Mayor Zohran Mamdani and “tenant czar” Cea Weaver just won’t quit their drive to “socialize” city housing via central control of rent-regulated apartment buildings.
The idea is to interfere with private-sector sales to steer ownership to politically connected nonprofits, as if that would miraculously fix the finances that have these buildings in distress.
The duo was stymied in January when they tried to halt the sale of a portfolio of rent-regulated apartments and steer ownership to a favored “community based” housing outfit.
Their bizarre logic: Since expanded rent regulation (fought for by Weaver and backed by Mamdani) prevents owners from recouping the cost of property upgrades by raising the rent, driving the buildings into bankruptcy, they insist new private owners also couldn’t make the finances work — but somehow a nonprofit could.
The courts tossed that first effort, but now Mamdani has a new target.
Emerald Equity Group bought a portfolio of rental buildings in Harlem in 2016 for $350 million, aiming to improve units’ conditions through rent increases.
But the state passed the Housing Stability & Tenant Protection Act in 2019, undoing Emerald’s strategy.
So now the buildings are virtually worthless: The rent rolls won’t cover expenses or repairs and permitted rent rises are less than the rate of inflation.
The Mamdani plan is to turn these units into “social housing,” either owned by the city or by city-funded agencies that will magically be more able to rehab the rundown units.
Proof to the contrary: New York already owns 190,000 rental units in desperate need of repair, but the City Housing Authority NYCHA is $80 billion short of what it needs to save this public-housing stock.
Why trust city government to take on more debt and more rundown apartments, or to select new NYCHA-lite outfits to work miracles that NYCHA can’t?
Mamdani and Cea Weaver literally created the disaster that they claim their approach will fix.
Yet the only realistic solution (no fairy dust needed!) is to undo the disastrous legislation that’s killing the city’s rent-regulated housing stock.
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