New York's Real 'Affordability' Problem is Government

Even as many Republicans were preparing to paint Democrats as the ‘Party of Mamdani’, President Trump’s staffers invited Zohran Mamdani for a high-profile chat with Trump.

Vice President J.D. Vance, who had previously mocked Mamdani, now calls him “fascinating”.

“Obviously, I’m not a communist, and I think he is,” Vance argued, “but the fact that he focuses so aggressively on the affordability question in New York City, which does have one of the worst affordability crises anywhere in the world, is smart, and he’s at least listening to people.”

“Most politicians, it’s a very low bar, but they don’t even listen to people. I would put Mamdani, Bernie and Ro Khanna in the category of those who, at least sometimes, they are.”

“I’ve always been fascinated by Bernie,” Vance also claimed, saying that if he repeated what the Vermont socialist had told him, “it would probably really hurt me on both the left and the right.”

Naive comments like these show how institutional knowledge of Communism has been lost. Republicans and conservatives need to urgently relearn what Marxism is before it’s too late.

No one who understands Marxism and the Cloward-Piven effect would seriously believe that Bernie, Mamdani or any leftists “listen to voters” and try to solve their problems. Communists don’t solve problems. They create crises and tell the voters that Communism is the answer.

Why does New York City have an affordability crisis? Let’s start with food.

When people in red states look for cheaper grocery shopping, they go to Walmart. But New York City doesn’t allow Walmart to operate in the city. The closest Walmart is to the city is mere feet away from the border in Queens: the borough where Mamdani carpetbagged his way to a career. Whole Foods, Target and every higher end chain store operate in the city, but only after a prolonged battle over unionizing their employees so the politicians can wet their beaks.

The more expensive chains stave off unionization with higher hourly wages which get passed on to consumers. And that’s on top of a $16.50 per hour minimum wage. Then add on the cost of legalized shoplifting, which has forced stores to close across New York and California, and when those stores aren’t closing, they’re passing on further costs in prices to consumers.

New York’s grocery market is controlled by a small number of local chains that have smaller order volume, higher prices and are more likely to have unionized staff. The rest falls to ‘bodegas’, a key part of the Mamdani campaign, mostly run by third world immigrants, including Muslims, who make much of their money from pushing malt liquor, lottery tickets and cigarettes. These ‘convenience stores’ vastly overcharge for basic staples and usually cheat on their taxes.

While New York City has some dollar and closeout stores, leftist activists have been trying to push them out, claiming that, unlike the Yemeni bodegas selling booze, they “exploit” the poor.

Combine that together and you have the highest food prices outside of Honolulu and Dallas. That’s how you end up with $10 milk, $14 bacon and $8 orange juice. Never mind fast food, restaurant or app delivery prices. (App workers have a $21 per hour minimum wage.)

Since around 3 million people in New York City, or over a third of the population, are on food stamps, and there are multiple ‘free lunches’, including the city public school system which serves 1.5 million free meals, including ‘take out’ meals for adults and non-students, food prices are not an actual issue for the welfare base of the Democrats. Just those paying for it.

What did all this? Decades of regulations that kept out any competition and consolidated the market around few and expensive choices to protect unions and organizations, like the Yemeni bodegas that backed Mamdani, leading to an “affordability crisis” that the Socialist-Islamist pol is promising to solve with government grocery stores. The plan won’t work, but it’s not supposed to, what it is actually meant to do is keep food prices high to indict the excesses of ‘capitalism’.

This isn’t “listening to people”: it’s the Cloward-Pivening of the system by Communists in power.

What about someplace to live? Want to buy a house? Fuhgeddaboudit, any house you could even begin to afford would be a ramshackle hovel starting at a million and located in an area that no one except career criminals, sex offenders and clans of third world immigrants want to live in. And even then, good luck. New York City is ground zero for the progressive dream of eliminating single family housing in favor of massive apartment housing complexes.

How’s that working out for everyone?

The apartment complexes fall into three categories: luxury condos, middle class rentals and government welfare housing. If you’ve got $5,000 a month to burn, you’ll have no trouble finding a place in Manhattan. (Just remember that homeless, migrants and junkies still prowl outside the nicest buildings and the doorman won’t do much except watch as you’re being beaten up.)

And if you want to live in a government welfare housing project, the New York City Housing Authority alone has 177,565 apartments in 2,410 buildings with around 500,000 residents.

That’s the population of Atlanta or Miami just living in welfare housing in New York City.

And NYCHA is not the only ‘affordable housing’ program in the city. There’s another 1 million ‘rent stabilized’ apartments with 2.5 million people living in them where the city controls who can live there, how much they pay in rent and whether landlords can evict them. (Of these around 24,000 are the semi-mythical ‘rent controlled’ apartments made famous by shows like Friends where you can pay 1960s rents.) And then there’s Section 8 which covers over 200,000 apartment dwellers or 11% of New York City’s rental apartments.

That’s around 3.2 million people in New York City living in some form of government controlled or funded housing. Over 50% of apartments in the city are some kind of welfare housing.

New York City doesn’t have a housing ‘affordability’ crisis because it doesn’t have enough government-subsidized housing. It’s got an affordability crisis because it’s one big project.

And that’s what makes New York City unaffordable for anyone who actually works for a living.

Mamdani promised to freeze rents on stabilized apartments and build 200,000 more units of government welfare housing at a cost of $70 billion in money borrowed at premium interest.

Surely when 3.5 million people are living in welfare housing, affordability will be solved?

Not really. Few people want to live in government housing projects once Mayor Bill de Blasio, Mamdani’s inspiration, reversed Giuliani’s policies and allowed career criminals back inside. I lived in a housing project as a boy and despite the regular police presence in the building, there was constant violence, crime and drug dealing. Mamdani’s 200,000 units will house criminals.

But it’s not the 3 million strong welfare class that’s complaining about housing costs anyway.

The middle class renter population that subsidizes the welfare housing industry bears the burden of the billions in costs (the NYCHA budget alone is over $5 billion) and is in trouble.

Those are the people that don’t qualify for ‘affordable housing’ and can’t afford to drop $5,000 in rent on a nicer place. They’ve relied on a network of apartment rentals that’s disappearing because eviction regulations, especially during COVID, made it impossible to evict deadbeat tenants. There’s a whole population of con artists that moved in, waited 30 days and then refused to leave without a $20,000 payout. A lot of landlords decided it was cheaper not to rent, or to only rent at such high rates that the risk of serial fraudsters and lunatics would be lower.

New York City has an estimated 50,000 of these ‘ghost apartments’. Other landlords found it easier to Airbnb their rental units rather than risk a monthly rental turning into an endless occupation. Members of Mamdani’s movement have (of course) proposed seizing them from landlords and turning them into public housing. That would take yet more housing stock away from the city’s dwindling middle class and make urban housing even less affordable.

Since NYC shifted from homeownership to apartment buildings, property taxes fall heavily on residential apartment buildings. New York City has the 2nd highest renter property tax share in the country at over $25,000 with an effective tax rate of 4.3%.

And while the taxes may be invisible to tenants, they get passed on to them every month.

All that welfare housing comes at the cost of making middle class housing unaffordable. And the more leftists try to make housing ‘affordable’, the worse it gets. That’s not an accident.

When you walk through New York City and spot vacant lots and wonder why no one is building housing there, that’s because a vacant lot makes a better investment property than a house. A vacant lot can always appreciate in value while a rental property is a money hole and a hazard.

Making ‘affordability’ even worse, New York City has some of the most expensive utility rates in the country. When President Trump met with Mamdani, he urged that Con Edison, the city’s power giant, should lower its rates. Instead Con Ed is raising them again. But Con Ed is just passing along the billions it pays in taxes and the ‘green energy’ mandates that require it to fund ‘clean energy’ from ‘wind farms’ in Nebraska thousands of miles away to ‘save the planet’.

Whose fault is this housing ‘affordability crisis’? The Left manufactured the crisis to boost the welfare class, squeeze out the middle class and then profit from its calculated catastrophe.

Republicans and conservatives used to understand that, but now some of that institutional knowledge is being lost. ‘Populism’ is treated as unambiguous good no matter whom it comes from. Some on the right insist on praising Mamdani because he’s ‘fighting the system’ and ‘offering solutions’. In reality, Mamdani is the system and he’s making the crisis worse.

Because the fundamental Marxist strategy is to push the crisis through to the breaking point.

GOPers who forget this won’t understand how to prepare for it, won’t know how to fight it and can be tricked into collaborating with the perpetrators. Playing into Mamdani’s big lie that he’s solving affordability problems, rather than creating them, Republicans are treating Socialism as a legitimate policy proposal while passing up the chance to win the affordability argument.

Socialism is not the solution to the affordability crisis. Socialism is the affordability crisis.

When we forget that big government, its allied NGOs, unions, regulators, activists, and consultants cause the problems they’re promising to solve, we lose the argument and we lose the opportunity to actually solve the problems they created by getting rid of them.

Embracing Mamdani isn’t how you beat the Left: it’s how you permanently lose to it.

Source: http://www.danielgreenfield.org/feeds/1211381827118039102/comments/default