Tenants beware: Mamdani is already kicking off his radical scheme to socialize housing

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is officially kicking off his scheme to socialize the city’s housing stock with his “Fix the City” program.

The idea of the program is to target Gotham’s worst landlords by levying heavy fines and taking court action to confiscate their buildings if they don’t fix violations and/or pay the fines.

All that’s missing is the slogan: Tenants of New York unite! Dilapidated public housing for all!

Don’t doubt it: The radical New York State Tenant Bloc, once headed by Cea Weaver, Mamdani’s tenant czar, is strongly pushing City Hall to use a $2.2 billion fund to “take housing off landlords’ hands.”

City Hall’s comrades blame the Big Apple’s housing crisis on “greedy” landlords — mostly small-time, working-class property owners — and they fiercely believe ownership by government and community groups is the solution. 

A 2019 state law limiting rent increases to recover landlords’ costs for repairs and upgrades in rent-stabilized units has proved a disaster: Many landlords simply can’t afford to make the repairs; they even leave vacant units that don’t meet code empty, rather than shell out money they can’t recover for repairs. 

That creates an opening for the Mamdani-style Marxists: They make it financially impossible to meet code, then look to seize property for not doing so.

Weaver herself has openly promoted the idea of imposing low rents — via rent freezes — and high taxes to squeeze owners into foreclosure so the city could “seize” their buildings.

Plus, Mamdani allies in the City Council and state Legislature have introduced measures facilitating such seizures to give “qualified” nonprofits and tenants “a first right to collectively purchase their buildings when a landlord sells.”

Both bills target distressed and at-risk multifamily buildings, where landlords are forced to sell. 

The good news: Nonprofits have yet to join Mamdani’s program because they realize many rent-stabilized buildings lack the rent rolls needed to support operating costs (insurance, maintenance, property taxes, etc.).

Massive government subsidies — paid for with higher taxes — would be required into perpetuity to renovate, maintain and preserve this housing stock.

Meanwhile, prominent lenders are pulling out of the rent-stabilized market to limit their financial exposure, and developers are making plans to focus solely on building market-rate apartments.

As for tenants, they need only look at New York City Housing Authority buildings — with their $80 billion worth of backlogged repairs — as a model of Mamdani housing to see just what they’re in for.