New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled his administration’s new housing initiative on Tuesday to considerable fanfare. The plan, titled “Block by Block,” aims to build 200,000 new affordable housing units and preserve or stabilize another 200,000 over the next decade.
The administration’s website describes “Block by Block” as “a sweeping blueprint to tackle New York City’s deepening housing crisis with the urgency and scale the moment demands. Spanning the full breadth of housing policy, from new construction to tenant protections to public housing, homeownership and worker protections, the plan lays out a comprehensive strategy to make New York City more affordable for working people.”
The reality is that this plan would significantly expand the power and protections afforded to renters, fulfilling a promise Mamdani made repeatedly on the campaign trail.
It would also impose steep penalties on landlords who allow their buildings to fall into disrepair and, in some cases, even transfer ownership of neglected properties.
The mayor smiled broadly as he announced his administration’s astounding plan to seize and redistribute properties owned by neglectful landlords — a proposal taken right out of the Marxist playbook.
“Through our new citywide campaign, Fix the City, we will focus on the worst landlords in New York City,” the mayor said, to much applause. “When necessary we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers.”
He continued, “And for buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards – stewards that include community land trusts, nonprofits or even the tenants themselves.”
If you’re wondering how low the administration might actually set the bar for “neglect,” and what new regulations and/or coercive tax measures it may impose on current property owners to achieve its goals, you’re not alone.
The New York Post noted:
The multi-pronged approach goes beyond the plight of tenants, calling for a $22 billion commitment over five years to build new affordable housing, including $5.6 billion alone for the New York City Housing Authority.The plan would also ensure the poorest New Yorkers pay no more than 25% of their monthly income for rent — down from 30% — in new projects subsidized by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development….Big Apple real estate and business leaders blasted the plan’s proposals to impose a strict $40 an hour minimum wage for workers building city-funded affordable housing and giving nonprofits first crack at private property sales.
This raises the obvious question: How exactly do these geniuses plan to pay for the construction of all these new housing units? Do they expect Gov. Kathy Hochul to come through again?
“Block by Block” emerged directly from a series of “Rental Ripoff” hearings that began just days after Mamdani’s inauguration. According to the NYC.gov website, “the testimony shared at these hearings will directly inform policy interventions to take on these ripoff tactics.”
Writing about the story at the time, Professor Jacobson noted, “We have seen this movie before. Mamdani has identified a class of property owners supposedly ripping off the masses, and now he is targeting them. In the Soviet days they were called Kulaks. In NYC under Mamdani, landlords are the new Kulaks.”
In his Tuesday remarks, Mamdani spoke about “how the world has looked to New York City to show the way … when confronted with intractable challenges.” He waxed poetically of the grandeur of the city’s skyline, the “skyscrapers that rise into the clouds. Grand bridges, libraries, and museums.”
What he failed to mention is that each of these great landmarks was made possible not by socialism, but by generations of private enterprise and investment. In other words, capitalist initiatives.
Asked to comment on the new plan by the Post, Ann Korchak, board president of Small Property Owners of New York, said:
This is a one-sided, pro-tenant plan that does absolutely nothing for thousands of distressed small rent-stabilized property owners, who next month will be saddled with a Mamdani-engineered rent freeze from the Rent Guidelines Board.The code enforcement section, in particular, is all politics and no real substance. Small owners are often victimized by tenant-caused violations and denial of access to apartments. This latest Mamdani housing scheme will deepen the distress of rent-stabilized properties, the backbone of affordable housing.
Days after Mamdani’s November victory, Cea Weaver, then a major advocate for tenants’ rights and currently serving as the Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, penned an essay that provided a glimpse into this very plan. In it, she called for “policy interventions” to solve “New York’s housing crisis.”
[Weaver made headlines in January after saying, “White, middle-class homeowners are a huge problem for a renter justice movement.” Mike covered that story.]
“With its multibillion-dollar capital budget,” she wrote, “the city has the capacity to act as a non-speculative market actor: purchasing buildings where the landlord is no longer interested in ownership.”
At the time, we could only speculate about which specific “policy interventions” the administration would deploy to make landlords “no longer interested in ownership.” While the new plan does not state the precise conditions under which properties can be seized, we now have a clearer understanding of what the administration means by “buildings where the landlord is no longer interested in ownership.”
Once the administration decides that enough violations have accumulated against an owner, the process of expropriating their property can begin.
This deeply misguided plan, conceived of by a coalition of socialists, has no place in the U.S.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on LinkedIn.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY