De Blasio Promises to Seize Property from Landlords

New York’s communist mayor Bill de Blasio has offered world class healthcare to anyone who shows up, from anywhere in the world, regardless of their ability to pay and regardless of whether they are in the country legally. This obviously entails a stratospheric cost. How will he pay for it? The same way communists pay for everything — by seizing other people’s property. De Blasio embraces theft, not only to raise funds, but to advance socialism more directly by confiscating property from landlords:

“When a landlord tries to push out a tenant by making their home unlivable, a team of inspectors and law enforcement agents will be on the ground in time to stop it,” the mayor said. If fines and penalties don’t do the trick, then “we will seize their buildings, and we will put them in the hands of a community nonprofit that will treat tenants with the respect they deserve,” he added.

To find allegedly misbehaving landlords to demonize and loot, de Blasio has created an ominous new agency called the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. NYC already has an Office of the Tenant Advocate. But there could never be enough government agencies to suit an authoritarian moonbat.

According to the executive order that created it, the new agency…

…will serve as a “central resource for tenants, social service agencies, advocacy organizations, legal services providers, landlords and management companies of affordable housing, and others on tenant issues,” including “tenant harassment.”

De Blasio’s base regards housing as a human right, just like healthcare. “Tenant harassment” will come to mean asking tenants to pay their rent.

Making it increasingly unprofitable if not impossible to be a landlord in NYC will not improve the supply of housing. This is not a bug but a feature. The higher Big Government drives rent, the easier it is to demonize landlords and justify authoritarian measures.

By the way, who is the worst landlord in all of New York?

In December, then-NYC Public Advocate Letitia James, who’s since been sworn in as attorney general of New York State, put the city’s own housing authority at the top of her “2018 NYC Landlord Watchlist.”

If NYC’s political trajectory continues on its current descent, there will soon be only one landlord in the rotting Big Apple: the New York City Housing Authority.

On a tip from Varla.

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