Former candidate for the NYS Senate District 25 in central Brooklyn. Original Hip-Hop Minister, preacher, activist, CUNY Adjunct Professor, talk show host!
My first non sports hero was Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson. You can eavesdrop on our last conversation . If you were not born a black boy in the 60s, raised in the 70s and 80s believing that you could never be president. You may not understand Black Americans tears this morning!
When I was asking everyone to support Gov. Cuomo for Mayor, the Dominican leadership were jubilant about supporting Mandami. Now after Mandami showed no love for them, it appears that now they wish Cuomo had won.
@VickieforNYC That is simply the truth. DSA candidates will not represent local constituents' interests or aspirations, as their loyalty lies with the DSA. The DSA’s agenda is their agenda!
@SymoneDSanders So instead of Dems spending boundless energy bemoaning Trump, they should spend the same amount of energy, TRYING to not SOUND sane to the wide American electorate, but to actually BECOME sane (moderate). Had they done in this 2024, maybe they'd still be in the WH. This won't do!
People losing their minds over this are upset for the wrong reasons. The threat isn’t that it will be a government take over. This has already been happening. The threat is that it will be more of the same.
The Mayor says he is going to take buildings from “bad landlords” and hand them to “responsible stewards,” meaning community land trusts, nonprofits, or the tenants themselves. Fine. Except every one of those categories is already drowning in New York City right now, today.
In September the city and the Attorney General had to launch a $750,000 rescue pilot for HDFC co-ops, buildings literally owned by their tenant-shareholders, because the city has more than 1,000 HDFCs and admits “a high number” are at high risk of foreclosure. UHAB pegs distress at roughly 20% of the portfolio.
In October, ANHD reported that at least 63,700 NYC apartments operated by nonprofit community development corporations are losing money every month, and that about half of the all-affordable buildings ANHD studied (112,000 units) have operating costs exceeding revenue.
Enterprise Community Partners, the national affordable housing nonprofit, published a report saying more than half of all units in its own NY LIHTC portfolio have been in financial distress since 2022. Their own portfolio. Their own report.
So when the Mayor says he is going to transfer buildings to nonprofits and tenant co-ops, what he is actually doing is moving the bailout request from one agency line item to another. The rent still must be collected. The insurance premium still went up. The water bill still has to be paid. A regulatory change of ownership does not change any of that. It just changes who is standing at City Hall asking for emergency funds to keep the lights on.
And here is the part every renter should pay attention to: this plan makes their housing more dependent on scarce public dollars at exactly the moment those dollars are running out.
The city already has financial problems.
The city just spent four months begging Albany to commit roughly $8 billion in state aid over two years to plug the gap. Vital City called it what it is, “a state bailout of New York City.” TIME noted that the plan “relies heavily on state aid and delayed pension payments.”
The mayor himself could not balance his own budget without going to Albany for help. And now he wants to absorb thousands of additional rent-stabilized buildings into a public-subsidy pipeline that already cannot fund the buildings inside it.
This is not a housing plan. It is an epic cost kicking. Every nonprofit, every HDFC, every CLT that gets pulled into this system joins a line for emergency operating funds the city has already proven it cannot reliably cover. The renters in those buildings do not end up with safer or better-maintained housing. They end up with housing whose continued existence depends on the next state aid package, the next AG settlement, the next budget cycle breaking in their favor.
This “solution” has already failed and we have overwhelming proof.
Abolishing private property in 2 easy steps
Step 1 - Rent control: Rent is lower than costs and taxes so you can't do maintenance.
Step 2 - Seizure: You don't have the money to do maintenance and the state uses it as an excuse to take your property.
Let's understand a few things about what's actually about to happen here if Zohran gets his way -- which he almost certainly will, unless courts intervene.
First and foremost, Cea Weaver and DSA 'organizers' will be unleashed with the full institutional and legal support of the city government to ramp up tenant complaints in targeted buildings. No complaint will be too small. No building will be too small. Everything will be treated as catastrophic. Full-scale demagoguery will ensue, complete with protests, rent strikes, street theater, and harassment of property owners.
Accordingly, the city buildings department will be weaponized to begin writing as many violations as possible in order to bolster the city's effort to justify a seizure. It won't matter how small or large the violations are, the total number will be breathlessly cited as evidence of mismanagement. It will be impossible for landlords to clear these violations in good faith.
The combination of a weaponized buildings department writing hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, rent strikes, and constant threats and harassment against landlords by militant activists will make the situation untenable for any property owner to realistically fight back, and the city will seize the property. The landlord will be lucky to walk away without prison or being beaten to death in the street by an angry mob (as Zohran's buddy Hasan Piker referred to landlords -- 'let the streets run red with their capitalist blood').
But that's only the first half of the plan, and everyone needs to pay very close attention to the big picture here, because it's hugely important and has national implications.
The properties will then be turned over to nonprofits. This is no small detail. This is in fact the whole point.
The idea here is to build up Zohran's DSA-connected nonprofits with a multbillion-dollar portfolio of hard assets -- New York City real estate. This portfolio could theoretically reach into the hundreds of billions or even the trillions, depending on how aggressive they get.
Now these highly political nonprofits would become the new land barons of New York, complete with all the political clout, leverage, and reach that goes along with it. It would be a true nightmare scenario.
As it stands now, the nonprofits depend mostly on the largesse of grants, donations, and other third-party resources to stay afloat. They are lavishly funded of course, and many do hold significant assets, but it would all pale in comparison to simply handing them the keys to a New York City real estate empire, courtesy of Zohran Mamdani and the DSA.
The resources at their disposal would be immense. The organizing potential that goes along with those resources will have national implications. Every DSA candidate in every town and city in the country would be trained, funded, and staffed by organizers with ties to the NYC nonprofit empire backed by a trillion dollars in free real estate. And they would be shameless in leveraging those resources for pure political power.
That's the game plan here. That's the whole ball of wax.
Zohran isn't interested in making housing better for anyone. If he was, we'd be talking seriously about solving the NYCHA disaster.
Hell, if he was even remotely sincere about seizing these properties from 'bad landlords' for the 'public good' he'd be focused on turning them over to the city itself, as misguided as that would be.
No, this is about nothing more than consolidating political power for the DSA. Just like everything else these people do. Giving the DSA a massive war chest backed by seized real estate.
Once you understand that they have no interest in fixing anything other than elections, it all makes a lot more sense.
“Perhaps that’s actually his goal: pushing distressed owners into defaulting on their property taxes, leaving the city to take ownership.”
Mamdani's 'race' to solve NYC's housing crunch masks his true goal https://t.co/Pyo9sL1vDX
My prayers are with all the victims, their families, and the entire community affected by the horrific and senseless shooting attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego. Houses of worship are meant to be places of peace, prayer, and safety, and seeing violence carried out in such a sacred space is deeply heartbreaking.
No one in America should ever have to live in fear of being attacked because of their faith, ethnicity, or beliefs. Targeting innocent people for who they are or how they worship is cowardly, hateful, and completely unacceptable. These kinds of attacks tear at the fabric of our society and must be condemned without hesitation.
At moments like this, we must stand together as Americans and reject hatred in all its forms. We pray for healing for the victims, strength for their loved ones, and peace for a community that should never have had to endure such pain.
Correct, we did have a hole, caused by the tens of thousands of migrants who poured into our city while the Biden Administration stood by, did absolutely nothing, and left New York to deal with the crisis they created.
I made the tough cuts necessary to close that gap, without the state giving us a pass on class size mandates and other measures, cuts the current Mayor and his socialist comrades in the City Council loudly protested at the time.
The job of a mayor is to make hard choices, not politically convenient ones, by the time I left, NYC had 8 billion dollars left in reserves.
There was never a $12 billion hole in the budget. That fairy tale was cooked up to justify reckless spending and political theater.
I left the incoming administration with $8 billion in reserves, not a financial apocalypse.
Albany election-year bailouts are not a long-term economic strategy. The free money dries up after Election Day, but the bloated “free” programs stay forever.
And here’s the part the socialists in City Hall never want to admit: the millionaires and billionaires they love demonizing already pay roughly 40% of NYC’s taxes. Keep demonizing the people creating jobs, investing in this city, and carrying the tax base, and eventually they’ll stop investing here altogether.
Facts are stubborn things. Even when some politicians aren’t.
FYI if a building goes bankrupt an owner does not have personal liability. The lender takes the hit.
But the tenants will experience that bankrupted building firsthand. So you decide who the loser is in this ridiculous policy push.
So tired of groups pretending to stand up for vulnerable populations, but they’re really using them as pawns for political gain.
RT: https://t.co/gIUMeuwqU9
Auto insurance reform is happening in New York.
Thank you for the Relief
Thank you, @GovKathyHochul and legislative leaders, for taking action to crack down on fraud and close costly loopholes that have driven up car insurance rates for years.
New Yorkers deserve relief - and this puts savings back where they belong: in the pockets of drivers.
Fraud and loopholes have been driving up your auto insurance for years.
We're cracking down and closing them.
And we're making sure those savings go back to you, not the insurance companies.