{"id":69776,"date":"2025-12-13T14:23:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-13T14:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/69776\/"},"modified":"2025-12-13T14:23:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-13T14:23:08","slug":"lefties-want-more-poison-to-cure-nyc-housing-crisis-they-caused","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/69776\/","title":{"rendered":"Lefties want more poison to cure NYC housing crisis they caused"},"content":{"rendered":"

You think New York has an affordability crisis<\/a> now? Beware: A housing emergency you don\u2019t hear about \u2014 driven entirely by lefty legislators \u2014 endangers the city\u2019s stock of rent-stabilized apartments.<\/a><\/p>\n

Buildings that host over 600,000 rent-stabilized units \u2014 with both private and non-profit owners \u2014 are on the verge of mortgage default. <\/p>\n

Mass foreclosure, of the sort New York last experienced in the 1970s, would crater the market, endangering these buildings and their already-vulnerable tenants.<\/p>\n

The New York Housing Conference, which represents not-for-profit, publicly financed buildings that provide deeply subsidized housing for low-income tenants, reports that its members will soon need a $1 billion bailout to avoid default.<\/p>\n

The problem, the NYHC explains, is simple arithmetic: \u201cRents are not covering expenses.\u201d <\/p>\n

The state\u2019s 2019 rent-law changes<\/a> made it impossible for landlords to raise rents when other costs go up \u2014 like utilities, insurance and labor \u2014 and prevents building owners from recouping the costs of unit rehabilitation after tenants move out.<\/p>\n

\t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPost Editorial Board<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve flagged how that slams mom-and-pop landlords, but it\u2019s a crisis for nonprofit outfits, too.<\/p>\n

Yet most affordable housing is still privately owned, and the New York Apartment Association, which reps owners of such rent-stabilized buildings, notes that its members are in the same boat. Thousands can\u2019t cover their mortgage payments<\/a>, much less make necessary repairs or upgrade their tenants\u2019 units.<\/p>\n

The NYAA estimates that the private market would need $3.65 billion to rescue its members from insolvency.<\/p>\n

This crisis wasn\u2019t the result of vulture capitalists speculating wildly to make a fast buck: It was progressives wildly rewriting the rules for a vulnerable sector to score political points. <\/p>\n

Democrats won control of the Legislature in late 2018 and started swinging for the left-field fences: That\u2019s when they rushed through all those disastrous \u201ccriminal justice reforms,\u201d too.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tStart your day with all you need to know\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMorning Report delivers the latest news, videos, photos and more.\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\tThanks for signing up!\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

That year\u2019s rent-law \u201cfixes\u201d turned the economics of residential-building management upside-down, drastically narrowing expected revenues not because market conditions changed, but because government upset the game board.<\/p>\n

As a result, values have collapsed, leaving building owners underwater on their debt, yet still legally obligated to provide their tenants with safe, habitable housing, including heat, hot water, working intercoms, on-site superintendents and all the other basics that New Yorkers take for granted.<\/p>\n

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani\u2019s vision for the future of housing<\/a> offers little hope for improvement: He vows to \u201cfreeze the rent\u201d for all rent-regulated tenants, even as so many landlords operate with paper-thin margins at best. <\/p>\n

By law, stabilized-rent hikes are supposed to reflect economic reality; Mamdani means to ignore not just the laws of economic, but the actual statute. <\/p>\n

The mayor-elect loudly cheers the \u201cdecommodification of housing,\u201d meaning that the housing market shouldn\u2019t be a source of profit for anyone \u2014 though NYCHA, the nation\u2019s largest public housing authority, shows exactly what a de-commodified system looks like: endlessly deferred maintenance that\u2019s yielded a repairs backlog running $85 billion.<\/a><\/p>\n

The city\u2019s affordability woes can\u2019t be solved by waving a magic wand; indeed, Albany\u2019s 2019 bid to \u201cprotect tenants\u201d already has the affordable-housing market on the brink of catastrophic failure.<\/p>\n

One more big dose of magical thinking from Mamdani, and New York\u2019s tenants will be in for a world of hurt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You think New York has an affordability crisis now? Beware: A housing emergency you don\u2019t hear about \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1586,433,304,2907,9,56,63,65,64,299,564,566,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-69776","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-affordability","9":"tag-affordable-housing","10":"tag-editorial","11":"tag-housing","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-nyc-headlines","16":"tag-nyc-news","17":"tag-opinion","18":"tag-rent","19":"tag-rent-stabilization","20":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}