All Forum Posts by: Ruth C.

I agree with you that we need to blame Reaganonics for the mess that everyone is in right now. But I disagree with the UBI for that very same reason. If we're living in a Reaganomics/neoliberal economy, then a UBI makes no sense. All that would happen with a UBI in the US is that the oligarchs would continue to be bailed out and get tax breaks while the ever-shrinking middle class would be footing the bill for all of it. 

You're misconstruing my parents' financial situation to make a point that has nothing to do with the one I was making. 

I didn't say that my parents passed savings onto tenants at the expense of reserves. My parents were fiscally responsible enough to have enough money to build up healthy reserves and pass savings onto tenants. They had, in other words, plenty of money to go around and to keep on hand in case of emergency or some other issue.

The point I was making is that the way NYC laws work, the entire thing is based on giving deadbeats every concession in the book to not pay rent and cause thousands of dollars of damages.The logic behind this is that if a landlord carefully built up reserves the way they're supposed to, it's not that he's financially prudent; it's that he's sitting on ill-gotten "piles of cash" that he "leeched" off tenants...or that if he didn't, he's Scrooge McDuck and therefore it's okay to let deadbeats walk again and again and again because he has "plenty of money" to be able to write off losses over and over again. 

 With laws being that aggressive in places like NYC to where even financially prudent landlords are losing money, I don't think it's fair to write off landlords in cities like this as being fiscally irresponsible. Walk a mile in the shoes of small landlords in NYC where your business is micro-managed based on the logic that if you even make so much as a penny over your overhead, this is "profit" that you "leeched" off a tenant (or in the minds of antisemites, "chiseled" from them).

@Nick Rutkowski:

There's nothing remotely "liberal" about these states. They're all run by neoliberals, people who are only acting in the best interests of their elitist donors. In the case of NY and CA, they are all in the pockets of developers:

Gov. Cuomo's long-time city developer donor got more generous when it stood to get $35 million in tax breaks
https://www.nydailynews.com/ne...

Kiryas Joel-based developer is Cuomo’s top donor this year
https://therealdeal.com/2015/0...

Developer Pays $10K to Settle De Blasio Dubious Donation Case
https://thecity.nyc/2019/11/de...

One of the ploys that these neoliberals like to do to enact policy for the benefit of their developer/corporate elite cronies is to pretend to be pie-in-the-sky progressives who are just "naively" implementing policies to "help people" without really understanding the implications. But they know more than anyone what the consequences will be. They are just pretending not to understand. This is straight out of the Robert Moses playbook, to disguise power plays under the guise of populist sentiment and then feign naivety.

For example, Google "single-family houses are racist." Neoliberal politicians started claiming that single-family house zones were racist and therefore needed to be abolished. It was all done in the name of progressivism, but the idea was to rezone these areas so that zones that were recently blocked off from elite developers could now access them. On top of that, by dwindling housing stock down to nothing, a new generation of people never get to enjoy the benefits of property ownership. They all become condemned to a life of renter-serfdom in the apartments built by the corporate developers who pushed this "abolish all single-family housing" talking point.

In the case of #cancelrent, neoliberal politicians like Cuomo, De Blasio, etc. know full well that if rent was canceled, in a year's time all the most vulnerable landlords would be forced to cash out or have their properties seized, in turn forcing the very people they're pretending to help out into the streets. That is the end goal of #cancelrent, to bankrupt the small property class out of the market, since they are all the last line of defense against corporate developers.

If this sounds too tin foil hatish, track down every anti-landlord/pro-cancel rent article--especially in publications like Curbed NY and Gothamist. See the profiles of "rent strike organizers." See who the biggest cheerleaders are and who Cuomo, AOC, De Blasio, etc. have chosen to listen to and be the "voices" of #cancelrent. All privileged millennials who could easily pay rent encouraging everyone in their buildings to not pay rent, many of them in gentrifying neighborhoods like Bushwick. Connect the dots and you'll see the implications, of gentrifiers threatening to bankrupt their landlords in these communities that developers have had a difficult time making inroads and having a direct line to Cuomo et. al.

Bottom line, this whole #cancelrent is all smoke and mirrors. It's a fake progressive (fauxgressive) movement started by neoliberal think tankers, backed by developers and being carried out by their handlers who are pretending to be doe-eyed progressives only trying to "help". Do not buy into this phony act of theirs of "naive liberals" not understanding the implications of #cancelrent. They know more than everyone else what will happen. They are all acolytes of Robert Moses, using populism to make power plays for the benefit of their developer donors.

It's a great article, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to the mass atroturfing campaign against landlords that's now being pumped on a regular basis across social media, Reddit, YouTube and every mainstream fauxgressive rag and media outlet around the country and the globe. So, as great as it is, it offers small comfort to me. For every one of those being published, there will be 10 this week ranting about how all landlords are evil, how canceling rent will usher in a new utopia, and how property ownership will go the way of the Dodo bird.

With all due respect, I think the people playing that "landlords are irresponsible and only have themselves to blame" are part of a concerted neoliberal effort to squeeze out small landlords out of the real estate market.

My parents couldn't have been more fiscally responsible. They were so fiscally responsible that they were able to pass the savings onto their tenants...only to have many of those tenants decide to skip out on rent, thanks to aggressive laws on the part of fringe tenant advocacy groups in cities like NYC that have given deadbeat tenants all the concessions in the world to not pay rent. 

Some people will argue, "Well, it's your parents' own damned fault for not screening tenants properly." Well, here is the further twist in the knife. These fringe tenant groups have been successfully getting laws passed making it all but impossible for landlords to screen tenants. Just this past fall in NYC, landlords were barred from sharing a blacklist, denying a prospective tenant based on a recent eviction, even looking up housing court records. This is all "violation of rights", "discrimination", etc. and punishable by in the thousands. 

The point isn't to complain but to make this larger point--no one would chide a grocery store for going out of business if laws practically made it legal for customers to get thousands of dollars of free food a month. But apparently, you can do this for small landlords. 

The reason why I cite that as "neoliberalism" is that invocation of responsibility in a scenario where it doesn't apply is a classic talking point. It's trying to pretend that a person's problems are all due to himself or herself alone, when there are various outside forces that have forced this person's hand. 

It's not socialism if the end goal of #cancelrent is to bankrupt small property owners so that the banks, fat cat developers, banks and the city winds up owning all the property and no one in the future will be allowed to own a piece of real estate to invest in or even own their house. That is flat out neoliberalism. 

Of course, from the way these fake progressives talk (De Blasio, Cuomo, etc.), you wouldn't think that. It sounds like they're "progressive" and "socialist." But they're not. They are in the pockets of developers, who have been working over time to "liquidate" properties owned by small property owners and force increasing numbers of people to be condemned to renter-serfdom. If this sounds like Tin Foil Hatism, the proof is in the pudding:

Developer with ties to Cuomo gets $2M tax break amid bailout
https://nypost.com/2017/07/04/...

STATE FINES DEVELOPERS FOR THEIR ‘GIFTS’ TO MAYOR DE BLASIO
https://thecity.nyc/2019/09/st...

Developer paid de Blasio-linked lobbyist, lawyers for East Village petition
https://nypost.com/2020/01/14/...

Kiryas Joel-based developer is Cuomo’s top donor this year
https://therealdeal.com/2015/0...

Part of the revolting strategies these neoliberal fauxgressives have been employing to get things rolling is co-opting progressive causes to make it look like they're doing it in the name of "affordable housing" when the end game is to help fatten the pocketbooks of their developer-donors or "gift" them increasingly larger shares of real estate. 

That is all this "#cancelrent" nonsense amounts to. It's another power play. No one in politics or real estate doesn't understand the Real World implications of canceling rent. Everyone knows that all that would happen is that ain a year's time, all of the small landlords would be cashing out or going into foreclosure. They also know that once that happened, the renters would all be forced out into the street anyway, defeating the whole point of "canceling rent."

Cuomo knows this. De Blasio knows it. AOC knows it. Michael Gianaris knows it. All of these other fauxgressive hacks know it. But they want to keep pretending they don't understand, blinking their eyes innocently as if they don't understand that this would be the precise outcome of #cancel rent. All the better a year from now to pull a Mortimer Snerd when the you-know-what hits the fan. "Oh, gosh, hyuk hyuk! All of these low income minority renters in these gentrifying neighborhoods have to move because their buildings are being seized or cashed out from under them as the banks, city and developers take over? I didn't see that coming! No sirree!"

So, I repeat, this isn't socialism. It's neoliberalism. And the sooner people realize that it's these political crony neoliberal hacks driving this b.s. #cancel rent movement, the sooner we'll get a better handle on it and fight it. 

This morning, I contacted the Office of the Public Advocate and was given several referrals that I hope will pan out into taking legal action against the city. I will also take this to the media if possible.

Being from NYC, I can assure that this has nothing to do with seeking votes.

People like Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio are neoliberals. Neoliberals are people whose entire purpose is to work in favor corporate and elite interests. Because they don't want anyone to know what they're up to, they'll always hide their intentions by pandering to populist Rightwing or Leftwing movements.

In the case of NYC, the entire goal of Cuomo, de Blasio and company has been to destroy the small business and small property owner class in order to hand it over to their fat cat developer donors and buddies. Of course, they can't do this outright, so true to the shadiness of neoliberalism, they've been passing laws or using protocols under false pretenses, pretending to do it in the name of progressivism (pro-tenant rights" and "pro-affordable housing"). However, if you look at how these protocols and laws played out, every single one of them were nothing more than power plays designed to bankrupt small property owners or erode property rights in such a way as to push them into cashing out to developers or make it easy for the city to steal property for developer interests.

For example, de Blasio invoked Third Party Transfer to snatch property from elderly black homeowners in Brooklyn. He did it claiming that he was doing it for "affordable housing," but he was using Third Party Transfer to take property from holdouts in gentrifying parts of NYC that had refused to sell out to developers.

Cuomo, de Blasio and these other NY politicians' jumping on the #cancelrent movement have join the anti-landlord/pro-tenant populist brigade for the same reason. They're pandering to this crowd with these b.s. eviction moratoriums to make it look like they're bleeding heart liberals who care about tenants struggling under COVID-19. But the whole point is to collapse the real estate market so that the last remaining number of small property owners are destroyed, much in the way they completely destroyed small business in NYC.

I am not saying that buying votes isn't playing a part in all this. It's just not the most important goal. More important is the end game--setting the mechanisms in place to collapse the market. And the only way they can disguise the end game is by subterfuge, as in pretending that it's all in the name of progressive ideals.

This end game is why none of them seem to not give a damn about all the legal and Constitutional implications of what they're doing. They know that by the time this is contested, the damage will have been done. By the time laws reestablish property rights, the fat cat developers will be the only people holding property and the small property owners will have all been gone by then.