New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani “just appointed as his ‘Tenant Advocate’ a communist who argues that home ownership is ‘white supremacy,'” notes Hot Air. “Seize private property,” she had said. “Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy,” she added.
Mamdani has noted that one of his goals is “seizing the means of production” from the private sector.
“Cea Weaver has been floating around ‘tenants’ rights’ circles for quite a while, and her appointment makes clear that Mamdani is quite serious about using the power of his office to use regulations to gradually seize private property through enforcement mechanisms at his disposal. During his campaign, Mamdani proposed that the city identify landlords who do not respond to tenant complaints fast enough and seize their property if they cannot pay the city to fix it,” says a New York official.
David Strom notes that “It’s not an exaggeration to call Weaver a communist. While technically a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she literally has said, ‘elect more communists’ and called for seizing private property.”
The New York Post reports:
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly appointed tenant advocate called to “seize private property” and blasted home ownership as a “weapon of white supremacy” in a series of pro-communist social media posts.
Cea Weaver, Mamdani’s new director of the city Office to Protect Tenants, made the statements and urged her followers to elect more communists in several lecturing posts on her now-deleted X account that were unearthed by internet sleuths.
“Seize private property!” she said on June 13, 2018.
“Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy,” she said then.
Weaver also pushed to “Elect more communists.”
Private property can be seized by freezing the rent and then seizing the apartment building when the landlord can’t afford to make repairs or legally-mandated upgrades, due to the inability to raise rent to keep pace with inflation. Mamdani has said he will implement a rent freeze (even though landlords’ costs go up due to inflation), and Mamdani has voted for changes to New York’s rent-control laws that kept some landlords from raising rent to pay for needed repairs and renovations.
“Mamdani’s ‘rent control queen’ says you CANNOT raise rent enough to pay the workers that upkeep the apartments, and YOU CANNOT EVICT THOSE WHO REFUSE TO PAY THEIR RENT” when there are maintenance issues. “But if you don’t fix things because” you have no money “because they didn’t pay, THE CITY WILL TAKE THEM!,” notes Gabi Anderson.
“Mamdani wants to impose a rent freeze on apartments while simultaneously ‘cracking down’ on bad landlords. In practice, what this will mean is that his allies will encourage tenant complaints to the city, which will, in many cases, result in the city sending in contractors to do the work and bill the landlord. If the landlord can’t pay, the city will try to seize the property. That’s the goal, anyway. Keep on imposing higher and higher costs on marginal landlords until they relent. Since this is America, he can’t violently seize the means of production, but he can regulate them out of business,” notes Hot Air.
“Mamdani wants to double and triple fines to landlords who can’t immediately fix ‘dangerous conditions’, and then step in make the repairs, then take over the building if the landlord can’t pay them back. Except Mamdani is also pushing for a rent freeze, and most landlords rely on rent increases to pay for repairs. So if they can’t raise rent and can’t afford to repay the city, they lose their buildings. That’s how you slowly turn private property into government housing. This is how he is starting his communist takeover,” says a New Yorker.
Having the city seize private housing won’t make conditions better for tenants, because the city isn’t especially good at maintaining housing units. New York City manages its own housing badly, says a self-described non-socialist Democrat. “Mamdani is literally the largest and worst landlord in the City. Hundreds of thousands of violations in his units and more than 5k of them sit vacant.”
Socialist Mayor Mamdani has “proposed arbitrary, extreme restrictions on rent that would leave landlords with too little money to maintain housing units, which could turn much of New York into a slum.” Mandani has also “called for having the government run grocery stores, even though such stores lose money, cost taxpayers, and result in increased food waste and reduced choices of food.”
The rent freeze is a bad idea.
Freezing rents for years turns cities into slums by destroying their housing stock. It leaves housing providers with too little money to maintain or renovate apartments, as their expenses rise with inflation, but their rent revenue doesn’t.
That’s what happened in Vietnam’s capital city, Hanoi. It became a disgusting slum due to a rent freeze. In 1989, Vietnam’s socialist leaders admitted that freezing rents had destroyed the housing stock of Vietnam’s capital city, which had been sturdy enough to survive years of American bombing in the Vietnam War. Vietnam’s foreign minister said, “The Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi, but we have destroyed our city by very low rents. We realized it was stupid and that we must change policy.”
Rent control is not a free lunch for city residents. It not only harms landlords, but also the banks that lend to them, and provide loans to city residents and businesses. Rent control was a key factor in the collapse of New York’s Signature Bank, which had to be bailed out at the cost of billions of dollars.
Rent control also cuts city property tax revenue, which can lead the city to raise tax rates. It reduces the value of housing stock, shrinking the property tax revenue that funds schools and local governments. “Researchers at the University of Southern California said rent control hurt property values in St. Paul, Minn. by $1.6 billion,” reported Market Watch.
In a 1992 poll, 93 percent of economists agreed that rent control reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.
Even before Mandani, New York City rent control was already limiting landlords to rent increases that are less than inflation, notes Reason Magazine.
