The Patriot Post® · Mamdani the Slumlord
With a $30 million proposal for one government-run grocery store and now a $22 billion proposal for 200,000 government-built “affordable” homes, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is on track to beat California Governor Gavin Newsom’s record of throwing the most taxpayer money at a problem with nothing to show for it. As usual, whenever affordability is the issue (which always seems to be worse in Democrat-run cities and states), the Dems’ go-to solution is to spend more taxpayer money, when all that will do is exacerbate the problem.
Mayor Mamdani revealed his housing plan on Tuesday. Called Block by Block: A Housing Policy for a New Era, it includes $22 billion for new housing investment, $5.6 billion for the New York City Housing Authority, a $40 per hour minimum wage for construction workers on city-funded developments, strict code enforcement measures, a city-approved home insurance provider, and reduced regulations on prefabricated homes. The mayor claims that housing is the “No. 1 driver” of the affordability crisis and that his proposal will “deliver the kinds of investments that for too long New Yorkers have been denied.” And of course, he’s increasing taxes to pay for all of this, at least on the wealthy who actually bring revenue and jobs into the city. A better idea than driving away your highest tax revenue source would be to deport the huge number of illegals in the city, which is one of the biggest factors driving up housing and rent costs. As we have seen across the country, the more illegal aliens deported, the more we see housing and rent prices come down.
According to city data prior to Mamdani’s election as mayor, 150,000 new homes were built between 2021 and 2025, the most for a five-year period since the 1960s. That was done without government intervention and without taxpayer dollars, so why the huge urgency to get more federal grants? He’s from a third-world country; he knows how it works. Everyone involved in the scheme has to line their pockets along the way. We saw how that happened in California after the Palisades fire, where a bunch of money was supposed to go to the victims of the fire, and instead the majority of it was spread among leftist NGOs. Now we can see why Mamdani’s plans for “affordable homes” will be run by, you guessed it, nonprofit groups and the city itself.
The site for his government grocery store in East Harlem had already been allocated $25 million of taxpayer dollars in 2017 to update the area. Yet it still sits empty and run-down with no one to account for where the money went. A private grocery store costs a few million to open, but Mamdani wants many times that amount on top of the $25 million, bringing the total for this government grocery store to $55 million. Pretty pricey and reeks of corruption. Critics have warned that his plan will only hurt local grocery stores, which won’t be able to compete, and that it will waste taxpayer money.
Big Apple real estate moguls are also blasting Mamdani for his housing plan, which will hurt private companies and working New Yorkers. Steve Fulop, president of the Partnership for New York City, argued that while building new homes is a “moral imperative,” Mamdani’s plan to do so by “imposing potentially crushing minimum wage mandates and restricting property sales will slow construction and preservation.” Fulop noted that extreme housing regulation had been tried in St. Paul, Minnesota, resulting in an 80% drop in construction. “St. Paul has since been forced to walk back those policies,” he posted on X. “New York City cannot afford to run the same experiment.” He continued, “When government positions itself as the primary driver of housing production and treats private capital as an obstacle rather than a partner, the people who pay the price are the working New Yorkers this plan is trying to help.”
James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, laid into the proposal, warning that dependence on union-backed labor contracts will backfire. “At a time when we need to build as much housing as possible, we question why the City would choose to make projects more expensive to build and finance through the addition of costly and inflexible Project Labor Agreements,” stated Whelan.
Common sense is not a trait that leftists and their anti-capitalist ideals possess.
Like all good communists, Mamdani seeks to crush private businesses so that the government gets more control and power, and he also seeks to abolish private property. With the mayor’s rent freezes, he is driving thousands of landlords to foreclosure. He is claiming he will crack down on landlord violations, even though the largest and most egregious violations occur in rent-stabilized buildings where rent doesn’t cover costs. It seems apparent he will use the “violations” as an excuse to take private property. As he said, “We will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers. We will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards,” including “community land trusts, nonprofits, or even the tenants themselves.” Mamdani’s radical housing chief, Cea Weaver, promotes imposing low rents and high taxes to force owners into foreclosure so the city can claim their property. Communism is rooted in envy and laziness, and therefore, it must legalize theft.
Will Mamdani’s “Block by Block” actually materialize, or will it be that mirage in the desert that communism always promises? As history has proven, it will turn out just like all the other times and places it has been tried before. There will no longer be a middle class or an open, free economy, and the government will own and run everything poorly. What will remain of New York City will be the poor and the government elites, like Mamdani, who have enriched themselves off the people’s taxes and are now the “Slumdog Billionaires.”