Peter St. Onge and E.J. Antoni

New York’s Comrade Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is ready to seize the means of production, starting with the landlords. As always with communism, it’ll mean quality goes down, and shortages will appear because the government destroys the incentive to provide the very thing it seeks to “redistribute.”

Interestingly, and contrary to the promises of Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky, Mamdani will not be handing landlords’ properties to the proletariat, laboring under the chains of capitalism. Instead, he wants to hand these assets to the party in the form of New York City’s empire of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

This was Mamdani’s recent pledge to crack down on what he considers bad landlords, saying the city will work to “transfer ownership” to “responsible stewards including community land-trusts and non-profits”—the NGOs that will do for America, broadly, and New York, specifically, what the Bolsheviks did for Russia.

This confiscation of private property would run alongside Mamdani’s plan to build 200,000 public housing units, at a cost that critics peg at around $80 billion. Then there’s also his proposal to impose rent control on hundreds of thousands of privately-owned housing units, which will make those units unprofitable, ultimately decreasing housing supply, canceling out the units he wants to build.

This is all an extremely costly and inefficient way to not make things better—a total waste of money. Waste is not something New York City can afford right now, considering it’s already running a $12 billion deficit. Mamdani’s going to need a whole lot more taxes. Or debt. Or both.

As bad as this sounds, it’s not surprising. Mamdani literally told voters he’d do this. In a widely cited interview during COVID, he said his “end goal” is “seizing the means of production,” later adding that socialism would work this time because “we will bring in the best and brightest to deliver it.”

It’s the apex of arrogance to think that the problem with socialism is that everyone else who tried it was a moron and only you are bright enough to make it work, like an intellectual savior for those who just aren’t very smart. But this is very standard socialism. The Soviets used an army of PhDs to centrally plan, which, oddly enough, still led to starvation.

Yet people are willing to listen to Mamdani because he largely won on housing in New York, which is one of the most expensive cities in the U.S.—in fact, in the world. Median rent is about $3,600 per month, and yet housing has been growing at just half the rate of population for 50 years, thanks to the precise anti-landlord measures Mamdani’s going all-in on.

There are union mandates, climate mandates, there’s licensing Hell, miles of other bureaucratic red tape, and rent control to make sure landlords can’t make money. This has left roughly 50,000 apartments empty—you simply can’t make money renting them out—despite a vacancy rate of 1.4%.

So, Mamdani could have slashed all this, done what Javier Milei did in Buenos Aires, cutting rents by two-thirds and doubling housing supply by getting rid of the red tape. Instead, like Tony Soprano on a job site, Mamdani is sending code enforcement to find excuses to seize properties.

The situation with New York housing is already bad enough, and it’s going to get worse because what landlord’s going to want to take the risk of being burned by “the warmth of collectivism” under Mamdani? His policies will drive up prices further and increase shortages.

Of course, that’ll just give Mamdani ammunition for his next campaign where the low-information voters of New York get to shoot themselves in the other foot. The worsening housing situation will require even more government intervention, or so the story will go.

It’s tempting to say Mamdani is economically illiterate, that maybe if he read Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, he’d figure it out. Alas, handing over the seizures to NGOs gives the game away. Like every blue-city “solution” to a social crisis, from homeless encampments to migrant hotels to scam “Learning” Centers, the goal isn’t helping people.

Instead, the goal is to seize resources for the crony NGOs who run those cities into the ground but channel plenty of funds to the political party in power. Mamdani is just the latest stooge, operating this time under the Democratic Socialist banner.

Peter St. Onge, Ph.D., is senior economist, and E.J. Antoni, Ph.D., is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.