Mayor Zohran Mamdani is right about the lack of decent, affordable housing in the city, but he’s worse than clueless about solutions.
That’s the take-away from the housing plan he dropped Tuesday.
Hizzoner blames Gotham’s housing woes on greedy landlords, so his “solution” is to hand as much ownership as possible to government and community groups.
Hello? Try to find a single New York City Housing Authority tenant who likes having government as their landlord — and waiting months or years for, say, an elevator to get fixed.
Yet Mamdani plans to build and preserve 400,000 “affordable homes” over the next decade, at a whopping cost of $22 billion — with many run by nonprofit groups or the city itself.
This guarantees disaster.
The mayor clearly knows NYCHA is dysfunctional but blames President Ronald Reagan for launching an era of funding “cuts” for public housing.
Sorry: Reagan shelled out $1.1 billion for day-to-day operations of public authorities in 1983; by 2023, Washington spent $5.1 billion — a five-fold spike (far above inflation).
Meanwhile, much of Mamdani’s plan is more of a jobs program: He wants all construction work here to pay combined wages and benefits of at least $40 an hour and to “expand project labor agreements” (effectively, union-dictated terms) for new developments.
Great: So the city will get the fewest number of homes built for every dollar spent.
He also vows to crack down on landlord violations, which is OK — except that the overwhelming number of serious violations are in largely rent-stabilized buildings, whose rental incomes barely cover costs.
The mayor’s rent freeze will make that worse — and any new owner (public, private or nonprofit) will face the same grim math.
Indeed, thousands of such buildings now face foreclosure, with more and more landlords behind on their mortgages.
How does Mamdani expect them to make repairs?
No, all this is simply an excuse for expropriation: “We will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers,” the mayor brags, and “will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards,” including “community land trusts, nonprofits or even the tenants themselves.”
Mamdani’s housing “ideas” chief, Cea Weaver, openly promotes imposing low rents and high taxes to squeeze owners into foreclosure so the city can grab their properties.
The aim is (legalized) theft, but after all confiscating private property is a pillar of socialism.
Yet socialist theories about improving people’s lives always run afoul of reality: The private sector will always supply and manage housing far better than government (let alone hapless or corrupt “community groups”); crushing the private sector won’t magically make the public sector any less hapless.
Mamdani’s plan steers the city into a deeper housing crisis — and the very tenants he says he’ll help will suffer the most.
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