De Blasio Orders Confiscation of Private Property from New Yorkers Who Don't 'Respect' Residents
Barack Obama’s infamous “you didn’t build that” line defined his presidency. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio may have just one-upped him with an alarming message to residents: You don’t own that.
During a Thursday speech called the “state of the city” address, the liberal mayor unveiled a new plan that threatens to seize privately-owned property and hand it over to “community nonprofits” if the owners don’t do what the city government says.
The executive order is being billed as a way to punish bad landlords, but it seems to be only a few steps away from outright socialism.
The mayor “announced he wants to take action against landlords who try to force tenants out by making the property unliveable,” Fox News reported. “He said that in the event the government intervenes, the buildings would then be controlled by a ‘community nonprofit.'”
In basic terms, if the city decides that a building owned by a landlord isn’t being managed the way bureaucrats want, the government will impose a series of sanctions all the way up to taking the privately-owned property by force.
“If the fines and the penalties don’t cut it, 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,” de Blasio declared, according to The New York Daily News.
There are some big problems with this plan. Who determines which properties are acceptable, and what prevents the city from constantly changing the definition to seize whatever it wants?
“My first reaction was: Is this communist Cuba?” state Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis said.
“I can say that as a daughter of Cuban refugees who fled Castro’s Cuba in 1959, this is what happened to her family, she had her home taken, my grandfather had his gas station taken.
“This is extreme even for Mayor de Blasio, because we know that he has socialist leanings, but this is straight communism and I think it’s very scary to America-loving, democracy-loving people,” Malliotakis added.
There’s also the reality of unintended consequences. While de Blasio is acting as if threatening landlords unless they pour money into building improvements will benefit residents, it’s almost guaranteed that this will raise the cost of living in the already-expensive city.
The New York metro area is already in the top five most expensive places to live, according to USA Today. Average monthly housing costs for a family of four are close to $1,800 — and that’s before considering any other expenses like food or transportation.
As with constantly-rising minimum wage proposals, the left never stops to think about the downstream consequences of their actions.
Just as raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour would require that the money come from somewhere — with expenses inevitably passed on to employees or end customers — the same would happen by forcing building owners to make expensive improvements or lose their own property.
De Blasio hasn’t even tried to hide the fact that he wants government bureaucrats to control … well, just about everything.
“I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be,” he said during an interview with New York Magazine.
The liberal mayor is openly bragging about his socialism.
“I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs,” de Blasio continued.
“Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed,” he said. “And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents.”
“That’s a world I’d love to see,” he declared, before endorsing “a very, very powerful government.”
What is going on with the left’s flirtation with communist thinking? First Bernie Sanders, then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and now de Blasio. Maybe it’s time they booked a one-way ticket to Venezuela so they can see just how well their Marxist views work in the real world.
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