Moscow on the Hudson
Zohran Mamdani’s housing scheme will transfer ownership of NYC real estate to allied nonprofits, giving them unprecedented financial and political powerArchive
In late May, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced his Block by Block housing initiative that would remake the New York City real-estate market in his and his comrades’ image.
In addition to the usual pabulum that his plan will finally make the city “more affordable” and “fair” by “taxing the rich” and “building more housing,” Zohran proudly announced the central component of the plan: to target “bad” landlords for seizure of their property and, crucially, to transfer ownership of those properties to politically aligned cadres like tenant cooperatives and nonprofits, an effort backed by the mayor’s new taxpayer-funded $53 million Office of Mass Engagement.
Let’s understand what’s actually about to happen here if the mayor gets his way—which, unless courts intervene, he most certainly will.
First and foremost, Mamdani will unleash Cea Weaver, the commissar of his Office to Protect Tenants, along with Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) “organizers,” 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. Full-scale demagoguery will ensue, complete with protests, rent strikes, street theater, and harassment of property owners.
Accordingly, the city’s Department of Buildings will be weaponized to begin writing as many violations as possible in order to bolster the city’s effort to justify a seizure. Mamdani has called them “roof to cellar” inspections, and the purpose is clear: to violate landlords out of their properties. It won’t matter how small or large the violations are; the total number will be breathlessly cited as evidence of mismanagement, making it impossible for landlords to clear them. In fact, the landlord will be lucky to walk away without doing time or being beaten to death in the street by an angry mob. (As Mamdani’s buddy Hasan Piker referred to landlords, “Let the streets run red with their capitalist blood.”)
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 backed by the mayor’s own cadre of paid activist organizers will make the situation untenable for any property owner to realistically fight back. That’s entirely by design. The city would then seize the property.
Removing property, particularly housing stock, from the hands of private owners has long been a fantasy of the left. Leftist housing-policy experts have spoken openly about using rent control and the administrative code to bankrupt property owners specifically for the purpose of seizing their buildings. These activists laid the groundwork for Mamdani’s takeover.
But that’s only the first half of the plan, and everyone needs to pay close attention to the other half, because it’s hugely important and has national implications. The seized properties will be transferred to ideological and financial allies: namely, the same nonprofit industrial complex that has funded the anti-ICE riots; the pro-Palestine mobs that took over campuses and that clog NYC streets and harass Jewish houses of worship on a near-daily basis; and those who elected Mamdani.
This is no small detail. This is, in fact, the whole point.
The legal mechanism the mayor will use to implement this policy is twofold.
Most immediately, the city already has something on the books called a “7A process”—a little-known program cited by Mamdani himself that allows a housing court judge to potentially appoint a nonprofit to take over management of a troubled building.
But up to this point, the 7A Program has been used sparingly and in very specific and narrow situations, not as a large-scale weapon to effect the kind of revolutionary change the mayor is envisioning. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t going to use his considerable political capital to try to reshape the program for his purposes. In fact, he’s made it clear he intends to do just that.
Successfully broadened 7A processes could see landlords stripped of property in record time and scale, bolstered by building complaints and violations juiced up by Weaver’s activism and aggressive inspections.
The second mechanism now on the table is called the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), originally introduced by city council member Sandy Nurse in May 2024.
The bill would insert nonprofits into the private sale of nearly every residential building in the city by granting them a right of first refusal whenever a property is placed on the market. All property owners interested in selling would be forced by law to first offer the property to “qualified entities,” i.e., nonprofits the city has preselected, and they would be granted somewhere between 60 and 120 days to submit an offer and arrange financing before the property ever reaches the open market. In the event a private transaction is ultimately arranged, the property owner would then have to take the private deal back to the city and give the nonprofits a chance to match the offer.
This unprecedented intrusion into the private market, the likes of which we’ve never seen in New York, would kill the vast majority of real-estate transactions and tremendously reduce the incentives for new development, especially at the lower end of the market where it’s needed most.
COPA made its way through committees and passed the city council in December 2025, without a supermajority. Mayor Eric Adams had the good sense to veto COPA as one of his final acts as mayor, to the furor of progressives. One of the big questions going into the 2026 term was whether our new city council speaker, Julie Menin, would simply reintroduce COPA for Mayor Mamdani to sign as one of his first acts in office.
Speaker Menin instead shelved the bill, in what appeared to be a welcome act of moderation. Unfortunately, that wasn’t really the case, and it seems Speaker Menin might have been colluding with council progressives to simply time the reintroduction of COPA to coincide with Mayor Mamdani’s announcement of the Block by Block plan. If we hoped Menin would be a moderating force, it seems we have all been sadly misled, myself included.
Even with a simple majority from the council, it’s a lock that Mayor Mamdani will sign COPA into law. And combined with his property-seizure scheme under the 7A Program, he will lay the foundation for a radically changed system in which the nonprofit-industrial complex becomes the beneficiary of permanent wealth transfer to an extent never before imagined.
It’s crucial to understand that the entire organizing thesis of Mamdani’s “housing initiative” is to build up DSA-connected nonprofits with a multibillion-dollar portfolio of hard assets in the form of New York City real estate. This portfolio could theoretically reach into the hundreds of billions, depending on how aggressive they get. The sky’s the limit, really.
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. The organizing potential that comes with such immense 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.
Nobody should be under the illusion that any of this is meant to or will improve the state of housing in New York City. We already have city-owned properties. It’s called the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). They are the worst landlords you could possibly imagine.
Mamdani could have proposed to turn over the properties he wants to seize from “bad landlords” for the “public good” to the city itself, as misguided as that would be. But because NYCHA is already under city control, there’s no further power to be extracted from it. And this whole scheme is about nothing more than consolidating political power for the DSA, by giving it a massive war chest backed by seized NYC real estate.
Once you understand that these people have no interest in fixing anything other than elections—just look at Los Angeles—it all makes a lot more sense.
Obviously, these policies will face legal challenges. And I know for a fact that such challenges are already being explored. On the face of it, the seizure scheme appears to be a fairly obvious violation of the Fifth Amendment (the so-called takings clause), which states essentially that the government cannot set up a regulatory scheme with the express intent of stripping a citizen of their property.
The fact that people like Weaver and Mamdani and various progressive policy experts associated with the plan have left a years-long paper trail explicitly describing their intent to use the mechanisms of administrative law to deliberately bankrupt landlords in order to appropriate their property likely won’t help them in court.
But who knows how long these court cases could take and how much destruction may be wrought in the meantime.
I’m personally hopeful that much of this will be struck down in the end, but its arrival to even this point should be deeply disturbing to all Americans. This is yet another mask-off moment for the left, and one thing we know for sure is that they’re relentless.
Zohran Mamdani has been fully embraced by the mainstream Democratic Party; he’s no longer an outlier or aberration. He’s a national star—the avatar of the party’s youth wing, who is spoken about as “a young Obama.” And so this is where we are today—having a deadly serious discussion about whether the largest and most important city in the nation is going to be allowed to strip private property from its citizens and transfer it to the activist wing of a socialist political party that will use that seized wealth as a magic bank account to fund its continued power.
The DSA isn’t going away. It’s found success where other would-be leftist third parties have failed, because it realized that trying to be an actual third party was a dead end. Steps like fundraising and getting ballot access are nearly impossible for a true third party.
So it chose to simply take over the Democrats from the inside, and it’s been a spectacular success for the group. At this point, the Democratic Party is mostly the DSA, and vice versa. And we all need to come to terms with what that means for us in a city with a historic Democratic majority, where existing Republican political infrastructure is weak to nonexistent in large areas of the city. The Democrats aren’t going to get sane anytime soon. The idea of having no sane alternative to socialist government in a city of nearly 8 million people is terrifying.
And this is just the beginning. West Coast cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles have already experienced the ravages of government by left-wing radicals whose disdain for law enforcement and private property has turned once-glittering success stories into hellholes of addiction, homelessness, and crime, as their most notable revenue producers have stampeded for the exits.
Mamdani’s plan to turn New York into Moscow on the Hudson by seizing private property and turning it over to NGOs is likely to have even worse results—which will send even more of the city’s tax base fleeing for the exits.
We’ve seen this movie before. It’s called Escape from New York. Very soon, we’ll all be living it.
