Mamdani's Housing Czar vs. The Entire Field Of Economics

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

In 2021, Cea Weaver, now the woman chosen by Zohran Mamdani to run New York City’s Office to Protect Tenants, unveiled a housing policy vision so detached from economic reality that the only academic seminar it could have emerged from would have been a slurry rant by a drunk at a bar at Newark International Airport at 3AM.

Her proposal for New York City was simple and elegant. It was also completely inane, nonsensical and catastrophically regressive: abolish meaningful ownership, convert housing into a “collective,” require everyone to pay exactly 30 percent of their income for rent regardless of supply, demand, or cost, and — in her genius words — have the government “make sure everything works and cash flows.”

Riveting. Why didn’t we think of making everything work and having cash flow? 

When asked how to finance this trillion-dollar fantasy in a nation already drowning in debt and fighting 3% inflation, Weaver delivered the masterstroke of modern policymaking: the federal government prints money. End of briefing. Next question.

From a free-market and Austrian economics perspective, it is the greatest hits album of economic failure. Housing does not appear because politicians feel strongly about it. It appears because investors risk capital, builders respond to price signals, and consumers reveal their preferences through what they are willing and able to pay.

Weaver’s model abolishes that entire information system and replaces it with a bureaucratic version of Sim City 2000 with all cheat codes enabled. Prices disappear. Scarcity becomes invisible. Investment loses direction. Economic calculation collapses. The result is not compassion. It is the same gray, over-subscribed housing that every centrally planned city on Earth has perfected.

This is her vision of New York...(READ THIS FULL COLUMN, 100% FREE HERE).