Tens of thousands of New York renters are shivering as their decrepit buildings’ heating systems wheeze and shudder against this brutal cold wave — suffering that’s likely to grow even worse in the coming years thanks to the left’s war on affordable housing.
With 80,000 calls in January alone, heat-related complaints to 311 are breaking records, a clear sign that “reforms” of the last few years are starting to destroy the city’s housing stock.
That is, the long drive toward “freezing” the rent really means freezing basic maintenance.
Starting with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s years of zero rent hikes and followed by the 2019 state law greatly restricting rent-stabilized landlords ability to increase their buildings’ incomes, and with Mamdan’s vow to again ban any hikes in the city’s million regulated rents, the cash to keep the heat and hot water running for these units is running out.
Top Mamdani adviser Cea Weaver openly expects this to bring what she calls a “capital strike”: Landlords squeezed by static revenue and rising costs — taxes, fuel, insurance and labor — will find they have no choice but to defer maintenance.
That means more boiler problems, more leaks, more crumbling facades and less cleaning; Weaver’s goal is to make conditions unlivable so Team Mamdani can seize buildings from “slumlords,” and convert them to “social housing.”
(How will they fund the massive repairs then needed, let alone make the buildings’ incomes match their expenses? They’ll burn that bridge when they come to it!)
Tenants just have to suffer in the meantime, involuntarily doing their part for the socialist “transformation.”
You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, one infamous socialist loved to say — but it’s awfully hard on the eggs.
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