The NYC rent freeze
What could possibly go wrong?:
“This is a historic victory for New York City tenants. After reviewing the data and hearing from New Yorkers across the city, the independent RGB has delivered a freeze on one-year leases, and the first-ever freeze on two- year leases in our city’s history. This is the relief that working people across our city deserve.”
And what of the kulaks landlords? Well, they’ll just have to make do somehow, because the laws of economics are suspended as far as the left is concerned:
In plain English, he’s warning that private-sector owners must realize they have no rights to cover their costs, let alone to make a profit.
And oh, by the way, developers shouldn’t even think of building rental units here. The free housing market in New York is dead.
Here’s an idea on how this will work:
New Yorkers living in the city’s 1.1 million market-rate apartments are about to get stuck with the bill for the city’s rent freeze, according to the only member of New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board who is an economist and voted “no” on the freeze.
Arpit Gupta, who was appointed to the board by former Mayor Eric Adams, said landlords will likely jack up rents on market-rate units, as the rent-stabilized market stalls with tenants incentivized to stay put and owners forced to pull vacant units off the market.
“I think of this as trying to breathe with one lung,” said Gupta, an economist and associated professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Ah, but Mamdani has his own lived experience:
What’s worse is as many as 30% of rent-stabilized tenants earn six figures, according to the income data in NYC’s Housing and Vacancy Survey.
Until recently that included Mamdani himself, who lived in a $2,300 Astoria pad despite making $142,000 as a state assemblyman and his family wealth, before he moved into Gracie Mansion in January.
Gupta goes on to point out two things. The first is that the inhabitants of rent-stabilized apartments are not means-tested in any way and that many people in what’s called “market-rate housing” are poor. The second is that the vacancy rate in rent-stabilized housing is already high because it costs money to rehab the units and when landlords can’t recoup those costs by raising rent to cover them, they just take them off the market.
As DSA candidates spread, these sorts of brilliant policies will become more frequent in places other than NYC. Will enough voters catch on in time?
[NOTE: Mamdani has a Fourth of July message for Americans on the 250th birthday of the republic. It’s about what you’d imagine it would be.]
Absent emergency, government has NO authority to set prices for this obvious reason. To put it bluntly, this rat bastard is illegally restricting prices in order to steal properties. He said so. He is an effing criminal.
I didn’t used to dislike foreigners, in fact my first wife was one, and I have spent considerable time in Asia and Latin America. But people like Mamdani, Omar, Jayapal, and so many others are really testing my patience.
Except that CAPITALISM is criminal, as are all capitalists.
They are THE ENEMY.
Which means he can, and will, do anything he can do to destroy THE ENEMY.
(And anyone who disagrees with him is ALSO the enemy.)
Typical Leninist (and comrades) “Who-Whom” power maneuver…unless he can be somehow stopped.
(Maybe Letitia James will start taking things personally…or maybe she, like Madame Weird Word Salad, will join in the festivities…or maybe Trump will make things more than a little bit difficult. Don’t know what tools he might have in his toolbox, though.)
All of this was predictable.
(Who else might be THE ENEMY? AKA we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet…)
What Richard Epstein said, “The physical entry is palpable, the compensation wholly iinadequate, the justification shopworn.” Rental real estate is not a monopoly or oligopoly either. The city’s most flush landlord might control 3% of the market. If our appellate courts were worth anything, rent control would be tossed out as an unconstitutional taking. If the state legislature and New York Constitution were worth much, no local government would be accorded this power in statute.
==
Note, this is the worldview of perpetually adolescent theater kids.
The accounting will come.
Open, scornful contempt is the appropriate reaction to Mamdani and his ilk. But do so prepared for violence.
Leftists 1 stage thinking
What could go wrong no one thinks about
If liberty is worth defending, then it is worth defending against foreign and domestic enemies.
Liberty should first be defended with logic and reason. In the courts when needed. But when these lawful remedies prove inadequate to preserve liberty, when liberty itself is threatened with extinction, then “politics by other means” becomes justified because liberty is not ‘optional’. It is not a state granted privilege but an irrevocable and bedrock right. One along with faith, family & friends worth fighting for and if necessary, dying for…
Mamdani et al on the hard left are so invested in their ideological delusions that they are incapable of grasping that in trying to destroy Western civilization they are “cutting off the branch” upon which they sit. And that branch sits far above the cold, hard reality that civilization shields them from.