Surprise! Mamdani Is Governing Like a Socialist

Surprise! Mam Downey is governing like a socialist by William L. Anderson.

When President Donald Trump recently told the New York Times that he is restrained only by

my own morality, instead of by international law or treaties, people rightfully were shocked.

People who feared the Trump presidency might turn authoritarian, hoped, maybe against hope,

that the existing constraints that came with the Office of President might moderate his views,

but so far it has been a false hope. Likewise, when Zoran Mam Downey became mayor of New York City,

some had hoped that the financial constraints he was facing would limit his ambitious plans for

billions of dollars of new free services for New Yorkers. However, Mam Downey dashed that

belief when he declared, I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic

socialist. I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical. Indeed, he has kept

that promise, especially when it comes to housing, which was the key issue that got him elected in

the first place. Mam Downey promised a rent freeze for starters, and much more government intervention

into private housing markets, and his first step was to hire C. Weaver as his director of the

office to protect tenants, who wrote that home ownership was racist, and a weapon of white supremacy

as his frontline official in housing. Weaver had posted many things on her now scrubbed social media,

and while Mam Downey's office has tried to play it down, what she wrote was significant,

and it provides a window into how the Mam Downey administration will govern,

especially when it comes to housing. Among the things that Weaver wrote included the

initiation of policies meant to impoverish the white middle class, and that rent control

a perfect solution to everything, because it is an effective way to shrink the value of real estate.

Notes the New York Times. That rhetoric had played a role in raising her Weaver's profile

within New York housing circles, even as it seemed to hobble her 2021 bid to join the city's

powerful planning commission. Her calls to elect more communists and C's private property

had been well documented in the New York Post. By stating his socialist intentions early in his

administration and hiring Weaver, Mam Downey is declaring that his office believes that private housing

is illegitimate, period, and must be ended, with the city of New York being the landlord,

or at least the overseer, for all rental housing in the city. Not even his socialist forebear,

Mayor Bill DeBlasio would go that far, although it is pretty certain that DeBlasio, too,

longed for an East German arrangement for the city's renters, writes Alicia Finley in the Wall Street

Journal. As rent restrictions drive thousands of apartment buildings across the city into

disrepair and threaten a cascade of foreclosures, Mr. Mam Downey has tapped Miss Weaver to implement

his goal of decommodifying housing. Their plan drive out private investors by making it impossible

to turn a profit and keep properties in serviceable condition. Then the government will seize the

buildings and hand them over to tenant collectives and nonprofits to manage under communal ownership.

Socialists have been using the term commodification as a pejorative to claim that the capitalist

system takes goods that should be socialized and instead places prices on them which then makes

them scarce. The Cambridge Dictionary defines commodification as the fact that something is treated

or considered as a commodity equals a product that can be bought and sold. To put it another way,

the definition is built upon the assumption that placing a price on a good is both arbitrary

and legitimate. Thus housing is a right, not something that one should be permitted to either buy

or sell, as Finley has noted. Mam Downey's denials notwithstanding, the mayor and his underlings

do have a planned bankrupt owners of apartment buildings through strict rent controls, organizing

rent strikes and other coercive measures so the city can take the property. Mam Downey and Weaver

have made it absolutely clear to building owners that the city considers them to be an enemy,

to be vanquished and if these owners lose everything in the process, they deserve it because they

had the affrontary to buy the buildings in the first place. Mam Downey's office likes to portray

apartment owners as ripping off tenants, but NYC laws for years have been stacked against

landlords and have made it difficult for owners to make profits, whether they be corporate owners

or individuals. Between current economic conditions and Mam Downey's open declaration of war

against private apartment owners, ownership of rental property will be anything but profitable

in the future. Finley writes, Ms Weaver's crowning achievement as a housing activist is a 2019

state law that restricts New York City landlord's ability to pay for renovations by raising rent

and does away with the ability to deregulate rent stabilized units, which account for nearly half

the city's rental housing when tenants move out. The law upended landlords' investment models

slashed building values and fueled runs at two regional banks. Finley continues, rent stabilized

buildings have been selling at steep discounts, some for less than the cost of a NYU degree,

which is worth more? Tough call? A rent stabilized building in East Harlem the spring sold for

3% of its 2016 sales price. A city pension fund investment in rent stabilized housing,

once projected to mint eye watering returns, has declined by 70% since the 2019 law was enacted.

Taxpayers will inevitably have to backfill the losses. Many buildings have fallen into severe

disrepair because rents don't cover rising maintenance costs, property taxes, insurance premiums,

debt payments, and utilities. The city pays non-profits up to $380,000 a unit to repair

dilapidated rent stabilized apartments which can exceed the market value of the entire buildings.

Lest anyone think that Mamdani is looking to just make life better for tenants,

Finley writes that the real goal is to drive down the value of private rental property to near zero,

noting a private real estate firm has sought to buy pinnacles rent stabilized apartments in bankruptcy

for a pittance. But a city attorney tapped by Mr. Mamdani last week sought to block their

sale by arguing to the judge that get this rent restrictions would prevent the firm from maintaining

the units. Mr. Mamdani knows full well that rent restrictions produce slums. That's the goal.

Ms. Weaver has advocated government seizure of properties that are in distress or foreclosure

so that they can become socialized housing. A majority of New York's left wing city council

last year signed on to legislation that would empower the mayor to do so. In other words,

the Mamdani administration admits that it has a policy of ensuring that private apartment owners

cannot afford to keep up necessary maintenance of their properties. But that has not stopped

NYC's public advocates office from circulating a worst landlords list that the media has published

with Glee. However, lest anyone claim that a fully socialized housing system, the city in which

either the city or nonprofits and tenant cooperatives tied to the mayor own the rental property,

one should remember that the worst landlord in New York City is the New York City housing authority,

which has more open work orders than all the vaunted top 100 worst private landlords combined.

For all of the commodification talk about private ownership of rental housing, not to mention

the wonder and greatness of democratic socialism, the new owners should Mamdani and Weaver get their

way to eliminate private apartment rentals. We'll even be less interested in providing decent housing

than the ones vanquished by New York officials. This is nothing less than a New York city

bait and switch and the city has done it before. In 1940, the city took over the subway system,

which from its construction in the early 1900s had been privately owned. The original fair was a

nickel per ride and in 1940 it was still five cents thanks to New York's price controls. Henry

Hazlett writes New York City's first subway opened in 1904. The fair was five cents. The subways

remained under private ownership until 1940. The fair was still five cents, but meanwhile wholesale

prices had gone up 32 percent, wage rates had tripled. The lines were granted tax exemption by the

city. They petitioned for higher fairs, but the five cent fairs was sacred. The city fathers

decided that the only way to keep it was to eliminate private profit and run the trains themselves.

So the subways were bought by the city in June 1940. On July 1, 1948, the fair was doubled ten

cents. On July 25, 1953, it was tripled to fifteen cents. Between 1940 and 1953,

the other consumer prices went up 91 percent, but New York subway fairs went up 200 percent.

The lines were still run at heavy loss, even by its own method of accounting. The transit

authority has lost money in seven out of the last ten fiscal years. If even one of its several

subsidies from the city is deducted, it has lost money heavily in every one of those years.

Even though it was able to raise fairs at will, the city and its current owner,

the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, have only run huge losses while the capital stock

has deteriorated. The New York subways are so poorly capitalized that they still are using what

the New York Times calls ancient signal technology. The equipment has to be manually operated

around the clock from a network of underground control towers. Housing will be no different.

The city already has a record of massive failure, being a landlord, and it only will be worse

as Memdanny and Weaver, strangle what is left of the private housing stock,

and the city seizes it and hands it off to politically connected non-profits and cooperatives,

unless anyone think the city will suddenly provide affordable and abundant housing that is not

in need of maintenance will be greatly disappointed. The waiting list for public housing is nearly

a decade and even longer for subsidized section eight housing. Indeed, the housing shortage and

ultra high rents will intensify during the Mamdani regime, as the city doubles down on the

destructive rent control policies of the 1970s and 80s as described by journalist William Tucker.

The warmth of collectivism will not be what Mamdani has promised or what his supporters have wanted.

Instead, like those who have lived in collectivist societies like the old USSR,

Eastern Europe and Mao's China, New Yorkers will live the absurdities of socialism,

even if they refuse to recognize what it is. For more content like this, visit measys.org.