It has been brewing since the start of the Mamdani mayoralty. His Executive Order 8, issued just four days after his Jan. 1 inauguration, asserted that landlords in the city had the upper hand to abuse and overcharge vulnerable tenants. The city needed what he called a series of “rental ripoff hearings” to call out “negligent and dishonest landlords (who) endanger the health and safety of New Yorkers through hazardous code violations, untimely repairs, repeated noncompliance, and unlawful fees and price-gouging; economic discrimination, abusive eviction practices, or neglect of needed repairs.”

The ongoing hearings, one set for each city borough, were for the city’s “Office of Mass Engagement” to “hear from tenants about illegal, unfair, abusive, deceptive or unconscionable landlord practices.”

Not surprisingly, tenants turned out to complain. Just as unsurprisingly, landlords have not bothered to show up to explain that repairs are going undone because rents can’t be raised to cover the cost, that thousands of apartments are being left vacant because it costs more to rent them than to let them sit idle, or that small “mom-and-pop” owners are hoping they can sell out to the big-time real estate firms who can afford to lose money — while hoping that the politics of New York housing policy might eventually change.

The socialist mayor has opened the latest front in an ongoing war against landlords, but it’s been waged at both the city and state levels in New York for a long time. The endgame of this war could well be what Mamdani promised in his campaign: housing socialism for thousands of apartments, which would move into city ownership or nonprofit ownership enabled by the city taking and disposing of apartments.

Those with long memories of the bad, old days of New York City in the 1980s know they’ve seen that movie before.

The rent freeze is the third front in this war against landlords. The first and most financially consequential to date was the 2019 enactment of something called the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act. No one who reads that state law should be surprised that repairs and improvements are being left undone in the nearly 960,000 “rent-stabilized” apartments — whose rents are set by a city agency called the Rent Guidelines Board. Per the law, landlords essentially must eat the cost of repairs. “Major capital improvements” can be used to justify no more than a 2% rent hike. But to rent a unit, one must keep up with those improvements for which the rent can’t go up.

The sheer cost of doing business after the 2019 law, according to Mark Willis of the Furman Real Estate Center at NYU, is such that owners of rent-stabilized buildings in the Bronx are losing $120 a month per apartment. Or as the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission warns about the city’s pre-1974 rent-stabilized housing: “Many of these buildings are financially stressed and teetering on the edge of a ‘death spiral.’” An estimated 50,000 apartments are being left vacant because renting them means operating at a loss, thanks to the costs of code compliance.

That downward spiral will only accelerate thanks to the second front in the war against landlords: Mamdani’s central campaign promise to “freeze the rent.” By appointing his own loyalists to the Rent Guidelines Board, which sets the rent, Mamdani, who’s already named six of the board’s nine members, is poised to do just that. A rent freeze is exactly the opposite of what the Citizens Budget Commission has recommended — that the board approve rent increases that, at a minimum, “keep pace with inflation.”

Mayor Mamdani is laying the public opinion foundation for just the opposite of any rent increase — that’s the goal of the “ripoff hearings”, which are de facto show trials for property owners squeezed by a regulatory tourniquet. Indeed, one cannot but think that the socialist Mayor has been keeping up on his Mao, who viewed landlords as class enemies.

If this is a war, however, what is the endgame? For New York housing, it could be the growth of socialist, government-owned housing — notwithstanding the fact that the city already owns 177,000 units of public housing operating under federal monitor because of its slum-like conditions (mold, lead paint, elevator, and power failures). Public takeover of private housing happened in the 1980s, when Ed Koch was the city’s mayor. Some 100,000 apartments were classed as “en rem” housing — buildings whose owners had failed to pay their property taxes and as a result became city property, with City Hall collecting rent on dilapidated housing.

There are signs that could be happening again. Per the Furman Center, about 1 in 25 “legacy” older buildings in the city face looming city liens because of “significant arrears on property taxes or related charges such as water and sewer fees.” An attorney familiar with the market for such buildings said that banks are unlikely to foreclose on such buildings’ mortgages, because “they don’t want money-losers on their bottom line.” That means the city would, once again, own thousands of apartment buildings. Koch chose to renovate those 100,000 buildings with $5 billion in city dollars ($14 billion in 2026 dollars), and slowly sell them to private and non-profit developers. As Mayor, Rudy Giuliani favored small, “mom-and-pop” buyers, the same owners now facing a cost squeeze.

But a socialist mayor could seize the opportunity to retain public ownership. He foreshadowed just that possibility in his campaign platform.  

“We can’t afford to wait for the private sector to solve this crisis,” per Zohran for NYC. “Zohran will triple the City’s production of publicly subsidized, permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes, constructing 200,000 new units over the next 10 years.” 

There’s no reason that “constructing” might not mean renovation of all those “legacy” apartments.

To be sure, the city will not socialize the entire New York rental market. But, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, “New York City’s mom-and-pop landlords, once a fixture of the city’s housing landscape, are staring at extinction.”

The likely winners in this housing hunger game will be progressive Democrats like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s bete noir: large housing investment firms. Such firms, as an attorney who follows the market for rent-regulated buildings tells me, will swoop in and buy at “fire sale prices. They have deep pockets, so they can afford to operate at a loss for a while. They’re essentially buying an option, based on the possibility that the laws will change.” 

THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION WILL EAT THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

In the meantime, small owners will have an incentive to keep units vacant, hoping to sell an entirely vacant property to a major investor. A vacant building, per the property lawyer, is the “golden ticket’ — because rents on vacant units can be adjusted to the market and thus raised. Landlords who own small buildings hope for their tenants to die and vacate. Sales to major investors are not theoretical. In May of last year, New York’s Longacre Group paid $141 million for 34 rent-stabilized buildings in the Bronx.

The prospect looms of still more public housing in New York, which already has far more than any other city and 20 percent of the national total, combined with housing owned by investor capitalists, likely to sit on it in hopes of a future big payday. In the meantime, family owners of small buildings, many of them immigrants, who’d hoped being a small property owner would be a way to build wealth, will be squeezed out. Call it housing socialism with New York characteristics. It’s the same formula the city has used for decades. The result is a housing affordability crisis that never ends.

Howard Husock is a senior fellow for Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of ‘The Projects: A New History of Public Housing.’