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New York City Mayor, Comrade Zohran Mamdani kicked off his plan to “fix” the city’s affordability crisis with his official housing policy agenda, titled “Block by Block,” under which one of the first priorities is to allow the government to seize property from owners deemed “negligent” and redistribute it to so-called “responsible stewards,” a category that includes anyone from land trusts, nonprofits, or even tenants themselves.
"Through our new citywide campaign, Fix the City, we will focus on the worst landlords in New York City," Mamdani, a communist who was born in Kampala, Uganda, announced.
"When necessary, we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers. And for buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards. Stewards that include community land trusts, non-profits, or even the tenants themselves," he said.
In other words, despite Mamdani’s claims that this time his own version of socialism will be different, it appears to be heading down the same familiar path, one that students of history expected upon Mamdani's victory, right before they started Googling “Venezuela real estate prices” and “how to flee to Florida.”
Government redistribution of private property, however, is not the only pillar of Mamdani’s “Block by Block” agenda. He has also vowed to fast-track the construction of low-income and government-subsidized housing, while promising to impose price controls on those units that would limit rent to just a quarter of a tenant’s income, because the surest way to create abundant housing is to make it illegal for anyone to actually profit from building it.
One has to wonder if the guy ever took a basic economics class as opposed to majoring in “Karl Marx, the Man, ther Freeloader, the Absent Husband.”
Mamdani ended his “Block by Block” agenda announcement with a unifying, though ironic, speech, praising the city for what it is known for: its iconic skyscrapers, bridges, and museums. They didn't get there via the collective.
Yet those achievements were made possible not because of politicians like Mamdani, but in spite of them, driven largely by private industry and capitalists who somehow managed to get things done before the government decided their buildings were “negligent” for not being run by community land trusts.
Today, Mamdani’s own agenda still depends on the very economic forces he blasts daily, relying on private wealth to help fund his socialist policy vision—like a man standing on the shoulders of giants while loudly complaining that the giants are too tall and need to be seized for the greater good.
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