New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood before a crowd of tenant advocates last week and promised to seize buildings from "negligent" landlords and hand them over to nonprofits, land trusts, and tenants themselves. He called the initiative "Fix the City." But the programs he plans to use are not new. They date back decades, and the city's own records show they have repeatedly failed.
The mayor's housing plan rests on three main pillars: expanding the use of Program 7A, which lets a housing court judge appoint a nonprofit to manage a building seized from a bad landlord; ramping up affordable housing cooperatives under the city's Housing Development Fund Corporation framework; and implementing the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, which gives nonprofits first right to buy distressed properties. A fourth element, a public-private trust for the New York City Housing Authority, rounds out the package.
Every one of these mechanisms already exists. And every one of them carries a track record that should give taxpayers serious pause.
Roughly 1,100 affordable co-ops currently operate across New York City. Last year, state Attorney General Letitia James announced an investigation into those cooperatives, and found that nearly all of them were considered "high risk." Buildings had fallen behind on rent collection, stopped making tax payments, piled up debt, and racked up code violations.
In September 2025, James and then-Mayor Eric Adams rolled out a $750,000 bailout for those same cooperatives. Neither the Attorney General's office nor the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development would tell the New York Post how those funds were distributed. HPD did not respond to questions at all.
That silence is telling. Mamdani now wants to expand the very model that required emergency intervention less than a year ago.
A former insider at HPD offered a blunt assessment of why tenant-ownership schemes keep falling short:
"The city has long tried to help tenants become owners of buildings, but tenants aren't necessarily equipped to run the building. You need someone to be a good bookkeeper and to collect rent from the neighbors. It's really hard to do and hard to do well."
That observation is not ideological. It is practical. Collecting rent from your neighbors, managing repairs, keeping the books, these are tasks that trip up even experienced property managers. Expecting tenants to absorb them overnight, with minimal support, is not empowerment. It is a setup for the next bailout.
The mayor's plan leans heavily on nonprofits to serve as the "responsible stewards" who would replace private landlords. But the nonprofit affordable-housing sector is itself in financial distress. A February report from the Association of Neighborhood Housing and Development found that 290,000 of the city's subsidized, nonprofit-run buildings are financially underwater.
The report's language was stark:
"Rising cost, stagnant revenues and unpredictable federal support have created conditions where even mission-driven nonprofits, those that rebuilt neighborhoods when the private market walked away, can no longer sustain their portfolios without intervention."
ANHD called for a massive government bailout of the nonprofit housing industry. So the organizations Mamdani wants to hand more buildings to are themselves begging for a lifeline. The math does not add up, unless the plan is simply to shift the cost to taxpayers.
Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, said exactly that. He called Mamdani's proposals "flailing solutions that don't meet the moment" and warned that the financial burden would land squarely on the public:
"Nonprofits and affordable co-ops are screaming from their crumbling rooftops that the rents don't cover costs. The city should crack down on bad actors but changing ownership simply moves the financial burden to taxpayers, permanently."
Burgos added: "We can't afford it today and we won't be able to afford that tomorrow."
Mamdani framed his initiative as a crackdown on the worst landlords. At his news conference, he declared:
"When necessary, we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers. And for buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards. Stewards that include community land trusts, nonprofits or even the tenants themselves."
Strong words. But when the New York Post pressed City Hall on what "chronically negligent" actually means, what threshold a landlord must cross before the city moves to strip the property, Mamdani's office could not define the term. That is not a minor detail. It is the entire legal foundation of the plan. A government that cannot define the trigger for seizing private property is a government asking for unchecked discretion.
The mayor's record on housing policy already includes a pattern of bold announcements followed by retreats. His property tax hike proposal drew fierce taxpayer backlash and had to be scaled back.
Building owners noticed the pattern. Humberto Lopes, a 61-year-old property owner and member of the recently formed Gotham Housing Alliance, pointed to the city's own public housing system as evidence that government stewardship is no guarantee of quality. Referring to NYCHA, Lopes said: "Why don't you start with them first."
NYCHA's decades of mismanagement, lead paint, mold, broken elevators, heating failures, are well documented. Mamdani's answer is a public-private trust for the authority. But as a state lawmaker, he opposed that very mechanism. The reversal is notable, though the mayor has not explained what changed his mind.
The Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, approved by the City Council last year, gives nonprofits first right to buy distressed buildings before they hit the open market. Former Mayor Adams vetoed the measure. Mamdani now plans to implement it.
On paper, COPA sounds reasonable, give community organizations a shot at keeping buildings affordable. In practice, it hands purchasing priority to the same nonprofit sector that ANHD says cannot sustain its current portfolio. Giving financially distressed organizations the first crack at buying more distressed buildings is not a housing strategy. It is a recipe for more taxpayer-funded rescues.
Approximately 70 percent of New York City residents are renters. The housing crisis is real, and the frustration of tenants living in neglected buildings is legitimate. No one defends a landlord who lets a building rot. But the question is whether Mamdani's plan would actually fix anything, or whether it simply recycles failed approaches under a new brand name.
The broader arc of Mamdani's tenure suggests a mayor drawn to sweeping ideological gestures that buckle on contact with fiscal reality. His tax proposals have drawn sharp criticism from business leaders who warn that punitive policies will accelerate capital flight from the city.
The programs Mamdani unveiled last week trace their roots to the 1970s. For half a century, the city has experimented with transferring buildings from private owners to tenants, nonprofits, and cooperatives. The results speak for themselves: co-ops that needed emergency bailouts, nonprofits that cannot cover operating costs, and a public housing authority so dysfunctional that the federal government placed it under a monitor.
Observers who have followed Mamdani's first months in office will recognize the rhythm. Grand announcements, progressive applause lines, and then the quiet collision with reality. His first 100 days produced a trail of unmet promises on housing and homelessness.
Critics have not been shy. Bill Maher publicly challenged the ideological assumptions behind Mamdani's approach to property and government power. The mayor's "Tax the Rich" video drew fierce backlash from major investors, forcing him to seek a conciliatory meeting with billionaire Ken Griffin.
Burgos, the apartment association chief, framed the core problem simply: rents in affordable buildings do not cover costs. No amount of ownership reshuffling changes that equation. Someone pays the difference. Under Mamdani's plan, that someone is the taxpayer.
The mayor could not define what makes a landlord "chronically negligent." His office could not explain how the last round of bailout money was spent. The nonprofits he wants to empower say they are going under. And the cooperative model he wants to expand just had nearly every single participant flagged as high risk.
When a politician repackages fifty years of failure and calls it a fix, the only thing getting transferred is the bill.
