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Mamdani's Rent Freeze Threatens Everyone Who Owns Anything

David Strom, HotAir:

  Tenants' groups and leftwing activists are cheering New York City's newly announced multiyear rent freeze. But Mayor Zohran Mamdani's rent scheme is headed for a judicial smackdown at the U.S. Supreme Court.

        In 2023 and twice in 2024, a hesitant Supreme Court declined to hear challenges by building owners to New York state's rent regulations. Lower courts had ruled that the regulations diminished the value of rental properties, but the state had good reasons to balance the rights of owners with the need to protect tenants.

        At that time, Justice Clarence Thomas said the constitutionality of New York's rent regulations is "an important and pressing question," and he looked forward to a case that clearly demonstrated the government was going too far to take an owner's property.

        Mamdani is giving Thomas what he's been waiting for -- on a silver platter.

        Moscow Mamdani's scheme to deny landlords any rent hikes at all reeks of the kind of expropriation of private property that occurs in Cuba, Venezuela and other socialist nations. Not in America. It is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.

        The Fifth Amendment bars government from imposing regulations that make a person's property worthless.

        Everyone who owns anything -- a home or a business of any sort -- should feel threatened by Mamdani's Bolshevik scheme to deny building owners fair compensation, doom rental properties to rapid decay, and then literally seize their buildings. After landlords, who's next?

        Under the framework established by the New York state legislature, the Rent Guidelines Board must determine allowable rent hikes based on the specific costs landlords incur. But Mamdani's handpicked RGB members threw the letter of the law out the window.

        Fuel costs went up 11% in the last year, and insurance went up 10.5%, but Mamdani's RGB announced Thursday that landlords will get no increases this year or the next. And, according to Mamdani's campaign promises, not even in the years after, as long as he is mayor.

        Zero rent hikes will cause buildings to rapidly fall into disrepair -- just what the new mayor intends. On May 29, he announced that when landlords fail to keep buildings up to code, "we will take aggressive legal action" to "transfer ownership to responsible stewards -- stewards that include community land trusts, nonprofits and even the tenants themselves."

        New York law already allows that, but only under extreme circumstances. It applied to fewer than 30 properties in 2024 and generally doesn't result in permanent confiscation. But Mamdani's rent freeze will turn many landlords into targets because they'll lack the revenue to keep apartments up to code. The rent freeze deliberately creates the conditions for widespread confiscation. Building owners get zip.

        Think Bolshevik Moscow in 1917, when the communists annulled private property rights, seized buildings and decreed them communal living spaces. Lefties now become the new land barons.

And what happens when “the people” do take over housing? Exactly what you

We've Never Tried 'Real Social Housing': Hall Of Eternal Shame

Mitch Berg 8:30 AM | July 03, 2026

It's one of those things that probably sounds like a great idea in a sophomore political science study group, or at a tony yoga studio full of upper-middle-class non-profit workers:   get rid of landlords, and convert the housing market to "social housing".   Which is another term for "socialist housing", without the "ist".  

I mean, like so many things coming from the ultra-left, it seems to wrap a solution to a difficult problem in a neat, simplistic, dare I say reductionist package that rolls right off the tongue, or the keyboard:

To paraphrase the classic sophomore political science cliché, just like the problems with Marxism, "we've never tried "real" "public builder social housing".  

But if you are old enough to have cognitive memories of Bill Clinton's administration, you know - yes, we have. 

In the 1950s-1960s, when a previous, much more innocent generation of the left embarked on the "Great Society and the War on Poverty", there was a well-meaning campaign of building public ("social") housing.   

The results were socially, criminologically, and economically catastrophic.  Some of the projects are still synonyms for horribly misguided government interventions with horrific results.  

For those that are too young to remember that more sensible age, and whose education ignored that history, I present to you...

...the Top Ten Worst "Social Housing" Fiascos Of the 1950s- 1990s.  

These are the ten worst, most dismal examples of "social housing".  

So far. 

10, 9 and 8. Rockwell Gardens, Henry Horner Homes and Stateway Gardens

Chicago's housing authority was particularly aggressive at building "social housing" from the 1950s into the '70s; the city was (and remains) highly represented on lists of places with tight correlations between government housing and all manner of blight.   

All three were demolished in the 2000s as even Chicago started to realize they had a problem:

You can follow the link to Berg’s top ten list, but closer to home, we have Bridgeport’s Father Panik Village as the perfect example:

I originally drafted this post with lengthy excerpts from two different articles and you can read them here and here, but this post is already too long, so here’s an AI summary: bottom line, two-parent, blue collar working families moved out, welfare-mothers and their undisciplined children moved in, chaos and destruction followed.


AI Overview

Father Panik Village, a public housing project in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was demolished in 1994 due to severe gang violence, open-air drug markets, deindustrialization, and chronic municipal neglect. The area ultimately fell into such extreme decay that officials condemned it as a "criminal's paradise".

The demise of the complex was driven by several interconnected factors:

  • Deindustrialization: Following WWII, the factories bordering the complex (like the Remington Arms plant) downsized or closed. This led to mass unemployment and poverty within the community.

  • Drug Epidemic & Gang Violence: In the 1970s and 1980s, the complex was heavily impacted by the crack cocaine epidemic. Courtyards became open-air drug markets, and the area was plagued by constant shootings, murders, and firebombings.

  • Systemic Disinvestment & Poor Management: The Bridgeport Housing Authority failed to properly maintain the property. As conditions worsened, maintenance ceased, leading to severe rodent infestations, uncollected trash, and broken-down facilities.

As for what awaits New York City, we already know that, too: we have the example of that city’s largest slumlord, the New York City Housing Authority:

AI Overview

The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) faces a systemic crisis of disrepair across its 330+ developments. The agency requires an estimated $78 billion in capital repairs, struggling with aging infrastructure, vermin infestations, lead hazards, frequent heat and hot water outages, and broken plumbing.