The socialists' dream of eliminating private property for all but the rich is coming true in NYC

How the Radical Left is Pushing is Pushing Property Owners to the Brink

When we think of New York landlords, we think of the Trumps, the Kushners, the Helmsleys, big names and big egos whose bad behavior provides as much fodder to the front pages of tabloids as it does the business pages. But in a city that has long taken pride in being home to diverse enclaves of newcomers from all over, your landlord these days may be someone like Eccles, who moved to Brooklyn from Jamaica as an infant and whose family owes its break to his uncle Walter, who climbed his way up from fruit picker to owner of more than 100 multiunit properties.

Tweak a few dates and a few factoids, and the story of the Eccles family could easily be that of many American Jewish families who arrived here fleeing poverty and adversity and worked their way into the American dream, one small piece of property at a time. Except now that dream is no longer available to a new generation of immigrants or first-generation Americans, and, ironically, it is the progressive politicians most vocal about equity who are the bitterest foes of folks like Eccles.

In January, for example, Eccles contacted a state senator, Julia Salazar, to complain of a basic flaw in the system: Landlords have to pay the city to remove any violation recorded in their buildings, even if they’ve already fixed the problem. Basically, he explained, this means he has to pay twice: once to address the problem — a leaky roof, say, or a busted pipe — and then again to wipe his record clean and avoid snowballing fines. For people like him who have little money to spare, Eccles wrote, the measure was onerous.

“You absolutely should have to pay to remove violations that you’re responsible for, Lincoln,” Salazar wrote weeks later. “That is the point. It’s a very small penalty to pay for the suffering you inflict on people who live in your janky building. Do your job instead of spending all day trolling us on Twitter.”

This sort of dismissive language should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following local New York City politics. A wave of progressive lawmakers — many of them, like Salazar, newcomers identified with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — stormed into office with “decommodify housing” as one of their key slogans. In June 2019, they radically overhauled New York’s rent regulations, making it virtually impossible for owners to raise rents on the approximately 1 million apartments covered by the law. It was a reversal of reforms that had been in place for the past two decades, and which gave small-property owners like Eccles better opportunity to recoup the considerable investments required to run a building, opting instead for policies that repeatedly failed for the prior half-century.

These policies, Eccles said, leave him between a rock and a hard place. If he renovates his units, he stands to lose a fortune on each one, an investment the new laws aren’t allowing him to recover. If he doesn’t, the new tenant is likely to complain to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the dreaded HPD, which means inspections, lawsuits and a fortune in violations. So he keeps some units empty.

“I need about $1,000 just to cover basic costs, like water,” he said. “I have three where the rent is under that. Unless they change the law, they’re not rentable.”

Under New York’s new rules, regardless of how much money Eccles spends to get an apartment ready for tenants, he can’t add more than $89.29 to the monthly rent. “The lowball estimate on renovating one of my two-bedrooms,” he said, “was $88,000.” Add to that a surging increase in tax assessments, and you can see why, even before COVID, things were looking grim for Eccles.

“These past eight years,” he said, “my revenue increased 5.75%, and my taxes increased 100%. It made it extremely difficult for me to keep up with repairs, much less pay my property taxes. I can’t get more money because of rent stabilization. When COVID came, I wanted to be a good landlord, so I gave tenants concessions, but then the city came in and froze the concessions forever. If I can’t cover my cost, it’s not going to work.”

It’s already failed, he said, with several members of his family, all of whom were forced to sell their businesses, often at a loss.

“My first memories are the home on Eastern Parkway my family now had to sell,” he said. “And then we saw it refinanced for $30 million. What these new rent laws did is constrict black property owners, reduce their wealth, and make them an easy pickoff for a bigger speculative owner. My aunt sold a 20-unit building because she couldn’t afford to keep it up anymore, and a few years later, the new buyers sold a single unit in that building for the price they paid for the entire building.”

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Lee, Eccles, Redhead, and dozens of others in their predicament, many of them minorities, are members of SPONY, Small Property Owners of New York, an organization dedicated to scaling back what they claim are draconian measures leading them to ruin. According to the group’s members, they’ve held more than 110 meetings with local politicians since the pandemic started, opening their books and begging for help. But the young revolutionaries that now run New York aren’t impressed.

“They don’t believe in private property,” said Joanna Wong, another SPONY member and a landlord. “They told us flat out. When we asked what is our role in your vision, they said, literally, you have a role, for now, until we figure out how we can take it from you.”

She wasn’t exaggerating: A source close to SPONY shared with me a recording of a Zoom meeting the group held with New York state Sen. Jabari Brisport recently. Brisport, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who was endorsed by prominent figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Cynthia Nixon. He prides himself as the first openly gay African American elected to New York’s state Legislature.

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But when he met with Eccles, Lee, and their colleagues, he insisted that only the state should own and rent houses, and that whatever failures public housing projects have had in the past can be solved by infusing the system with more tax-based cash.

“So you don’t think that the housing market should be in the hands of private landlords,” one SPONY member asked, “is that a fair statement?” Brisport didn’t need much time before responding. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s fair, it’s clear that the market cannot make affordable housing.”

This is the future envisioned by people like former Greenwich BET member Sam Goldbrick, when they assert that housing is a “human right”: Some people must work, so that others may live in public housing projects built from the earnings of those workers. Goldbrick surely don’t envision donating his own $2 million tear-down on Glen Avon to the state and joining the victims of his compassion in a shoddy apartment tower, but that’s exactly what he and his fellow communists hope to do to the rest of us. No thank you.