Michael Benjamin

I mean this with complete respect. The Mayor works in propaganda the way Rembrandt worked in oils. COPA is perfectly designed to enrage people who fear a government takeover of private property, while elating people who think government can solve a math problem that public housing has already proven it can't. Neither is correct. COPA isn't new. DC has had a version since 1980, and other cities have tried it since. It never scaled. NYC's version is even narrower, and it faces the same hurdle. Money. Bad actors sometimes own housing. Owning cheap housing isn't what makes them bad actors. Plenty of good actors own cheap housing, and their buildings are dying too. When housing is regulated to death, a bad actor diverts what little money there is to themselves instead of the building. But good owner or bad, the result is eventually the same. Why? Because when a building costs more to run than it collects in rent, the math is broken. That's the case for a third of NYC's rent-stabilized housing, roughly 40 times what COPA will touch in a year. Making taxpayers cover the gap through nonprofits and tenant unions doesn't fix the math. It just buries it in costs the government covers by making everyone else's housing more expensive. This isn't Red Vienna. More like Viennetta. Sweet, fattening, and ultimately a cheap imitation of the real thing.