Housing hypocrites Cuomo, Mamdani put politics over wisdom

Another New York City mayoral election, same old campaign strategies: Bash landlords, politicize housing promises, rinse and repeat.

Small building owners are tired of politicians like Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo targeting the hard-working New Yorkers who provide the bulk of our city’s affordable housing — in an environment where government caps our rental income, but not our operating expenses.

The ignorant housing rhetoric of trust-fund baby Mamdani proves he lacks any understanding that a four-year rent freeze would trigger affordable-housing Armageddon.

But shouldn’t we expect Cuomo to acknowledge the economic distress his politics created for small rent-stabilized building owners?

Socialist Mamdani, as Cuomo “uncovered,” lives in a rent-stabilized apartment, despite his six-figure income and family wealth.

Hardly a new revelation: It’s been known for years that well-off politicians like Assembly Housing Committee Chair Linda Rosenthal, state Sens. Zellnor Myrie, Robert Jackson, Jessica Ramos, Kevin Parker and Gustavo Rivera, and City Councilman Keith Powers, to name a few, have occupied cheaper rent-stabilized apartments that would better serve the financially struggling families for whom they supposedly advocate. 

Talk about hypocrisy.

Cuomo promises to enact “Zohran’s Law” to means-test the income of everyone living in a rent-stabilized apartment.

That’s rich coming from someone who could’ve tackled this problem when he was our state’s governor.

Cuomo completely ignored property owners’ proposals for means-testing that would get wealthy tenants to pay their fair share.

We have long recognized the inequity of this broken system, with tens of thousands of six-figure-income tenants — bankers, authors, art collectors and college professors, many of whom own getaway homes in the Hamptons and tony upstate enclaves — occupying rent-stabilized apartments. 

Now that they’ve been exposed, the advocates are leaping to politicians’ defense, crying that a $150,000 income doesn’t make them well-off.

Tell that to their constituents living on the fringes of poverty and working two jobs for less than a third of that.

But there’s plenty that the next mayor can do to right the housing ship.

First off, he must push Albany to meaningfully reform the Cuomo-era laws that helped create the mess small building owners are in today.

The Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, which Cuomo signed into law, has us walking a fine line between survival and foreclosure.

At this moment, over 50,000 rent-stabilized apartments across the five boroughs are sitting empty.

That’s because of the disastrous effects of Cuomo’s HSTPA, which effectively neutered older rent-stabilized housing stock’s ability to survive.

It gutted the program that helped owners upgrade apartments — which by law they must do before putting them back on the market — when existing tenants move out.

It also eliminated the vacancy increase that owners were formerly allowed to charge new occupants.

Lifting or easing these economic restrictions would give owners the financial wherewithal to rehabilitate and upgrade their empty apartments, putting 50,000-plus affordable units back on the market within months, not years or decades.

That would do far more good than Mamdani’s plan to freeze stabilized rents for the next four years, which would force further deterioration of crumbling units and drive more property owners into foreclosure.

Building our way out of the city’s housing-affordability crisis is just another campaign pipe dream — a vow made in every mayoral election cycle that no one ever tracks.

Plans for new construction must of course be on the drawing board, but in the meantime, an effective and quicker solution — HSTPA reform — is staring politicians right in the face.

In addition, property-tax reform is a must for New York’s next mayor.  

The last two administrations didn’t make good on their promises to unravel the mysterious and inequitable black box of property taxes.

New construction can get special property-tax abatements, and nonprofit housing gets tax subsidies.

But small property owners have been victimized for decades by an inscrutable system that has them paying higher rates than high-wealth neighborhoods.

If our next mayor isn’t willing to put politics aside, more and more rent-stabilized buildings will fall into abandonment and foreclosure, and the city’s affordable housing infrastructure will completely collapse.

But going by the top two candidates’ wrongheaded non-solutions, it seems our next mayor won’t even care.

Ann Korchak is board president of the Small Property Owners of New York, where Lincoln Eccles serves as board vice president.