Socialist candidates endorsed by New York City mayor Zohran Mandani won primary elections in congressional races in New York City, defeating two incumbent Democratic members of Congress. These are safe Democratic seats, so these socialists, who are anti-police and anti-property rights. will become members of Congress after defeating Republican opponents in the November general election.
The socialist candidates won even though they were left-wing radicals with records of attacking the police and calling for extreme restrictions on property rights, and in one case, calling for the complete abolition of the police, prisons, and private property. As CNN noted, U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who leads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was defeated in the Democratic primary by socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, who had a record of social media “posts that supported abolishing police and prisons as well as seizing private property.”
As a news report noted, “Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist congressional candidate endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani,” had a social media
account that included thousands of posts and reposts expressing support for abolishing police, prisons and borders, as well as seizing private property and nationalizing major industries and calling into question Israel’s right to exist.
Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old investigator at a public defender’s office in New York City and doctoral student, has emerged as one of the most prominent left-wing challengers in the country after Mamdani endorsed her bid to unseat longtime Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th Congressional District….
While reports in the New York Post and Politico previously highlighted several deleted social media posts in which Avila Chevalier criticized police, Israel and Democratic politicians, a CNN KFile review…found ones that called for abolishing police, prisons and borders; tweets about communism; calls for open borders and zero deportations; and expletive-laden attacks on Democrats.
One of the candidates Mamdani endorsed is not a self-described socialist — Brad Lander — but even Lander has called for cutting funding of the police department. Lander unseated mainstream Democrat Congressman Dan Goldman, a two-term incumbent. Goldman was viewed by Mamdani and New York City Democrats as too moderate even though Goldman led the effort to impeach Donald Trump. Lander is more extreme than Goldman.
Lander, and all of the socialist candidates who prevailed, support extreme rent control laws, both nationally and in New York City, that would freeze rents and leave some landlords with insufficient funds to mantain their properties. New York Mayor Mamdani has called for the city to seize private rental properties that are poorly maintained (even though the city itself poorly maintains many of rental housing units it owns, doing a worse job than private landlords). One city official appointed by Zohran Mamdani said that the city should “seize private property,” and that home ownership is “white supremacy.”
Having the New York City Housing Authority take over the apartment buildings of landlords who go bankrupt due to rent control could be a bad thing for tenants, because of how inefficient and slow the authority is in responding to problems like mold and broken elevators. The authority operates under a federal monitor due to a severe, long-term backlog of hundreds of thousands of repair requests spanning issues like mold, lead paint, and broken elevators.
As the American Enterprise Institute noted,
Tenants at 1305 Loring Ave. in Brooklyn, 1635 E. 174th St. in the Bronx, and 1835 Lexington Ave. in Manhattan were all without gas this month; multi-story buildings with elderly tenants such as 3031 W. 25th St. Brooklyn or 310 E. 115th St., had elevators that weren’t working. The same owners has long been plagued by heat, hot water and power outages.
All these buildings are owned and managed not by the alleged greedy private slumlords Williams loves to target but by the city government he works for: The New York City Housing Authority.
Williams and Mayor Mamdani appear to feel that private housing ownership is inherently problematic and that “social housing” is the answer — in the form of the 200,000 new government-sponsored units the mayor has proposed. Mamdani plans to pile on private landlords in coming weeks, with his promised “rental ripoff’ tour of the five boroughs, de facto show trials for property owners.
Meanwhile, back in the real world. NYCHA, the city’s biggest landlord, is routinely the target of hundreds of complaints, including 400 regarding heat, hot water and elevator outages in one week this month alone. It’s a system of 177,000 units plagued by what the liberal Community Service Society calls “chronic neglect.” Its website includes a standing feature called Service Interruptions Overview.
It should be more than enough to prompt progressives to question their commitment to government-managed housing.Since 2019, NYCHA has been the subject of a federal monitor, as the result of persistent problems with mold, lead paint, heat and elevators. As the Authority’s 2025 financial statement puts it understatedly, “NYCHA is not yet in full compliance with the requirements of the Agreement.”
New York City currently manages its own housing badly, says a 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.”
Mamdani and his allies want 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 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.’”
“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.
The rent freeze proposed by socialist like Mandami 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.
