The communist takeover of NYC continues. On Thursday, the New York City Rent Guidelines Board approved Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s request to “freeze the rent” — in a move that landlord advocates slammed as “an absolute farce.”
The board passed a rent freeze on both one-year and two-year leases for the Big Apple’s roughly 1 million rent-stabilized units in a 7-1 vote.
Someone on X posted the standard analysis of rent control — an analysis that is entirely correct:
Yes, your rent is frozen. So is the landlord’s budget to fix your heat, your leaks, and your broken freezer. But don’t worry, when nothing works, at least the number on your lease stays the same. You can admire it while you eat out.
And the rent won’t rise, true. Neither will any new buildings, because no one builds apartments he’s forbidden to price. So enjoy the same aging unit for the next thirty years, paying yesterday’s rent for tomorrow’s ruins.
Freezing a price doesn’t freeze reality. It freezes the supply, halts the repairs, and ends the building, while the line of people waiting for an apartment grows longer every year.
But feel the warmth of collectivism: everyone equal, shivering together in identical crumbling units, sharing the broken elevator and the dead freezer as one community.
The number stays the same. That was the promise, and that is all you’ll get.
Of course, one of the cognitively impaired progressives on that platform responded with this gem:
“Landlords are required by law to provide those things.”
While there may be a law that mandates certain things, where is the money going to come from “to provide those things?”
This same Rent Guidelines Board released a report a few months ago that showed that insurance costs have risen 10.5% IN ONE YEAR. Fuel and maintenance costs went up by 11% and 6%.
Dr. Tom Woods has weighed in on this insanity:
This is truly the progressive worldview: if we want something, we simply demand it. There is no such thing as tradeoffs. If we shout something through a bullhorn it will happen exactly the way we want, and with no collateral damage.
It is because of this juvenile worldview that they are so contemptuous of people who disagree with them. It is well established from surveys that people on the right can explain progressive opinions with vastly more accuracy than progressives can explain the views of people to their right. They don’t know a thing, and they have no interest in knowing a thing.
What they “know” is this: they are righteous people who want inexpensive housing for people, which they can get simply by shouting through a bullhorn, and their opponents perversely refuse to shout through that bullhorn. If making demands is all that’s necessary to bring about a social result they favor, the only reason someone might not join them in it must be pure wickedness.
If this “wing” of the Democratic Party should grow (and recent primary wins in NYC seem to favor that outcome), nothing will be safe. They will come after you with wealth taxes. We are seeing this abomination in Californistan already.
Next up will taxing unrealized gains from your stock portfolio. This is true insanity. After that would come raids on your retirement savings. Remember, in their eyes, you are an oppressor. They will believe they have the moral high ground and will laugh at you as they expropriate your life savings.
Communism killed 100 million people in the twentieth century. The time to wake up to this reality was yesterday. The longer that sane people believe this will just go away eventually, the stronger the communists will get. The time to fight back is now.