Why do progressives refuse to see how they’re killing the city’s housing market?
Consider Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proud notice that Brooklyn’s Nostrand Houses complex is getting over $600 million in pubic support to rehab almost 1,200 NYCHA apartments, which works out to over $500,000 a unit — even as the state and city deny private landlords’ needs to spend anything like that to get their vacant apartments up to code.
NYCHA is falling apart, with a capital-needs shortfall approaching $100 billion; that’s how badly public ownership of residential apartments has failed the city.
Yet private owners of rental apartments are blocked by law from raising the rent to cover the cost of rehabbing their units — so tens of thousands of rent-regulated apartments sit empty, off the market needlessly.
State progressives’ 2019 law pretends to protect low-income tenants with this mandate, when in fact poor and non-poor suffer from a shrinking housing supply.
NYCHA will never get all the cash it needs to stop many complexes from falling apart completely, while private landlords only want a chance to improve their buildings without having the government’s heavy hand artificially depressing prices.
When running for mayor, Mamdani claimed, “For those landlords who need a little extra help, there’s a city fund they can apply to.”
Huh? When pressed for details on this city fund, the mayor’s office stonewalls.
Because no such fund will give landlords money to repair their buildings; at most, the city offers financing, but only if you enter covenants that impose even higher costs.
Nowhere else does the city forbid price increases: People need underwear and shoes, but nobody expects the government to force stores to sell them below cost.
It doesn’t work for housing, either — but the “social justice” crew doesn’t care.
If they have their way long enough, the entire city housing market will be a disaster as bad as NYCHA.
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