Evictions are ‘violence’ now?
Evictions are ‘violence’ now?
F or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his draconian housing dictates, the pain is the point.
If you haven’t heard, the landlord is Public Enemy No. 1, profiting off innocent city dwellers who are just trying to keep a roof over their heads. The rhetoric out of the administration and its allies suggests that those who own buildings and rent them out to willing residents do not have any right to ensure the bargain is upheld. Landlords are the bogeymen of the hour — and they should be worried. The demagoguery is getting more reckless.
“Our city is turning the corner on tenant power,” one anti-landlord activist said at a recent Mamdani press conference. “When we organize, we win results. The Mamdani administration is emboldening us so that we no longer tolerate the violence of evictions as a matter of business as usual. My landlord owns dozens of buildings, but he is not a steward of the public trust.”
We’ll get to the use of the word “violence” momentarily. But first, “steward.” Stewardship is leaving something better than you found it. By owning and maintaining a property, a landlord is providing value to tenants and the surrounding neighborhood. If that landlord is unresponsive to tenant concerns or fails to make necessary repairs to the building, the tenant can choose not to renew the lease after it expires. Contrast a landlord’s incentive to invest in a building’s upkeep and beautification with the government’s. That is, the government has no incentive. For all the moral preening about good stewardship, it’s not like the government’s housing projects are in immaculate condition — quite the opposite.
In New York City, government-owned housing — predominantly managed by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) — is in a state of woeful disrepair. About 81 percent of public housing residents require immediate apartment fixes, with the most common issues being broken plaster, peeling paint, mold, and vermin. How is that good stewardship?
What those waging war on landlords seem to forget is that we’re talking about a contractual relationship. Both parties agreed to certain terms with certain deliverables, due dates, and exceptions and signed their names on the dotted line to codify them.
Slowly but surely, Mamdani is punishing and demoralizing landlords to the point where some will have to just throw in the towel. Or, to stay afloat, they’ll pass their regulatory burdens onto tenants either by raising rents or, for rent-stabilized units, cutting amenities or neglecting upkeep. Tenants then will have more cause to blame the landlord, in turn fueling Mamdani’s crusade. It will be a vicious cycle, and that is by design.
Following a rent freeze for rent-stabilized apartments, the latest proposal backed by the mayor would force New York City landlords to pay for tenant credit checks, prohibiting owners from charging prospective tenants for credit reports.
The implication is clear: Landlords are heartless to ask applicants to prove they can pay to live in their building. It’s a disincentive to screen for risk. Only a politician who has never held a real job in the private sector would believe companies should be restricted from doing due diligence.
Meanwhile, for someone to say that eviction is “violence” is to expose the astounding ignorance inherent in this approach to housing. Evictions happen because a tenant reneges on his or her end of the agreement, either by failing to pay the promised rent, which the landlord needs to stay in business, or by causing problems in the building that threaten the landlord’s income from other tenants. It is baffling that many leftists seem to grasp that buying a product at a store is a valid transaction but increasingly view renting a property as . . . something else. Then again, casual shoplifting or “microlooting” has been justified by the socialists capturing the Democratic Party.
There’s a reason why philosopher John Locke, whom the Framers relied on as they wrote our founding documents, said the most important natural rights are “life, liberty, and property.” Great destruction has been inflicted during left-wing riots in recent years, whether 2020’s disorder over George Floyd’s death or the 2025 Los Angeles protests against ICE. That violence doesn’t just hurt the business owner; it hurts those who patronize the business. It hurts society.
As the Minneapolis unrest broke out after Floyd’s death, a disabled woman named Stephanie went viral for her heartfelt plea for the chaos to stop: “These people are tearing up our livelihood. This is the only place I could go to shop, and now I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t have any way to get there.”
The left’s use of the emotionally charged word “violence” to describe a landlord’s enforcing a contract is, of course, intentional. Leftists are creating the permission structure for resistance. They are inviting agitation and proportional violence to overthrow the allegedly oppressive regime of landlords operating their businesses. New Yorkers, beware.