Posted on 08/28/2026 3:08:11 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Housing in New York City has become painfully unaffordable.
In June 2026, renters paid an average of $5,408 for a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, while even the average studio reached $4,014. It isn't difficult to understand why young New Yorkers are frustrated, or why socialism is starting to sound appealing.
Underneath that anger is a very real problem. Young New Yorkers aren't wrong for being frustrated. Housing has become unaffordable, and they are right to demand better solutions. But is socialism the answer?
New York’s democratic socialist movement approaches housing through the same basic class-struggle lens Karl Marx used to understand society. Marx divided society into opposing economic classes, with one benefiting from the exploitation of the other. In today’s housing debate, this framework means: the landlord profits, the tenant struggles, and therefore the landlord is exploiting the tenant.
Mamdani says the “root cause” of neglect and disrepair in housing is “the relentless drive for profit.” His administration advocates taking housing out of the hands of exploitative landlords and putting more power into the hands of tenants.
But viewing housing through this framework creates a major blind spot. Tenants and landlords aren't opposing classes whose interests must always come at the expense of one another. They participate in the same housing market and ultimately need each other. Renters need people willing to provide, maintain, and invest in housing, while landlords need people willing to rent.
Affordability doesn't come from using government power to fight the side deemed an exploiter. It comes from a housing market where more people can provide housing, more apartments are available….
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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That’s the part socialism gets backwards. You cannot make something abundant and available by making it harder to provide. And you cannot solve a shortage by controlling an already scarce supply.
If Young New Yorkers want affordable housing, they will never get there through policies that create even more scarcity.
Voting for someone with Mamdani’s policies only exacerbates the problem.
No problem for Mamdani.
By the time the consequences are felt, he’ll have moved on politically and in the party.
People like him don’t ever have to look at the big stinky pile they leave behind.
ya know... anymore, coming here every day, several times a day, it’s like playing Jenga. Just waiting for that story that informs us the ticking time bomb just went off!! Watch the whole stack of blocks come down!!
Maybe we’ll see it before our sands of the hourglass run out!!
Arrest all landlords!
Arrest all investors!
They are wreckers.
Wreckers: Stalin’s term for anyone who stood in the way of the communist utopia.
Stalin shot his wreckers. Mamdani is not advocating that.
Not yet, anyway.
.
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