamdani signals the dangerous truth of his housing plan
for NYC
The peril of Mamdani and Weaver’s Communist college kids’ field trip in
New York City
Prior to that statewide vote, three major Massachusetts communities had
adopted rent control.
The result: poorly maintained buildings and a drop in housing stock.
Just as in Gotham today, properties were taken off the market while
values fell.
By 1994, Boston had more than 10,000 vacant apartments, as overall
rental housing stock fell by 12%, per an MIT study.
Healey fears a replay.
“I don’t want to see housing production stopped,” she told The Boston
Globe, and restoring rent control threatens to “effectively end housing
construction in Massachusetts.”
In other words, contra Mamdani and Weaver, Healey understands the
private housing sector as an engine of affordability — and welcomes it.
It is, of course, far too much to expect Mamdani to follow her lead and
oppose rent stabilization; his signature rent-freeze stance got him elected.
But he might consider modulating his stance, by sticking to his freeze
promise for an apartment’s base rent — but pushing for Albany to permit
rent increases when owners invest in major improvements that bring
apartments up to code.
A hard freeze, in contrast, risks disaster, pushing small landlords into
financial limbo and off the market — perhaps even bringing a return to
the Bronx-is-burning 1970s, when the combination of arson and insurance
was more profitable than operating a building.
Healey’s decision gives Mamdani an example: He can choose to govern not
as an ideologue, but as a progressive pragmatist.
And it sends a message to those Democrats promoting an affordability
agenda: Real growth may require bucking the leftist radicals now
dominating their party.
Howard Husock is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and
author of “The Projects: A New History of Public Housing.”
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.
--
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that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
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