Photo by Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
New York City's mayor wants to take private properties and transfer their ownership to nonprofits. The city's recent history shows why that's a terrible idea.
Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that he will take “aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers,” transferring buildings “that have suffered chronic neglect” from bad landlords to “responsible stewards” — a coalition of nonprofits and tenant groups aligned with his base.
He neglected to mention that, five decades ago, New York City tried something very similar, taking possession of abandoned properties and eventually turning many of them over to nonprofits. Public control didn’t make them viable; instead, the city became the state’s largest slumlord.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Pirate Wires (paywall)
______________________
John Ketcham is a legal policy fellow and director of Cities at the Manhattan Institute.