{"id":86172,"date":"2026-01-01T02:53:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T02:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/86172\/"},"modified":"2026-01-01T02:53:25","modified_gmt":"2026-01-01T02:53:25","slug":"mamdanis-goal-socialize-the-skyline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/86172\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani’s Goal: Socialize the Skyline"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York Mayor-elect\u00a0Zohran Mamdani<\/a>\u00a0is set to move into public housing,\u00a0New York City<\/a>\u2019s Gracie Mansion Thursday, when he assumes power on New Year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s flagship\u00a0housing\u00a0policy has been to completely freeze rents on all rent-stabilized housing, which already limits how much landlords can raise rents.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> State Tenant Bloc.<\/p>\n

\u201cTenants 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\u00a0real estate\u00a0industry,\u201d she\u00a0said\u00a0when she founded the bloc earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Two months ago, Weaver wrote an essay calling for \u201cpolicy interventions\u201d to solve \u201cNew York\u2019s housing crisis,\u201d which she characterized as \u201csky-high rents, extraordinary waitlists for affordable housing, and low-quality housing stock.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weaver made a good point when she wrote that the city\u2019s housing policies \u201care defined by acute competition\u201d between two Goliaths. One is \u201ca robust tenant movement that has secured the strongest rent stabilization laws and public-housing tools in the United States,\u201d and the other is \u201cthe country\u2019s most powerful real estate lobby, accustomed to shaping our city in its image.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s skyscrapers.<\/p>\n

How do you resolve this tension?\u00a0Weaver wants to do it by putting\u00a0regulations and taxes on steroids; then, when landlords cry\u00a0\u201cno mas\u201d and are \u201cno longer interested in ownership,\u201d the city will step in, buy out their properties, and presto, Gotham becomes the city\u2019s biggest landlord. What\u2019s not to like?<\/p>\n

This is how it works: Weaver recognized that the rent freeze could have adverse consequences. She\u2019s not dumb.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is true that a rent freeze, without additional intervention, risks deepening the crises within the market,\u201d she wrote in her essay. \u201cOwners of rent-stabilized buildings may choose not to invest in their properties.\u201d That would make an already deteriorating housing stock worse, and Mayor Mamdani would get the blame.<\/p>\n

Effective code-enforcement programs would help, and make Mamdani appear to care, especially with the help of a sympathetic media.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut investment in enforcement\u00a0is not in itself enough,\u201d Weaver wrote. The city, as the\u00a0New York Post\u00a0aptly\u00a0put it\u00a0in an editorial, can then pass \u201claws that cause real-estate values to collapse.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Weaver\u2019s world, the city\u2019s \u201clack of a profit motive\u201d 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\u2019s awesome \u201ctaxing power,\u201d and have the Big Apple \u201cintervene\u201d and \u201cacquire rent stabilized housing as a market actor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWith 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,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to combine the power to enforce housing standards and the power to finance and acquire rental housing\u2014two capacities the city already has,\u201d Weaver wrote.<\/p>\n

Of course, none of this will touch the truly rich. Just as\u00a0Trump\u00a0decamped 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Add to this that part of Mamdani\u2019s\u00a0housing plan\u00a0is already to have the city construct 200,000 new, \u201cpublicly-subsidized, affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes\u201d over the next 10 years.<\/p>\n

How will he pay for it? Tax and spend, of course.<\/p>\n

\u201cZohran will allocate $70 billion new capital dollars in the city\u2019s 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,\u201d says the plan. Crush owners with regulation and citizens with taxes.<\/p>\n

The history of the Soviet Union<\/a>, Eastern Europe, China<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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 Thursday.<\/p>\n

Originally published by the Washington Examiner<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York Mayor-elect\u00a0Zohran Mamdani\u00a0is set to move into public housing,\u00a0New York City\u2019s Gracie Mansion Thursday, when he assumes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":86173,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[827,13378,9,11,10,1211,41815,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-86172","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-china","9":"tag-morning-bell","10":"tag-new-york","11":"tag-new-york-headlines","12":"tag-new-york-news","13":"tag-socialism","14":"tag-soviet-union","15":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86172","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=86172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}