Striking the killing blow

www.americanthinker.com

Last month, Zohran Mamdani announced a policy that creates his first fatal contradiction.

Almost all socialists, social democrats, whatever they call themselves, are undergrad ideologues -- people possessing little or no lived experience who believe that their particular brand of socialism is complete in and of itself and that any policy derived from it will operate perfectly the first time out so long as it is ideologically correct. Mamdani fits this mold (as does Katie Wilson, who had never moved out of her parents’ home before being elected mayor of Seattle).

In late June, Mamdani announced the fulfillment of a socialist dream: a rent freeze across all five boroughs. Beginning in October, one million rent-stabilized apartments will be subject to a total freeze lasting two years. (Which makes it effectively permanent. It could not possibly be rolled back after being put in effect for that length of time.) Rents cannot be raised a dime during that period.

What Mamdani and his administration (including the staff of his Office to Protect Tenants) overlook is that there is no freeze on the expenses involved in owning and operating a rental property. Far from it: landlord expenses rose 6% last year, before Mamdani took office. Now, with the socialists firmly in control, these costs will inevitably balloon – they always do under collectivism, and NYC will be no exception. They are likely to reach the double digits by the end of the year, and after that the sky’s the limit. So what are rental property owners to do?

Mamdani doesn’t know, nor does he care. In Zohran’s tidy little world, landlords are all bloodsuckers living off the surplus value created by their poor tenants. (Most are probably Jewish, too.) They’re all in Florida or the Bahamas, living lives of luxury while their tenants count their pennies in a hopeless effort to avoid the streets. (How this could possibly occur in a city already subject to rent control is anybody’s guess.)

The landlord’s solution is simple: when the financial hemorrhaging begins, sell the place and get out. But here’s where the second jaw of the pincer closes shut. In late December, the city council passed the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, requiring all property owners, when making a sale, to offer it first to the city of New York, through its various agencies, before putting it on the open market. When Mamdani took office, he allowed this act to go into effect without comment.

So there we are: before selling the property, the owner will have to approach… exactly who is not at all clear. Is it one city agency, say, the housing department, or does the offer have to be made to all of them? What is clear is that this will not be a simple, one-stop, rubber-stamp process. It will take weeks, probably months, and in the end even years, as it does in all socialist milieus. In the meantime, the property will be deteriorating, losing value, costing more every week, alongside thousands, or even tens of thousands of others.

Eventually, facing bankruptcy, owners will simply cut their losses by abandoning the property. In short order, currently livable neighborhoods across the Big Apple will collapse, overrun with abandoned, empty properties taken over by squatters, criminal gangs, and junkies. Property values citywide will plummet to basement level. Crime and drug use will skyrocket. Whatever industry and business remain will flee so fast you’ll hear sonic booms. Night will fall on the greatest city in the world.

This actually occurred to New York City on a smaller scale decades ago. In the 1970s, the South Bronx went through the exact process outlined, with the area reduced to mile upon mile of wrecked and abandoned tenements inhabited only by street gangs and the most desperate poor. The South Bronx became a global byword for urban decay. The area remains scarred to this day.

What did city government do, you ask? It had a solution: the “occupied look.” The Koch administration had vinyl decals the exact size of tenement windows printed up featuring curtains, shades, and potted plants and flowers on the sills, to make the ruined buildings appear inhabited. Only the ones nearest the expressway, though. They didn’t have enough money for all of them.

It’s doubtful that Mamdani has a better solution. The city can’t purchase buildings, because the city is broke, and will only get broker. Predators may appear within city government to scoop up cheap property deals, but not all of them – nobody has enough funds to cover it all. Or maybe he’s cutting some kind of deal with the hedge funds buying properties all over the country (You know the ads -- “I want to pay you cash for your house…”) If so, he’s in for more legal trouble than he can imagine.

But most likely, he hasn’t even thought that far, serene in the knowledge that socialism works, that he has all the answers, and that it’ll come right in the end. Which, of course, it always has. Just ask Cuba or Cambodia.