Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Cea Weaver, his pick to head the resurrected Office to Protect Tenants, are two peas in a progressive pod when it comes to housing.
Mamdani has infamously promised to jack up property taxes on “whiter neighborhoods”; Weaver has been pilloried, and justly so, for calling homeownership a “weapon of white supremacy” and seeking to “impoverish the ‘white’ middle class.”
But Weaver’s policy confusion goes deeper — and should spark concern about Mamdani’s broader housing agenda.
In resurfaced tweets, she railed against property ownership as “an individualized good and not a collective good.”
Private property and homeownership merely “masquerade as ‘wealth building’ public policy,” she declared.
In other words, Weaver (and perhaps Mamdani) is signaling antagonism toward the private housing sector itself.
In that light, it very much matters that the mayor is standing by Weaver despite her inflammatory views.
He’s even announced what amount to a series of show trials for landlords, in the form of “rental ripoff” hearings in all five boroughs.
He clearly fails to appreciate the extent to which private landlords are failing in New York as the result of public policies.
A key case in point: the estimated 50,000 rent-regulated apartments now vacant — held off the market — because the cost of bringing them up to housing code is greater than the rent owners can collect.
Renovating a vacant apartment can cost up to $600 per square foot, experts say — that’s a $60,000 bill to bring a 1,000-square-foot apartment back to rentable condition, for critical costs like updated electrical wiring, new appliances and plumbing replacement.
But the state’s 2019 rent-control statute, the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, sharply limits rent increases, even for major capital repairs.
The problem here is public policy, not market failure.
If Mamdani really wants to boost the housing supply, he should follow the example of a fellow progresssive.
Maura Healey, the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, seems to be Mamdani’s political soul mate.
She’s the nation’s first LGTBQ state chief executive and a fierce critic of “systemic racism.”
“Yes, America is burning,” she said of the riots that followed the death of George Floyd. “But that’s how forests grow.”
She has opposed deporting any illegal immigrants, calling it “intentionally cruel.”
Yet she’s broken ranks with her fellow leftists on a core housing policy: rent regulation.
With a ballot referendum in favor of statewide rent control looming, Healey last month just said no.
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“Rent control is not going to be the solution to how we get through this crisis,” she said. “We need to build more homes.”
In other words, she’s one leftist who understands supply and demand.
The latter without the former leads to high prices — like the $3,400 per month average one-bedroom rent in Boston.
Healey understands, as Mamdani apparently does not, that freezing the rent inhibits new supply.
She knows the telling history of rent control in her state — and the benefits that followed the 1994 referendum that abolished it.
Prior to that statewide vote, three major Massachusetts communities had adopted rent control.
The result: poorly maintained buildings and a drop in housing stock.
Just as in Gotham today, properties were taken off the market while values fell.
By 1994, Boston had more than 10,000 vacant apartments, as overall rental housing stock fell by 12%, per an MIT study.
Healey fears a replay.
“I don’t want to see housing production stopped,” she told The Boston Globe, and restoring rent control threatens to “effectively end housing construction in Massachusetts.”
In other words, contra Mamdani and Weaver, Healey understands the private housing sector as an engine of affordability — and welcomes it.
It is, of course, far too much to expect Mamdani to follow her lead and oppose rent stabilization; his signature rent-freeze stance got him elected.
But he might consider modulating his stance, by sticking to his freeze promise for an apartment’s base rent — but pushing for Albany to permit rent increases when owners invest in major improvements that bring apartments up to code.
A hard freeze, in contrast, risks disaster, pushing small landlords into financial limbo and off the market — perhaps even bringing a return to the Bronx-is-burning 1970s, when the combination of arson and insurance was more profitable than operating a building.
Healey’s decision gives Mamdani an example: He can choose to govern not as an ideologue, but as a progressive pragmatist.
And it sends a message to those Democrats promoting an affordability agenda: Real growth may require bucking the leftist radicals now dominating their party.
Howard Husock is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The Projects: A New History of Public Housing.”
