As part of an ambitious plan to create 400,000 units of housing in the Big Apple in the next ten years, Mayor Zohran Mamdani proposed this week that he intends to use city resources to seize buildings from bad or neglectful landlords and transfer ownership of the seized property to one of three entities. That means the city becomes the arbiter for who loses a property they can’t maintain. However, critics argue the plan is just a form of patronage that moves money around with little to no regard for the actual welfare of the tenants who have to stay in the buildings or find new housing if the situation dictates it. Curtis Sliwa explained on 710 WOR’s Curtis Sliwa and Larry Mendte in the Morning program why the plan is destined to fail because the tenant/landlord relationship must be taken on a case-by-case basis- but more importantly, because the city tried similar seizure plans during the fiscally-challenged 1970’s and saw them fail then.
Curtis explained how the “one seize fits all” approach to housing that Mayor Mamdani supports can’t work, starting with the bad landlords: “It’s a mess, so now you have to bifurcate it. You have to say, okay, we have slumlords who basically just try to milk the property and then try to sell it, you know, they just flip it to another L.L.C. and they just keep milking the property. So, what do you do? But, if the city starts seizing properties, and we did that already in the 70’s, the worst landlord in the world is the City of New York- just look at NYCHA. So, the mayor and his people may have the best of intentions to get them out of the hands of the slumlords, but that’s not the way to do it.”
But Curtis suggested that, in some cases, the problems in housing stem from deadbeat tenants as much as absentee landlords: “They [essentially] become squatters; two, three, four, five years, sometimes more. And then on the way out, finally, when the marshals have been told by landlord court judges [to get out], they bust up the apartment. They bust up the plumbing, there’s flooding, holes in the wall. The landlords, many of them small, mid-size landlords, they just can’t absorb that. So, there’s no sentimentality, there’s no empathy for the different gradations of landlords, and I’ve seen the abuse on both ends.”
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