Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood before a crowd of pro-tenant advocates Wednesday and unveiled a housing initiative he called "Fix the City", a plan to seize buildings from landlords the city deems negligent and hand them over to nonprofits, community land trusts, or tenants themselves. The cheers were loud. The details were thin. And the programs he's banking on have been failing New Yorkers for decades.

The mayor framed the effort as a bold new crackdown. But as the New York Post reported, the mechanisms at the heart of the plan, Program 7A receiverships, Housing Development Fund Corporation cooperatives, and the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, are not new. They date back, in some cases, to the 1970s. And the record they've compiled is one of financial ruin, mismanagement, and taxpayer bailouts.

That record matters, because Mamdani is not proposing a pilot. He's proposing to scale programs that already can't sustain themselves.

The co-op crisis no one at City Hall wants to talk about

New York City currently has roughly 1,100 affordable co-ops, Housing Development Fund Corporation cooperatives, scattered across the five boroughs. Each is run by a board of directors legally required to act in the co-op's best interest. Each is subject to strict regulations on resident income, subletting, and resale rates. On paper, they look like a model of community-driven housing.

In practice, they are collapsing.

Last year, Attorney General Letitia James announced an investigation into the cooperatives and found nearly all of them to be "high risk." The buildings had fallen behind on rental collection, stopped making tax payments, run up high levels of debt, and racked up a staggering number of code violations. In September 2025, James and then-Mayor Eric Adams rolled out a $750,000 bailout to stabilize the worst cases.

Where that money went remains unclear. The Attorney General's office did not say how the funds were distributed. The Department of Housing Preservation and Development did not respond to Post questions about it. A mayor who has drawn scrutiny for his handling of transparency pledges now wants to build on a program whose own bailout lacks a public accounting.

290,000 buildings underwater, before the expansion

The financial distress is not limited to cooperatives. A February report from the Association of Neighborhood Housing and Development found that 290,000 of the city's already-existing subsidized, nonprofit-run buildings were financially underwater. The report called for a bailout and reforms, warning that even mission-driven nonprofits, the very organizations Mamdani wants to hand buildings to, can no longer keep their portfolios afloat.

The association put it bluntly:

"Rising cost, stagnant revenues and unpredictable federal support have created conditions where even mission-driven nonprofits, those that rebuilt neighborhoods when the private market walked away, can no longer sustain their portfolios without intervention."

That is the sector Mamdani wants to expand. Not a sector that is thriving, innovating, or proving its model. A sector begging for a lifeline.

What the mayor said, and what he couldn't define

At the Wednesday news conference, Mamdani told the crowd his administration would not hesitate to act against bad landlords:

"When necessary, we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers. And for buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards. Stewards that include community land trusts, nonprofits or even the tenants themselves."

But when the Post pressed City Hall on what "chronically negligent" actually means, the standard that would trigger the city's power to strip an owner of a building, officials could not define the term. A plan built on aggressive legal action, and the administration cannot articulate the threshold for using it.

The centerpiece mechanism is Program 7A, a little-known process in which a housing court judge appoints a nonprofit to take over management of a building. It has existed for years. No success metrics were offered. No data on how many buildings have been stabilized through the program, or how many have deteriorated further under appointed managers.

Mamdani also endorsed the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, or COPA, which gives nonprofits first shot at buying distressed buildings. The City Council approved the legislation last year. Then-Mayor Adams vetoed it. Mamdani is now reviving it as part of his plan, despite the financial evidence that the nonprofits meant to benefit from COPA are already drowning.

Industry pushback and a former insider's warning

Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, did not mince words. He called the plan a disguised subsidy hike that shifts costs onto taxpayers while solving nothing.

"Nonprofits and affordable co-ops are screaming from their crumbling rooftops that the rents don't cover costs. The city should crack down on bad actors but changing ownership simply moves the financial burden to taxpayers, permanently."

Burgos added a sharper point about the math:

"We can't afford it today and we won't be able to afford that tomorrow."

A former insider at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development offered a different angle, not political, but practical. The city, this person said, has tried for years to turn tenants into building owners. The results have been poor.

"The city has long tried to help tenants become owners of buildings, but tenants aren't necessarily equipped to run the building. You need someone to be a good bookkeeper and to collect rent from the neighbors. It's really hard to do and hard to do well."

That assessment lines up with what the Attorney General's investigation found: co-ops run by residents who stopped collecting rent, stopped paying taxes, and piled up violations. Good intentions did not translate into good management.

NYCHA and the contradiction at the center

Mamdani's plan also includes creating a public-private trust for the New York City Housing Authority, the city's sprawling, notoriously mismanaged public housing system. Humberto Lopes, a 61-year-old building owner who recently formed the Gotham Housing Alliance, pointed to the irony of a mayor threatening to seize private buildings while presiding over a public housing authority that has been a national symbol of government failure.

"Why don't you start with them first."

Lopes went further, in language that captured the fury many small property owners feel at the prospect of government seizure of their buildings. The mayor, who has been criticized for his choices about where he shows up and whom he prioritizes, is now asking landlords to trust that the same city government that cannot maintain its own housing stock will responsibly manage theirs.

There is also the matter of Mamdani's own record. As a state lawmaker, he opposed the public-private trust model for NYCHA. Now, as mayor, he is embracing it. The reversal went unexplained at the news conference.

A city of renters, a plan without a foundation

Roughly 70 percent of New York City residents are renters. That is a massive constituency, and any mayor who promises to hold bad landlords accountable will get applause. Nobody defends slumlords. Nobody argues that tenants should live in buildings with code violations and crumbling infrastructure.

But the question is not whether bad landlords exist. The question is whether the city's proposed remedy, transferring buildings to nonprofits, co-ops, and tenants, actually works. The evidence from the city's own programs says it does not. The cooperatives are high-risk. The nonprofits are underwater. The bailout money vanished without a public accounting.

A mayor with a pattern of saying one thing and doing another is now asking New Yorkers to believe that the same failed tools, wielded with more enthusiasm, will produce different results. The city cannot even define the term that would trigger its enforcement power.

Mamdani called the plan "Fix the City." A more honest name would be "Repeat the Mistakes." When 290,000 nonprofit-run buildings are already sinking, the answer is not to add more weight to the same leaking ship. But that is precisely what this plan proposes, and taxpayers, as always, will be left holding the bill.