What People Hear When Mamdani Slams “Corporate Landlords”

Muslims like Mayor Zohran Mamdani are rightfully outraged when American politicians portray them as terrorists. It is the worst kind of demagoguery.

Show me any population of 2 billion without some nut jobs. To associate Islam with terrorism is unfair and disgusting.

Now let’s look at what Mamdani said about landlords in his Fourth of July speech:

“We see America in corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model. We see it too in the father who tucks his children into bed beneath a ceiling stained with leaks…”

So, owners profit by forcing kids to live in filthy buildings.

Mamdani would say he’s calling attention to a problem, and that he didn’t claim all landlords’ businesses are based on tenants’ suffering.

That’s how a politician would answer if criticized for tarring Islam. “I didn’t say all Muslims were terrorists.”

But you know, that’s what people hear. And that is why demagogues say it — about Muslims, landlords, immigrants or any convenient target.

“Painting any industry with this broad of a brush is pretty gross,” Matthew Forrest Cox, founder of New York-based Saucetown Properties, commented on LinkedIn. “It’s the typical populist crap that’s sadly very effective.”

It resonates with people who need a scapegoat for their problems and motivation to vote. President Donald Trump used this unfortunate strategy when he launched his 2016 presidential campaign:

“When Mexico, meaning the Mexican government, sends its people … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

No one remembers Trump saying “some, I assume, are good people.” Just like no one recalls Mamdani saying some landlords are good, which he did at least once — not during his July 4 speech, though. In an unpublicized response to a question, the mayor cited his old landlord in Queens.

Mamdani’s Independence Day shot at landlords did not go unnoticed by the real estate industry.

“As we celebrate 250 years of independence, that our Mayor felt it necessary to, once again, demonize the real estate industry, was an unnecessary and divisive moment,” longtime landlord attorney Sherwin Belkin posted on LinkedIn.

“It’s also just blatantly false. No landlord pursues ‘negligence’ in their business plan,” added Richard Cadena Jr., a project underwriter and Mamdani supporter.

“Real estate owners basically just have an asset that produces income,” Cadena explained. “They are not going to willingly let that asset deteriorate, but it will if extraordinary conditions arise (such as ill-conceived policies by local politicians with no expertise on the subject).”

Like a rent freeze?

Housing attorney Matthew Berman offered a measured defense of Mamdani in a reply to Cardena. “OK, but there are plenty of landlords who use fraud as a business plan when it comes to rent-stabilized and affordable housing,” he wrote.

Cardena countered, “There are plenty of tenants that defraud their landlords as well; a whole group shouldn’t be demonized because of a subset of bad actors.”

Mamdani surely gets this. He speaks often about discrimination against Muslims. Yet he smears landlords using the same technique as those who disparage Islam.

Incidentally, there’s no evidence that “corporate” landlords are any worse than individual ones. Tenant organizers, like Mamdani’s own Rasputin, Cea Weaver, have even said foreclosures would bring in big, professional landlords preferable to the individual owners they deal with.

If the mayor wants to call out bad landlords, he should do so by name — and prove they collect enough rent to maintain their properties but hoard it instead.

Instead he points to deceptive return-on-investment data to claim rent-stabilized building owners are awash in profits. Another rhetorical tactic.

Mamdani knows the major media will never explain that the Rent Guidelines Board’s ROI figure excludes major expenses like mortgage payments and new roofs, boilers and facades.

Systemwide ROI is also inflated by luxury, market-rate buildings. Meanwhile, fully rent-stabilized buildings are being hammered into insolvency by the 2019 rent law, repeated rent cuts and glacial housing courts. In the Bronx, ROI was negative last year.

Mamdani and Trump are talented politicians. When they say what they say, they know exactly what they’re doing.

At this point, Trump isn’t going to change, but Mamdani still could.

In the meantime, New Yorkers would be wise to heed the words of Vital City managing editor Josh Greenman.

“Beware of simple narratives,” he wrote. “The ‘tale of two cities’ rhetoric of progressives and the ‘all the rich people will leave’ fears of conservatives don’t adequately represent [the city’s] complicated economic realities.”