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For small-property owners in New York City, it’s time to hit the panic button.
When Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a 9.5% property-tax hike the centerpiece of the budget he rolled out Tuesday, it ushered in a terrifying new housing reality.
A spike of the size he’s proposing would totally crush small-property owners.
Thousands of mom-and-pop, largely immigrant and mostly multigenerational families — owners who’ve been the backbone of affordable housing for decades — would be driven into greater distress, foreclosure and bankruptcy.
That may well be his goal.
Mamdani has long signaled his hostility toward private ownership of housing, but with his proposed property-tax hike, his message is clear: The sooner he rids the city of private residential rental property owners, the better.
Make no mistake, this hike alone would be a major move forward in what seems to be a grand scheme of taking over private rental property and converting it into socialized housing.
Doubt it? Recall that that’s precisely what the director of his “Office to Protect Tenants,” Cea Weaver, once called for.
She also described homeownership as “a weapon of white supremacy.”
What a laugh, especially considering the vast number of non-white small-property owners.
Weaver has since walked back her statements. But the steps Mamdani is taking sure seem like he embraces them — and would love for the city to swipe private buildings, even if it means bankrupting owners.
Look, Mamdani has never run a business. He knows nothing about the financial struggles and grind of operating housing in a highly regulated environment that South American, Chinese, Greek, Bangladeshi, Caribbean, Eastern European and other multicultural small-property owners deal with every day.
Trouble is, he doesn’t care.
While proposing to boost landlord taxes, he’s also committed to a rent freeze.
That’s another move meant to crush small-private property owners, presumably so he can convert their properties into socialized public housing.
Indeed, the tax hike and rent freeze are a one-two punch: They’ll burden already cash-strapped small-building owners with a crippling tax hike while simultaneously depriving them of a rent boost to cover the new taxes — not to mention the increases in other expenses to maintain their buildings.
Capping rental income and raising taxes is an obvious formula for failure. Mamdani knows that.
He justifies his tax hike as the only “tool” available to balance the city’s budget if Albany won’t OK other tax hikes. But he won’t even consider cutting wasteful spending.
And he’s dead serious about the rent freeze: He just tapped five new Rent Guidelines Board members who’ll guarantee he gets his way.
Controlling the nine-member board all but seals the deal when the RGB meets in June — and never mind the RGB’s charter, which mandates a process independent of political influence and interference.
The board is required to make its decisions based on income and expense data compiled by its research team for the sole purpose of setting rent increases that maintain the health of the city’s rent-stabilized housing.
Its decisions should not be meant to fulfill political objectives.
Mamdani has also vowed to take “unprecedented” steps against supposedly negligent landlords.
And he may also try to revive the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act.
That act — which thankfully didn’t muster enough votes last fall to survive the previous mayor’s veto — would give hand-picked purchasers (housing nonprofits, predatory investors) exclusive rights to stall and freeze the sales of small buildings that property owners need to sell quickly, forcing them to sell below market.
Already, there’s talk among Democratic Socialist of America members of the City Council of reintroducing the bill and going scorched earth on small owners.
That would, ironically, clobber the city’s affordable-housing infrastructure — and the very New Yorkers the mayor claims he’s protecting.
It would also help with his plan to socialize city housing.
Small owners have long been tapped by the city as ATM machines whenever the need arises to balance a budget.
But this time it’s more than balancing the budget; Mamdani is looking to destroy us.
It’s straight from the DSA playbook: Drain our checking accounts, strip us of our life savings and investments, take our property, hand it off to politically connected housing nonprofits and create a landscape of socialist housing.
The mayor seems serious about this. He won’t be happy until he’s able to announce: Small-property owners in New York, RIP.
Ann Korchak is a small-property owner and president of Small Property Owners of New York.