Mamdani’s Rental Ripoff theatricals
Mamdani is staging a series of struggle sessions in which people complain about bad kulaks landlords. These events have been given the alliterative title of “Rental Ripoff” hearings:
New Yorkers will be able to lament about their rental woes – from hidden fees, retaliation, discrimination, illegal eviction and deplorable building conditions – during Mamdani’s first 100 days in office, according to an executive order signed by the mayor on Sunday. …
“In a city filled with older buildings that could use some tender loving care, some landlords are taking advantage of the housing market to gouge tenants with outrageous fees, all while leaving them trying to survive in homes with collapsing ceilings and sinking floors,” Mamdani said in an Instagram video. …
“He’s one-sided right now. Everything is about destroying the landlords,” said Humberto Lopes, CEO of H.L. Dynasty and the Gotham Housing Alliance.
“You think all the landlords are slumlords?” Lopes added.
If you help the landlords, you can help the tenants. Landlords can make the repairs if you help them.”
Instead, Lopes argued that Mamdani was going in the other direction by squeezing property owners.
This approach is highly likely to involve a succession of theatrical ventings without much attention paid to economic realities. That omission would be a hallmark of socialism/Communism.
One of the commenters at the article writes this:
Is Zoron also planning on holding hearings on tenants abusing the landlords? The deadbeats, the squatters, the tenants that tear up the property, or the rent controlled apartments that are money losers for the landlords.
I think we know the answer.
I wonder if Mamdani plans a similarly creative and theatrical approach to this problem:
In New York City, making a profit on real estate has become increasingly difficult. Rent-stabilization laws built on the mantra that “housing is a human right,” a dysfunctional housing court, and myriad other interventions have driven thousands of units off the market, giving rise to the phenomenon of New York’s “ghost apartments.”
The city now has nearly 50,000 empty units, absent from the market either because their operating costs exceed legal rents or because they require considerable renovations. Recently, I visited four of these ghost apartments. Together, they reveal the city’s fundamentally broken housing market and what needs to be done to fix it.
In New York, rent stabilization laws often mean that the cost of making repairs and improvements in apartments – especially older ones – cannot be recouped. So the apartments remain vacant and in disrepair.
There are possible solutions, but I would be extremely surprised if Mamdani and his team would ever consider them:
“New York is unique in its rent-control system,” Kenny Burgos, who heads the New York Apartment Association, said. “Even Los Angeles [gives landlords] an ability to reset rents after [apartments] become vacant.”
Burgos’s suggestion is to amend the law to restore landlords’ ability to raise rents after vacancy. Under this proposal, rents would continue to be subjected to the Rent Guidelines Board’s maximum increases while a lease is active. But landlords would be allowed to raise rents once the units come off the market, reestablishing the economic incentive to renovate. This would mitigate the effects of the below-inflation rent increases that the RGB has permitted over the previous decade.
Burgos didn’t endorse it, but there’s an even more effective option: eliminate rent stabilization entirely. This would let rents rise to meet demand while also making renovations profitable again. New Yorkers whose incomes are below a certain level could get a housing voucher, thereby restoring the investment required to maintain, construct, and operate buildings. New Yorkers would gain a sustainable solution to rent burdens while also keeping the existing housing stock in good shape.
New Yorkers whose incomes are below a certain level could get a housing voucher, thereby restoring the investment required to maintain, construct, and operate buildings.
Housing vouchers would also make rents rise, just as Pell grants and Federal student loans have done for college tuition. Might be better than the current system but far from ideal.
“without much attention paid to economic realities.”
And this just in as Mamdani thinks he can control everything, including FIFA pricing and what happens in New Jersey:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/amy-curtis/2026/01/06/mamdani-world-cup-tickets-n2668950
A series of struggle sessions in which people complain about bad kulaks landlords.
I shared before in a comment about two months ago how over the last several years I have learned how much power tenants have compared to landlords. The small church I served which rented out the parsonage. My mom who has a few rental properties. My parents who rented out our Stateside house when we lived overseas.
A clever and determined tenant can royally screw over a property owner (by not paying rent, causing damage which costs more to repair than the deposit). Yeah you can *eventually* evict, you can take tenants to court, but my observation is usually it is not worth the time and trouble. Hopefully your tenants vacate, count your losses, hope your next tenants are better.
I’m not saying there’s no such thing as bad landlords. But my experience is our legal system favors tenants much more than landlods.
Much of the subterfuge and contention between landlords and tenants is a function of rent control. This is supplemented by New York have among the more elaborate procedural rubrics to implement evictions and foreclosures. Mamdani will seek to make the problem worse. It is appropriate to debar mandatory ancillary charges for anything but damage inflicted by the tenant. However, the landlord should have plenary discretion over the rent for the term of the lease / rental agreement. To get from here to there, a program Mamdani and the city council would never implement:
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A. Rent control does not apply to units constructed or generated by renovations after a certain date:
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B. Rent control does not apply to units vacated (no primary tenant nor any sublessor) from this day forward, provided the tenant died without a successor or left voluntarily.
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C. Succession to a rent controlled lease is limited to one’s spouse or disabled adult child resident with you.
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D. The permissible annual increase in rents shall be equal to the most recent year over year increase in nominal personal income per capita for the nineteen counties of Downstate New York and northern New Jersey.
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E. Sublets require the consent of the landlord.
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F. The tenant’s right to a controlled rent may be sold to the landlord in return for a lump sum, after which controls are removed for the tenant and all future tenants. The purchase is put into effect by executing a contract in front of a notary and registering it with the City Clerk.
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G. Landlords may make a bloc offer to purchase the rights of all tenants in an entire building of tenants. Each tenant is due a share of the bloc offer and no side payments to any tenant are permitted by law. The number of shares a tenant is due is equal to the square footage of his unit multiplied by the number of years he has occupied it. The formula for what a given tenant is due is as follows: d = (s / u) x b, where ‘s’ is the number of shares assigned a tenant, ‘u’ is the sum of shares assigned to each tenant and ‘b’ is the value of the bloc offer. The offer is placed before the tenants and if 3/4 agree to take the offer, it can be implemented.
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H. Public housing is to be converted to rent controlled private housing (with the controls on each unit therein dissipated by way of the procedures delineated above. Each building or building set is offered at auction to a set of bidders who have demonstrated they have a certain sum in assets or loans. Bids are sealed and the bidders can offer any value, including negative numbers.
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I. All urban property is properly assessed biennially. All urban property carries a tax liability. Except as noted below, the levy rate is the same on all properties. Assessments can be contested by owners. The state attorney-general may also contest the assessments of property owned by the federal government and property owned by philanthropies who may be due state reimbursements. As a rule, private parties pay their taxes out of their assets and earnings. Philanthropies not in excluded categories (club service providers being one) take out a line of credit and pay their property taxes with that; they are then fully re-imburse by the state treasury. State and local government corporations pay their taxes out of their revenues. Local governments net out their obligations to each other and make payments accordingly. The state government pays taxes on its own property and that of the federal government and federal government corporations. No special deals. Only local governments may impose property taxes.
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J. Tax abatement zones are delineated decennially with census data. All census bloc groups (in this case, in the nineteen counties in question) are rank ordered according to nominal personal income per capita, lowest to highest. You calculate a running balance of the population of the rank-ordered list, pausing when you’ve corralled 15% of the population of the area in question; this is ‘zone c’. You resume calculating the running balance util you corralled 20% of the area in question; this supplementary set makes up ‘zone b’. The rest is zone a. A locality entirely within zone a is required to have a uniform levy rate on assessed valuation. Those with zone b or zone c block groups have a disaggregated rate. That for zone a is x% of assessed valuation; for zone b 0.5x%; for zone c, 0%. If a particular property at the time of the decennial delineation is transferred from zone c to one of the other zones or zone b to zone a, the old rate applies for a grace period of six years.
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K. Building codes and zoning regulations are more lenient in zone c and zone b than they are in zone a. Opportunities for neighbors to object to developments are circumscribed and low priority strictures in building codes do not apply in thes zones. Fairly free development of housing for the sketchy (halfway houses, group homes, apartments with shared kitchens, boarding houses, SRO hotels, flop houses, and emergency shelters) is permitted in these zones.
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L. Municipal inspectors travel these zones more frequently than other parts of the city and are implacable about graffiti, broken and boarded up windows, and trash on lots not in receptacles.
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M. Procedural modifications in state law and ample staffing of municipal courts allow all evictions to be implemented within 70 days of the initial service of process.
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N. Landlords are granted in state law and local ordinance plenary discretion over to whom they chose to rent. Freedom of contract, freedom of association.
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The barest mention of such a program will cause Mamdani’s head to explode.
@Rick67:Hopefully your tenants vacate
Everyone I know who had this problem ended up just paying the tenant to move out.
I’d make a snarky comment about all of this and rent control but I’m reminded rent control is on the ballot here in Massachusetts. Then I’m reminded they manage to con people here into voting for the millionaire’s tax by even having the current governor make the promise that the dollars raised by the tax would only be used for education and roads. Of course none of the media pointed out money is fungible, the state already spends money from general funds in excess of the tax, and the state does a budget every year. If you know those 3 things you knew they could spend the money anyway they wanted while hiding the fact they were doing that. I’m not confident that it won’t pass here. (I’ve had macro-economics, price controls are a bad idea.)
The imposition of rent controls or other similarly harmful regulations should be consider a “taking,” covered by the 5th Amendment and requiring compensation. AI backs this up:
As far as I’m aware no property owner has ever been compensated. Maybe there are court cases that have found against it.
It goes without saying that the real answer is scrapping rent control entirely, as Milei did in Buenos Aires with great success. The WSJ had a story some months back that rents actually declined, because so many of those “ghost apartments” were brought back on the market.
“Zoron” — I like it, although it goes against my usual rejection of misspellings. It makes him sound like an anime villain, which may be just what’s needed here.
The money in the vouchers where does it come from?
This will be the key test, and it just might prove a good thing for the country. The total failure of socialism will be stark and obvious. If there is any sense left in the electorate, it could be a serious long term setback for them. If there isn’t, we’re screwed, of course. But at least there’s no hiding what’s going on. The one thing I will say for Mamdani is that he is forthright about what he believes.
“…the electorate…”
Now who might that be (in our long term forecast of potential positiveness)?
As for “…no hiding what’s going on…”, if that were indeed the case then Madmani would have been laughed out of town from the get-go…though I suppose—even if one totally ignored the role played by the Media and social platforms (and now AI) in “guaranteeing “the total absence of “transparency”—one could make the case for Room 101 being the most transparent of environments ever to have been conceived…
It seems appropriate to repost this link that Kate gave us a couple of days ago.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/01/02/putin-envoy-blasts-zohran-comrade-mamdani-is-doing-a-solid-job-steering-u-s-toward-communism/
More than a little snarky, but he has a point.
The imposition of rent controls or other similarly harmful regulations should be consider a “taking,” covered by the 5th Amendment and requiring compensation.
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Richard Epstein made the case more than thirty years ago. “The physical entry is palpable, the compensation is wholly inadequate, and the justification is shopworn”.