Sen. John Fetterman: “Let’s everybody turn the temperature down, honestly. Whether that’s some of the kinds of rhetoric from Secretary Noem, or the President, or the Mayor, or the Governor.”
@Wilson__Valdez@SenFettermanPA Hahaha he is a US senator. You are an anonymous X account w/ less than 30k followers (me being one of them and enjoy your account). Fetterman is one of the few Dems that actually reflect all the woke/identify bs and speak to the middle.
@AlbaneseNYC Young woman? I’m 37–I’m not a young man. I have owned 3 homes w/ my wife. I am white. She is Latina. Am I a white supremacist? My parents are white. They were raised in rentals and apartments. They own not one but two homes! Are they too white supremacists? Cut the Marxist crap.
Before stepping into the hellish Rorschach-test-like arena that is American public discourse today, before you convince no one on Twitter, before adding to Screwtape’s Noise, please at least pray for that poor woman who died. And pray for peace in Minneapolis and everywhere.
I had the chance to sit w/ my dad during a few serious situations when he was MOD. I know no details from Minnesota, but this is NOT how you lead a city through a crisis. Please pray for this city and our country.
Have not watched any videos. As a dem, I respect your perspectives tremendously. I'm against masked men shooting civilians. Also, against Frey/Walz using this for political purposes. But MORE against masked men shooting civilians!
@ericmetaxas How about this? J6 “protestors” killed a cop? Democrats are still trying to use this to score political points? Both can be true. Do better, Eric.
Who Will Build NYC if Builders Are the Enemy?
As a New Yorker Jew, I'm surrounded by people who have been in real estate their entire lives. I am not trying to feed a stereotype, but that's my reality. They aren't activists or online commentators. They are people who bought their first buildings with all their savings, carried debt through rate hikes, fixed things themselves when there was no money to hire, and stayed in New York through high crime, recessions, 2008, COVID, rising taxes, insurance increases, and an ever-expanding book of laws and codes. None of them were promised fairness before they started, and none of them were protected from risk. They succeeded very slowly, and painfully, but with responsibly.
That experience is exactly what is missing from the worldview of Zohran Mamdani, and it shows in every part of his housing agenda. Mamdani has never built anything. He never signed a personal guarantee, never met payroll, never carried a mortgage through a rough month, never had to choose between fixing a boiler now or hoping it survives another winter because there is no cash. He has only operated in a political world where consequences are abstract and other people absorb the risk. When you have never operated in the real economy, it becomes easy to believe that shortcuts are solutions.
It is also why his message resonates with a certain type of voter. The people demanding “housing reforms” are not bad people. They are frustrated renters who feel like the system is rigged against them. I understand the frustration. But frustration doesn't change math. Housing is hard. Ownership is a very slow process. Building anything meaningful in this city takes years of stress, and debt. The people calling for "landlord policies" often want the outcome without the grind, the stability without the risk, and the reward without the years of sweating that every responsible adult who succeeded here had to endure. But it does not work like that.
NYC is in housing crisis. Citywide vacancy sits around 1.4 percent, a level economists consider an emergency. Median rents keep rising anyway, with Manhattan near $4,800 and Brooklyn around $3,800, even under an already thick layer of regulation. The reason is obvious. Supply has not kept up. In a good year, New York adds roughly 30,000 units. The city needs hundreds of thousands more over the next decade just to stabilize prices. At the same time, construction costs here are among the highest in the country, financing is extremely difficult, and insurance is wildly expensive
Mamdani’s proposals take that fragile situation and make it worse. When you cap upside while leaving downside unlimited, rational people stop participating. Developers do not argue on X. Lenders do not protest. They simply reallocate. Projects stop coming up. Renovations are postponed. New construction dies before a shovel hits the ground. The people I know in real estate are not angry. They are disengaging. Some are buying elsewhere. Some are sitting on cash. Some are done entirely. And when that happens, tenants do not win. Buildings deteriorate, supply tightens further, and rents rise anyway.
What Mamdani offers is emotional satisfaction, not solutions. He tells voters that prices are high because someone else is greedy, not because the city has spent decades making housing harder and almost impossible to build. He frames landlords as villains instead of participants in an ecosystem that only works when incentives align. That framing feels good, but it does not produce housing. It produces resentment, fear, and withdrawal.
Everyone I know who made it in this city did it the same way. Slowly, without shortcuts. Policies written by people who never did that do not create fairness or affordability. They create shortages. NYC doesn't have a landlord problem. It has a confidence problem. And a city that teaches people to hate the builders while demanding more building is a city sabotaging its own future.