Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks at a press conference at Manhattan Housing Court in New York City on Tuesday, Aug. 25. Michael Brochstein/ZUMA / SplashNews.com See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google In what’s clearly part of a strategy to transfer vast amounts of city housing out of the private sector, City Hall has spurred a major spike in tenant complaints.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s taxpayer-funded organizers fan out across the city, encouraging renters to call 311 about dim lighting, bugs or missing signs.
Landlords have to address each grievance under threat of fines — or, as Mamdani prefers, having their buildings moved into a kind of receivership, setting up transfer of ownership to the city or to politically favored nonprofits.
Getting the city to seize and “socialize” New York’s housing stock is an explicit goal of the socialist visionaries occupying City Hall, who are on record with plans to mass-mobilize renters via “tenant unions” to harass, squeeze and ultimately bankrupt landlords.
The mayor and his housing-rights commissar, Cea Weaver, are weaponizing the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the Office to Protect Tenants and the Mao-inspired Office of Mass Engagement.
The “Talk to Tenants” program, launched in July, sends volunteer cadres door-to-door to “connect tenants with organizing resources” and “build the collective power to hold negligent landlords accountable and fight for the homes they deserve,” in the words of Mass Engagement Commissioner Tascha Van Auken.
These coalitions organize complaint drives against landlords, with dubious or even bogus entries stuffing the city’s complaint box.
If a flood of complaints doesn’t drive the landlord under, rent strikes can.
Remember: Mamdani crony Tracy Rosenthal — a millionaire nepo baby and the author of “Abolish Rent” — brags about her four-year rent strike, which drove her immigrant landlord into foreclosure.
Rosenthal says she began withholding rent immediately after moving into her two-bedroom apartment.
The process involves unrelenting attacks from multiple angles: Freeze the rent while all other costs soar; encourage tenants to complain about decaying conditions; fine the landlords while also beating the drum for rent strikes.
Finally, force the building owners out of the market and Presto! Utopia arrives.
Except that it doesn’t: The socialists’ cloud castles can only come crashing down.
They imagine profit has no place in housing, which they call a human right, but if a building’s costs exceed its rental income, something must give — almost always starting with maintenance, which is how the New York City Housing Authority became New York City’s No. 1 slumlord, by far.
Mamdani’s team aims to recreate the collapse of the 1970s, when the city wound up owning a quarter of the housing stock — and saw the stock rot even more rapidly.
Those are now known as “the bad old days” for good reason; it’s grotesque that the left is out to impose the very nightmares it claims capitalism causes, but which actually are what socialism always produces.
