Make New York Post a Preferred Source New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks during a press conference at City Hall on Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in New York. Andrew Schwartz / SplashNews.com Mayor Zohran Mamdani last week signed a law that serves as a test case of getting away with constitution-defying socialism.
Passed quietly through the City Council, and watered down from an earlier version vetoed by Mayor Eric Adams, the Community Opportunity for Purchase Act still tramps all over property owners’ right to sell to a bidder of their choice.
As only the second law Mamdani’s deigned to sign so far, it clearly carries great meaning for the mayor as both a policy win and an ideological keystone.
Starting Jan. 1, it will stop the private owners of about 2,100 properties (rent-regulated buildings with sufficient code violations) from simply selling their properties on the open market: When they reach a price with any buyer, they must then give “qualified nonprofits” (essentially, ones run by Mamdani allies) 90 days to make an offer.
That is, the landlord is required to sell to favored bidders if they match the price.
Notice: This isn’t creating any opportunity for the community, as the law’s title pretends, but only for the interests that control the nonprofit.
Which of course is how socialism always winds up working in practice.
The shift won’t even benefit tenants — it doesn’t lower rents, only changes who collects them.
And nonprofits have to cover the same costs as any other landlords, with any income over that going into the nonprofit’s hands even if it doesn’t get called a profit.
As for the pretense that the new owners will be better custodians of the property, just consider the City Housing Authority’s near $100-billion repair backlog.
Notice, too, that nonprofits are also struggling with the impact of the mayor’s rent freeze: They can’t get vital financing, either, because the math of rent-regulated owners meeting payments no longer adds up.
Meanwhile, COPA directly reduces the value of the private buildings it targets: Not only does it at least delay any sale, it guarantees lower private-sector bids, which must include the risk that, even after you’ve done all the work to make a purchase, it’ll be transferred to someone else.
And a less-valuable building will get less money invested in it by the current owner, hastening its deterioration: Everybody loses except City Hall’s “nonprofit” allies.
The other way this serves the mayor’s movement is a test for whether they can get away with it — that is, do they control the courts?
The Court of Appeals, New York’s highest, ruled in a landmark 1976 case over the city’s attempt to rezone private land in Tudor City, that municipalities must be “reasonable” when regulating the use of private property; that rule should strike down COPA — unless progressives’ prolonged drive to make the COA their puppet has succeeded.
The law also defies the US Constitution: Its limit on owners’ rights is clearly a “taking” — a partial seizure of the property — under the Fifth Amendment.
But of course national Democrats are looking to remake the Supreme Court, too; they might succeed before any lawsuit winds its way there.
From top to bottom, in other words, this is another example of how the left pretends it’s battling for justice when its real struggle is simply for power.
