http://nypost.com/2025/12/13/opinion/lefties-want-more-poison-to-cure-nyc-housing-crisis-they-caused/
By Post Editorial Board
New York Post
Published Dec. 13, 2025
Democrats are SO ridiculously stupid.
You think New York has an affordability crisis now? Beware: A housing emergency you don’t hear about — driven entirely by lefty legislators — endangers the city’s stock of rent-stabilized apartments.
Buildings that host over 600,000 rent-stabilized units — with both private and non-profit owners — are on the verge of mortgage default.
Mass foreclosure, of the sort New York last experienced in the 1970s, would crater the market, endangering these buildings and their already-vulnerable tenants.
The New York Housing Conference, which represents not-for-profit, publicly financed buildings that provide deeply subsidized housing for low-income tenants, reports that its members will soon need a $1 billion bailout to avoid default.
The problem, the NYHC explains, is simple arithmetic: “Rents are not covering expenses.”
The state’s 2019 rent-law changes made it impossible for landlords to raise rents when other costs go up — like utilities, insurance and labor — and prevents building owners from recouping the costs of unit rehabilitation after tenants move out.
We’ve flagged how that slams mom-and-pop landlords, but it’s a crisis for nonprofit outfits, too.
Yet most affordable housing is still privately owned, and the New York Apartment Association, which reps owners of such rent-stabilized buildings, notes that its members are in the same boat. Thousands can’t cover their mortgage payments, much less make necessary repairs or upgrade their tenants’ units.
The NYAA estimates that the private market would need $3.65 billion to rescue its members from insolvency.
This crisis wasn’t the result of vulture capitalists speculating wildly to make a fast buck: It was progressives wildly rewriting the rules for a vulnerable sector to score political points.
Democrats won control of the Legislature in late 2018 and started swinging for the left-field fences: That’s when they rushed through all those disastrous “criminal justice reforms,” too.
That year’s rent-law “fixes” turned the economics of residential-building management upside-down, drastically narrowing expected revenues not because market conditions changed, but because government upset the game board.
As a result, values have collapsed, leaving building owners underwater on their debt, yet still legally obligated to provide their tenants with safe, habitable housing, including heat, hot water, working intercoms, on-site superintendents and all the other basics that New Yorkers take for granted.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s vision for the future of housing offers little hope for improvement: He vows to “freeze the rent” for all rent-regulated tenants, even as so many landlords operate with paper-thin margins at best.
By law, stabilized-rent hikes are supposed to reflect economic reality; Mamdani means to ignore not just the laws of economics, but the actual statute.
The mayor-elect loudly cheers the “decommodification of housing,” meaning that the housing market shouldn’t be a source of profit for anyone — though NYCHA, the nation’s largest public housing authority, shows exactly what a de-commodified system looks like: endlessly deferred maintenance that’s yielded a repairs backlog running $85 billion.
The city’s affordability woes can’t be solved by waving a magic wand; indeed, Albany’s 2019 bid to “protect tenants” already has the affordable-housing market on the brink of catastrophic failure.
One more big dose of magical thinking from Mamdani, and New York’s tenants will be in for a world of hurt.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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