Mamdani Plans to Seize Property From Bad NYC Landlords, But the Government Has Been the City’s Biggest Slumlord

The warmth of Mamdani’s collectivism is going to leave a lot of landlords and tenants out in the cold.

On Tuesday, New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a new city housing plan in which he provocatively said that for properties that have suffered through “chronic neglect” the city will work to “transfer ownership” to the community.

The “stewards” of the expropriated property will “include community land trusts, non-profits, or even the tenants themselves.”

Surprise! The guy who ran as a socialist is a socialist.

OK, it’s not exactly a curveball that Mamdani is making property confiscation a key part of his policy agenda. He’s made rent freezes and shaking down landlords and the “rich” a central part of his “affordability” message. What can’t be done by the private sector has to be done by a socialist he’s said, while rebuking history with midwit rejoinders.

And I’m sure the Marxist New York City tenant director Cea Weaver, who has said that we should transition from “treating property as an individual good to a collective good” in her plan to impoverish middle-class white residents, is practically giddy.

What kind of violations will lead to property confiscation is unclear. This could just be an excuse to come up with ticky-tac violations to weaponize the government against landlords who are often forced to operate within tight margins in the city.

Socialists always have the most “success” when creating problems that they say they alone can solve. The mindset is that once after acquiring control of the means of production, or in this case the property, they can think about the details of making it work later. Well, maybe never, but once they’ve seized power, what does it matter?

What’s interesting is that Mamdani included nonprofit groups on his list of possible beneficiaries of the property confiscation. In that sense, his policies are very much like the mainstream of the Democratic Party, which has mastered the craft of laundering money to their activist class through ideologically-aligned NGO’s.

City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino suggested that might be the big takeaway here. She surmised that Mamdani aims to make his friends in the Democratic Socialists of America and other similar groups the “new land barons of New York, complete with all the political clout, leverage, and reach that goes along with it.”

In that sense, what he’s doing is likely just a more radical continuation of what’s already been happening in the city. He’s supercharging existing city policy and handing the keys of  governing to his taxpayer-funded DSA army.

Mamdani’s dreams of public property ownership have already partially come true with the New York City Housing Authority, which has hardly produced a panacea for renters. NYCHA has been consistently labeled the Big Apple’s “worst landlord” for more than half a decade.

In 2024, the Department of Justice charged 70 current and former NYCHA employees with bribery and extortion, which was the largest number of federal bribery charges in a single day in American history.

I’m sure things will get better if you give them more power and less accountability, right?

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., said in an interview on Fox Business that Mamdani’s plan was “communism.” She said though that the city government was already the “biggest slumlord” in New York.

“When you look at these facilities, there’s mold, there’s leaks, there’s rodents, there’s roaches,” she said. “ … The idea that he’s going to go after other city landlords when they can’t even manage the portfolio that they currently have to provide good dignity of life for those residents is mindboggling.”

Another New York Republican, Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, wrote on X that if Mamdani was upset at bad landlords with a long list of violations he should look at NYCHA, which had over “600,000 unanswered work orders.”

And one long-term New York resident wrote in March for the left-leaning New York Daily News that with NYCHA buildings he’s seen “the hallways left uncleaned, the elevators in disrepair and the air thick with mold and roaches that leave children wheezing from asthma. I’ve seen holes in the walls, felt cold heating systems that do not work, and complaints that get ignored.”

Yet, the resident said, Mamdani “targets private landlords while ignoring the shortcomings of city government. The city doesn’t maintain these NYCHA buildings as they expect private owners to do. The agency doesn’t show pride or care.”

There’s your glorious, affordable future New Yorkers.