Mamdani NYC Housing Plan Has Insiders Curious, Skeptical

Authored by Petr Svab via The Epoch Times,

The new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, has put forward a plan to make housing more affordable, including the government building more housing, freezing rents, and potentially taking over properties from landlords who fail to fix them up.

Affordability is indeed an issue worth addressing, several industry insiders told The Epoch Times. But they weren’t sure how Mamdani could succeed where previous administrations largely hadn’t.

“He’s proven to be really skilled at walking a fine line between opposing parties with different priorities and making each party feel like they’re being catered to,” said Devin Lynch, sales manager at Howard Hanna NYC, a real estate brokerage.

Lynch pointed to the housing ballot proposals that gave the mayor more power over approving housing projects. Many Mamdani voters opposed the measures, worrying they would strip local communities of a voice in the approval process, Lynch said.

“He couldn’t do that because he also courted the union vote, and they all needed the construction and the ‘Yes’ on those ballot proposals for their members. So he’s really threading the needle between these two different opposing goals in his constituency.”

There’s also much uncertainty about the specifics of Mamdani’s plan, given that he has just assumed office, said Michelle Griffith, a real estate agent at the New York City-based Douglas Elliman brokerage.

“We’re all trying to be as optimistic as possible. But the truth is, he’s been mayor for not even four weeks. So we still don’t know what is going to happen,” she said.

“Short term, there’s going to be a rent freeze, so that’s how he’s going to try to soften it for people immediately. And then long term, it’s building more affordable housing.”

Rent Freeze

There are significant caveats to Mamdani’s proposed rent freeze, according to Lynch.

The mayor doesn’t have direct authority to freeze rents city-wide. What he could do is to appoint members to the Rent Guidelines Board, which could freeze rents across rent-stabilized housing units. More than 40 percent of all rental units in the city, almost one million, are rent-stabilized. Their tenants pay rent that is on average about 25 percent below market.

Mamdani can appoint five members of the nine-member board this year, giving him a majority. Whatever decision the board makes would come into effect on Oct. 1 and only for leases that start on that date or later.

However, it’s not just tenants who are struggling with affordability. Costs for landlords have increased, too.

“You already have a lot of landlords that are really struggling to operate in the black,” said Seamus Nally, the chief executive at TurboTenant, a property management platform that caters to smaller-scale landlords.

Maintenance costs have increased by some 40 percent since 2019 and insurance costs skyrocketed by 150 percent, according to a report by the Furman Center, New York University’s housing think-tank.

Meanwhile, New York’s 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act not only made it nearly impossible to release rental units from rent-stabilization, but also capped how much landlords can hike rents, regardless of how much they need to invest in renovations.

Since then, net income from rent-stabilized units has dropped by some 12 percent, according to the Furman Center.

Mamdani’s rent freeze would add yet another squeeze.

“The landlords we’ve got an opportunity to talk to in the area, they’re very concerned,” Nally said.

There also appears to be a growing phenomenon in the city, where landlords leave vacated rent-stabilized apartments empty.

There are now estimated 50,000 to 100,000 such empty units in the city now, Lynch said.

Landlords used to be able to release such homes from rent-stabilization and thus have a prospect to recoup the substantial capital investment many require. In some cases, however, that led to abuse where landlords harassed tenants into leaving so they could hike rents. The 2019 law put a stop to that.

However, it now appears that some landlords are stuck with dilapidated apartments that are not worth fixing.

“You’re looking at non-compliant electric, non-compliant plumbing, potentially structural issues that need to be addressed. And that’s in addition to the standard stuff, like replacing floors, replacing appliances,” Lynch said.

Rather than sinking capital in such projects, some landlords bank on the building going up in price over time or that the law will eventually change, he said.

Government Intervention

Mamdani tapped Cea Weaver, a tenant activist, to head his Office to Protect Tenants. Weaver lobbied for the 2019 state law and has proposed that the city buy “buildings where the landlord is no longer interested in ownership.”

In January, Mamdani tried to delay the sale of one such distressed landlord, Pinnacle Group, which went bankrupt after its business model of hiking rents on rent-stabilized units unraveled. However, the sale went through, and Summit Properties USA obtained over 5,000 mostly rent-stabilized housing units for less than $90,000 per unit.

Lynch doubted whether Mamdani would actually pursue the course outlined by Weaver, as it would come with political responsibility for extensive tenant complaints.

It’s easy to be the “knight in shining armor” speaking on behalf of dissatisfied tenants, but “once you directly assume those problems and the realities of addressing the problems, you learn it’s much harder,” he said.

Public Construction

Another aspect of Mamdani’s plan involves substantially increasing the quantity of affordable housing paid for with public funds. He has promised 200,000 housing units in 10 years at the cost of $100 billion.

He proposed financing this by drawing on municipal bonds and hiking taxes on richer city dwellers. Both of those proposals, however, would require state approval.

Mamdani may get some support from Gov. Kathy Hochul, who may be eager to court his voters, Lynch said.

“That will be a big part of her voting base if she runs for reelection” later this year, he said.

Still, the city already carries a substantial debt burden with its interest expenses having risen by more than 20 percent since 2023.

Mamdani promised to expedite approvals of affordable housing projects, while at the same time promising to use all union labor, which would significantly limit capacity.

There’s still much uncertainty about how the plan will look and what aspects of it will materialize, Griffith said.

Mamdani promises that the public will pay, while the previous mayor, Eric Adams, promised the private sector would pay. And before that, Mayor Bill DeBlasio was “somewhat in the middle of those two,” she said.

“And where are we at now? We still have an affordability crisis,” Griffith said.

The next big question is what will happen with whatever housing Mamdani manages to build. The city’s public housing projects have been notorious for slow and inadequate maintenance, even as the city’s housing expenses nearly doubled since 2022.

Nally argued it may be more effective to make it easier for the residents, rather than the government, to build housing. He gave the example of Austin, Texas, where easing regulations helped to spur a housing construction boom.

“I’m skeptical that what will work is more government involvement when some of the petri dishes that we’ve seen work across the United States have actually used less government involvement,” he said.

Tyler Durden Tue, 02/03/2026 - 15:20
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Mamdani NYC Housing Plan Has Insiders Curious, Skeptical

The Circular Firing Squad: Staffers At CNN And CBS Denounce Efforts To Restore Balance

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

The decline of American mainstream media has long been obvious, with public trust and revenues plunging. Some companies are responding with the novel idea of restoring objectivity and neutrality to coverage. For years, news organizations have essentially written off half of the country.

However, as news organizations struggle to avoid even greater layoffs, staffers are fighting efforts to bring balance to their networks. That was evident last week in meetings at CNN and CBS where staffers continue to fight to retain their bias rather than their jobs.

CNN has long aired controversial hosts and guests who engaged in controversial statements on race and politics from the left. However, a meeting last week focused on the airing of one of the few conservatives who regularly appear on the network. As one staff member reportedly raised, there was outrage that Jennings is “allowed to exist” on the network. Even as CNN continues to languish in ratings, staffers want to fire one of the few remaining conservative voices on the network.

One of the key issues raised in the meeting was Jennings referring to “illegal aliens.” While CNN bars the term, it is used in federal law and federal cases, including by the United States Supreme Court.

In one exchange on Jan. 19, Jennings trades barbs with fellow panelist Cameron Kasky, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting. Kasky criticized Jennings for saying that ICE should be allowed to “chase down illegals” in Minnesota.

Jennings pushed back: “Who are you to tell me what I can and can’t say? I’ve never met you, brother. I can say whatever I want.  They’re illegal aliens. And that’s what the law calls them. Illegal aliens. That’s what I’m going to call them.”

Staff members reportedly denounced him as a “MAGA mouthpiece” and a “firebrand Trump loyalist” who “frequently gets into verbal spats with other CNN guests.”

It is a curious objection since these panels are supposed to be lively contrasts between guests.

The meeting is reminiscent of the effort at the Washington Post to get staffers to recognize the company’s declining position.

Robert Lewis, a British media executive who joined the Post earlier this year, reportedly got into a “heated exchange” with a staffer. Lewis explained that, while reporters were protesting measures to expand readership, the very survival of the paper was now at stake:

“We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around. We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”

The response from staffers was to call for the new editors to be fired. 

One staffer complained, “We now have four White men running three newsrooms.”

The Post has been buying out staff to avoid mass layoffs, but reporters were up in arms over the effort to turn the newspaper around.

The same dynamic is playing out at CBS, where Bari Weiss was brought in to turn around the network.

Weiss has been the subject of anonymous attacks since the company brought her in to reverse the decline in ratings.  Like Lewis, Weiss tried to explain that the staff is “not producing a product that enough people want” and that something has to change.

According to reports, Weiss was direct and candid with the staff. She stated:

“I need to start by acknowledging that there’s been a lot of noise around me taking this job. … I get it. I also get why, in the face of all this tumult, you might feel uncertain or skeptical about me or what I’m aiming to do here. I’m not going to stand up here today and ask you for your trust. I’m going to earn it, just like we have to do with our viewers.”

However, she was also clear that returning to past practices is not one of the options:

“So, here it is as plain as I can say it: I am here to make CBS News fit for purpose in the 21st century. Our industry has changed more in the last decade than in the last 150 years and the transformation isn’t over yet. Far from it. It’s almost impossible to conceive of how fast things will move from here…Back then, 30 million people watched Walter Cronkite every night. Some were on the left, some were on the right. But they trusted him. Through Cronkite, they inhabited a shared world with shared facts and a shared sense of reality. We can’t reverse time’s arrow. He had two competitors. We have two billion, give or take.”

She then made the same point as Lewis with a brutally honest and brilliantly blunt assessment:

“What we can do is what journalists do best: look at the world as it actually is. We have to start by looking honestly at ourselves. We are not producing a product that enough people want.”

Bravo.

Weiss concluded with this powerful line:

“I realize that none of these ideas are revolutionary on their own. What’s different now is that the stakes are so very high. And the hour is late. And we are in a position, with the support of all of the leadership of this company, to really make the change we need.”

Any rational person would hear these words and understand that Weiss is struggling to protect these staffers from themselves; struggling to keep their jobs. Instead, the response has been glacial from journalists, who believe they should be able to continue covering stories for one another and for an ever-shrinking audience on the left.

The fact is that we need CNN and CBS. The Framers understood the importance of an independent press. These companies helped revolutionize media and could be restored if the staff stopped obstructing reform efforts.

Instead, staff members continue to furiously saw at the branch upon which they sit.

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/02/2026 - 17:40
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The Circular Firing Squad: Staffers At CNN And CBS Denounce Efforts To Restore Balance

"F**k ICE!": Awards Season Exposes 'Spoiled, Entitled, Reality-Denying Tyrants'

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

The political grandstanding started way back in 1973 when the irascible Marlon Brando stayed home from the Academy Awards but sent an Apache princess, one Sacheen Littlefeather, to the podium to decline his award (Best Actor for The Godfather) on account of the 71-day standoff at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota between federal agents and Oglala Lakota activists who had seized the little town of Wounded Knee.

After that, political “statements” at awards ceremonies of all kinds became modish, then obligatory, and now in the age of Lefty-left Woke Jacobin activism, all you get is one denunciation after another of the monster who lives in their heads: ChrumpChrumpChrump. Cue the audience of fellow “stars” for the also obligatory standing-O, which is really a test to see if any among them dare not join in the hosannahs — so they can be anathemized.

You are seeing sheer ritual performance by performers, the highest perq of stardom being the approbation of their peers, fellow performers — nevermind the lowly gorks out in Flyover Land who “consume” the products of pop culture. This is cliché narcissism-on-parade, of course, and is now so completely institutionalized in the pop culture industries that seemingly all actors, musicians, dancers, mimes, comics, and literary figures must act-out an activist fantasy or face the pretty extreme punishment of being run out of their business.

It’s all fake and pathetic, and the more they do it, the more their various culture industries suffer — to the point now that feature production in Hollywood was down over 16-percent in 2025. It’s dying in a self-reinforcing doom-loop. The reason is no secret, but it is dangerous to speak of it: the management of our “sense-making” institutions — movies being an important one — has been taken over by women (and womanish men) acting out Cluster-B psychodrama fantasies obsessively attacking “the patriarchy” — by which they mean (but cannot say) civilization itself, the thing sedulously built by men.

The latest wrinkle in this tragic saga is the psychodrama over ICE, the men tasked with finding and deporting people who came into the country illegally. The Cluster-B women mis-direct their nurturing instincts to rescue this politically-designated “oppressed minority,” overlooking the fact that not a few of these illegal aliens turn out to be murderous psychopaths. Conveniently, too, the illegal aliens also happen to be a very useful device for the Democratic Party to pad the census and provide illicit votes, all to keep the party in power and sustain its rackets.

President Trump completes the doom-loop circle because he is the mythic figure who prompts all the anxiety behind the “mass formation” phenomenon we are witnessing. Mr. Trump is patriarchy-in-action, so he must be destroyed by the goddess-heroines of show business. The goddess-heroines seem to believe they are ushering-in a Utopia of Nurture in which no oppressed minority will be left behind. That fantasy happens to intersect with the leveling fantasies of Karl Marx and his apostles, the mentors of the obscenely-rich denizens of Hollywood so eager to abolish obscene riches. So, you see how either stupid, or mentally-ill, or both, the people in show business can be.

Last night’s awards extravaganza was the Grammys, for music.

The anti-ICE ritual flared in full effulgence with Song of the Year winner Billie Eilish - costumed not to look as a woman but rather like a piece of luggage - bathed in applause for heroically muttering, “Fuck ICE,” after picking up her little golden gramophone statuette. Perfect.

Few musicians can make a dime anymore, and a very few of those few make billions while the rest starve. The record album was the supreme art-form of my generation, and it is long gone. Record labels don’t continue to exist when there are no records. Musical acts don’t get contracts and don’t get paid. Nobody listens to FM radio anymore and so nobody is introduced to new musical talent. Live music on the small club scale is dying because the drinks cost too much. Does anyone still have a quaint old home stereo, a gigantic wall-of-sound, with four-foot-high speakers? All I’ve got is a seven-inch Bluetooth speaker.

The lively arts are dying and the remaining lively artists are assisting with the suicide.

Not far in the future, the motion picture might be a dead letter. Technology marches on.

Immersion in human experience depicted on a silver screen, using the techniques of dramaturgy, will be supplanted, we’re told, by video games that put you immersively into “a world” where a story is spinning that you can now act-out a role in.

You might see how that would entice an awful lot of people to check-out of reality altogether — and if that happens, you might well ask: who is left to run civilization?

The answer you get will be: artificial intelligence, AI. Oh, great.

But then, is it running civilization for all those pathetic people losing themselves in immersive video games? Or just for AI itself? And where does that take the human race?

Personally, I don’t expect it to work out that way. If I were disposed to investing money in the entertainment business, I’d build a theater for puppet shows.

That’s the level our civilization-destroying antics are taking us to, with the Democratic Party leading the way.

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/02/2026 - 16:20
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"F**k ICE!": Awards Season Exposes 'Spoiled, Entitled, Reality-Denying Tyrants'

Hollywood Celebrities Are Losing Their Minds And Calling For "Revolution"

As the information age barrels forward the age of the celebrity is coming to a close.  Largely because Hollywood elites do not understand how to navigate social media and their true personalities always bubble to the surface.  With no agents or managers to filter their impulsive opinions, narcissistic celebrities readily expose themselves and their stupidity.  

The glamour and mystic of the entertainment world is dead, and celebrities killed it.

One unexpected consequence of the decline of Hollywood is that the apparatus of adult pretenders (actors) is starting to go dangerously insane.  Big budget movies are losing hundreds of millions at the box office and new projects are in steep decline.  Top actors are stooping to doing TV commercials to get paid, something most of them would have sneered at a decade ago.  Acting royalty of the 90s and early 2000s are hitting the wall and getting too old to play the parts they want to play.  Fresh younger actors with actual talent are rare.     

The empire of degenerates is slowly fading into irrelevancy and the celebrity cult is desperately clinging to their delusions of grandeur.  Yes, they've always been a little crazy, but something new is happening. 

Breaking Bad Star Giancarlo Esposito: 'Time for a Revolution' — Some Will Dıe, But the Rest of Us Survive

Somebody has been playing make believe too long and needs a reality check pic.twitter.com/QrASaImrFz

— TaraBull (@TaraBull) January 29, 2026

The return of conservative and nationalist ideals has spurred widespread American opposition to the agenda of multiculturalism.  Multiculturalism is the key to the progressive strategy for deconstructing western civilization and replacing it with a relativistic socialist framework.  For leftists, mass deportations represent a reversal of political gains that took them decades to achieve.  This is why stopping ICE operations is absolutely the hill that leftists are willing to die on.

Every element of the leftist Utopian vision relies on the erasure of borders and the destruction of western principles through unchecked third world immigration. 

Actors and directors and producers have long tried to use their "platform" to influence the masses politically, but now they are calling for blood in the streets, violent revolution, making lists of conservative neighbors "just in case" and pretending as if they are rebel leaders fighting for the downtrodden. 

Dear @kathygriffin,
You have lost your mind and are going to get people hurt.

Why don’t you go out to Minnesota yourself and protest?

God forbid one of your dozens of fans listens to you and loses their life, you deserve to be held accountable. pic.twitter.com/Fd4f3mo8oS

— Chrissie Mayr🇺🇸 (@ChrissieMayr) January 30, 2026

Others are fantasizing about revenge, including the rise of a new Democrat regime in which their conservative opponents are rounded up and imprisoned for nothing more than being conservative.  

Do we think Newsom’s DOJ will start with the Megyn Kelly and Matt Walsh types or just make it more efficient by raiding Fox and arresting everyone?

— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) January 30, 2026

When activists commit crimes and are held accountable for their actions, the progressive hive loses its collective mind.  It's important to understand that these people believe that they can do whatever they want as long as their motivations are deemed ideologically pure. 

They believe that if they break the law while "exercising free speech" then they are protected from consequences. They also cannot accept the fact that they do not represent the majority of the country.  They continue to pretend as if they didn't just lose an election, and that most of the country avidly supports deportations.

pic.twitter.com/sC9SEYlrIR

— Ben Stiller (@BenStiller) January 30, 2026

In truth, you will never see celebrities risking their lives for anything they claim to believe in.  Their posturing is purely performative.  But they could very well inspire some useful idiots to go out and commit terrible crimes. They claim it's all in the name of "freedom", but what kind of freedom?  Keep in mind, these are the same people that joyfully attempted to burn the Bill of Rights to the ground under the Biden Administration - Now they are suddenly patriots?

The Hollywood celebs are back telling us to be mad at ICE

I saw it so now you have to pic.twitter.com/qTUHPJZGrn

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 30, 2026

Narcissists are like suicide bombers; if they discover they are losing they will try to take everyone else down with them.  Hollywood activists used to be considered "cute" but now the mask is fully torn away.  These are not good and reasonable people, they are lunatics who are used to running the asylum.  They can't handle the idea that their celebrity no longer purchases power, so they are scratching and scraping for a chance to remain in the limelight, no matter the cost.

Tyler Durden Sun, 02/01/2026 - 20:25
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Hollywood Celebrities Are Losing Their Minds And Calling For "Revolution"

Isaacman: NASA Aims To Build 'Martian Outpost' On Mars With Nuclear Propulsion

Authored by T.J. Muscaro via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced his agency’s commitment to developing a nuclear propulsion system for missions to Mars within the next three years.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman (L) speaks at a press conference at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on Jan. 17, 2026. (T.J. Muscaro/The Epoch Times).

“Before the end of @POTUS‘ term, @NASA will lay the foundation of a ’transcontinental railroad' to Mars,” Isaacman wrote on X on Jan. 30. “By utilizing nuclear electric propulsion, our nation will have the tools necessary to establish a Martian outpost and maintain American superiority in deep space.”

The administrator shared a clip from a Jan. 30 appearance on Fox News in which he explained that while NASA continues its work to put boots back on the moon, it will also launch its first nuclear power and propulsion rocket by the end of President Donald Trump’s term.

“That’s going to essentially almost establish the transcontinental railroad to Mars,” he said. “It’s how you efficiently move lots of mass to Mars. So it’s not necessarily always the fastest way to get there, but it gives you the tools to build out potentially a Martian outpost, certainly to mine and refine propellant on Mars, which is what you’re going to need to bring your astronauts back home.”

He explained that America would have the capability to send astronauts to Mars, but the hard part was bringing them back. Nuclear power and propulsion solved that problem.

Meanwhile, Isaacman reaffirmed that the Artemis program would continue to push forward the goal of the president’s national space policy to not just land humans back on the moon, but to construct a lunar base in order to stay and fulfill its scientific, economic, and strategic potential.

That base, he said, will involve a nuclear power plant, as well as mining operations, and refining Helium 3, which is considered to be the best fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, and plan to do it before communist China’s plan to do so by 2030.

“The Chinese said they’re going to do it,” Isaacman said of a nuclear reactor on the moon, “We’re going to do it first.”

But all of these plans still start with the mission whose rocket stands at Launch Complex 39-B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida: Artemis II. That 10-day mission, which will carry humans around the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, and could do so as early as Feb. 8, awaits the results of a crucial dress rehearsal of launch day conditions set for Feb. 2.

“America’s mission to the Moon won’t end with a handful of landings,” Isaacman said on X. ”We will undertake repeatable and affordable missions that expand our presence across the lunar surface, fulfilling a 35-year promise to the American taxpayer.”

Tyler Durden Sun, 02/01/2026 - 18:40
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Isaacman: NASA Aims To Build 'Martian Outpost' On Mars With Nuclear Propulsion