“Two of Mamdani’s executive orders directly address that latter goal. One creates a Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development (SPEED) task force dedicated to identifying and removing bureaucratic barriers to new housing construction and leasing.
The second creates the Land Inventory Fast Track (LIFT) task force that will identify city land that can be used for housing construction.
Both are fine ideas. They’re also not exactly novel.
Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, likewise convened task forces to speed up the city’s permitting process and to identify city-owned land that could be used for housing.
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Perhaps a Mamdani administration will be able to squeeze more juice out of new task forces.
But as the Manhattan Institute’s Eric Kober details in a new report, substantially increasing new supply will require more comprehensive legislative changes to city zoning and permitting laws.
The end goal of those reforms, like many of the zoning reforms the City Council passed under the Adams administration, is to induce private developers to add more units to the housing-starved city.
Several of Mamdani’s other initial housing moves may well make them less likely to do that.
On his first day in office, Mamdani appointed Cea Weaver, a tenant activist and one of his campaign advisers, to lead the city’s Office to Protect Tenants.
A few days later, the New York Post reported on Weaver’s long history of hard-left social media commentary. She’s called for seizing private property and derided homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy.”
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In addition to appointing Weaver, Mamdani has directed city agencies to host a series of “rent ripoff” hearings, in which tenants will be given a public forum to complain about conditions in their buildings.
Mamdani, beginning his administration by appointing communists and scheduling housing struggle sessions designed to demonize landlords, might not be the most surprising development. It’s not entirely unprecedented either. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio liked to talk about seizing private property from time to time.
It’s nevertheless worrisome for anyone who does care about private property protections. It’s also maddeningly hypocritical.
Weaver was a primary proponent of New York’s 2019 rent stabilization law that made it much more difficult for landlords to fund maintenance and building improvements through higher rents.
As recent lawsuits and reports have highlighted, the result has been declining housing quality and a growing number of units sitting empty because their owners cannot finance needed, often city-mandated repairs.
Neither Mamdani nor Weaver can expropriate private housing all by themselves. The U.S. Constitution provides some protection against that. They can, however, scapegoat landlords for problems that are caused by overbearing regulation.
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Housing production has plummeted in Montgomery County, Maryland, which borders Washington, D.C., following the implementation of a local rent control ordinance.
In 2023, the county council approved a rent control policy that caps annual rent increases at the lesser of inflation plus 3 percent or 6 percent.
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multifamily housing permits have fallen by some 96 percent since the implementation of rent control. County planning officials report that the multifamily projects that are getting permitted are generally for-sale units.”
In an interview, Trump’s chief of staff described Elon’s brash, illegal, incompetency, and Trump’s lack of basic knowledge about what he’s doing, and the damage that his and Elon’s policies are doing.
When countries like China focus on heavily investing, initially it works well because they invest in productive things and this grows their economy. However, later, they run out of that many productive things to invest in, in which case they are robbing their citizens of consumption and outcompeting other countries’ manufacturing, but not gaining much actual new productive benefits. This leads to debt.
Bilateral tariffs like Trump is doing don’t work. The U.S. has a huge deficit because it consumes more than it exports. A global tariff could work by making goods more expensive and incentivizing people to consume, now relatively cheaper, domestic products. Bilateral tariffs just mean Americans will import cheap goods from country C and D instead of the heavily tariffed countries A and B.
Getting foreigners to invest in the U.S. hurts the U.S.. The U.S. has plenty of capital to invest and doesn’t need more. Additional investment means driving up the dollar, making U.S. goods less competitive internationally, and hurting U.S. exports.
China has debt to support investment. The U.S. has debt to support consumption. The system is out of whack and needs adjustment.
“In theory, the CHIPS Act provided a mechanism for the federal government to retract the grant and get all or part of its money back should Intel fail to meet its obligations. It’s not clear whether the federal government would have exercised its option to take the money back, but it was an option—until Trump stepped in.
As the company flailed, Trump met with its CEO, Lip-Bu Tan. Trump first called for him to resign. Then in August, the Trump administration announced that the federal government would just take partial ownership of Intel. Essentially, the U.S. government would purchase a roughly 10 percent stake in the chipmaker, partially nationalizing the company. And funds from CHIPS would be used to do it.
Trump bragged about the deal, saying he planned to “do more of them.” The company’s stock price rose on the news, suggesting that investors liked it. But that’s probably because it was a good deal for the company, at taxpayer expense.
According to public financial filings, the federal government would disburse the remaining funds, about $6 billion, while clearing any obligations for the company to actually complete work on new domestic semiconductor fabs.
In exchange, the federal government would gain partial ownership—as well as all the financial risks stockholders usually have when they invest in companies. Those risks will now be borne by taxpayers.
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Trump gave Intel a federal bailout, removing the company’s public obligations and accountability while loading more financial risk onto the public.”
“From knitting needles to garment fabric to bottles of paint, American crafters work with many materials produced abroad. That has left them particularly vulnerable to Trump’s trade war. Imports from Europe currently face tariffs of 15 percent, and while sky-high tariffs on China are currently subject to a 90-day pause, they still stand at 57.6 percent, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Worse still, Trump has done away with the de minimis exemption, which allowed goods valued at under $800 to enter the U.S. tariff-free.
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Exclusively stocking U.S.-produced materials isn’t an option for most craft stores. “Tariffs impact American-made yarns as well,” pointed out Fibre Space, a yarn store in Alexandria, Virginia. That’s because “American-made goods still rely on materials made in other countries.” Yarn “is an agricultural product,” observes Chadwell, “so certain crops and certain livestock produce the best fiber in very specific climates that aren’t necessarily” found in the United States. Meanwhile, “needles, notions, doodads, [and] bags…can only be produced at much higher prices” here.
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Tariffs prevent all sorts of voluntary transactions that shape lives and culture in big—and often inconspicuous—ways. That means shops that won’t be started, gifts that won’t be made by hand, and hobbies that won’t be taken up. And more immediately, tariffs are punishing business owners who want to help Americans fill their lives with more creativity.”
In places where wealthy people want to be and are not just there for tax advantages, higher taxes often don’t make many wealthy people leave. Keeping high-skilled professionals is more important to a city than keeping super wealthy people.
“On one of their units, the Lulgjurajs are able to charge monthly market-rate rents of $2,600. For an identical unit that became vacant in 2019 after a long-term tenancy, they can only charge $710 per month.
The costs of legally mandated repairs to that unit—which would include replacing the kitchen and bathroom, performing lead abatement, and leveling the floors—exceed $100,000. Yet the 2019 law permits them to reclaim less than half of these costs, let alone raise rents to something approximating market rates.
Without the ability to recover the costs of legally mandated repairs, the unit currently sits empty.
In addition to alleging a taking, the property owners’ lawsuit also argues that the wildly different rents allowed on units, dependent solely on how old the unit is and when it became vacant, is arbitrary and irrational.”
“After a few months in the program, Smith was no longer diabetic, and she has now been sober for two and a half years.
Her story highlights the success of the Healthy Opportunities Pilot, which launched in North Carolina in March 2022. The program had benefits beyond health and quality-of-life improvements; researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill found the program saved $1,020 a year per recipient on health care costs, and the 38,000 participants had “significantly lower” emergency room visits than their peers.
The program was unique, funded with a five-year, $650 million federal grant approved by the first Donald Trump administration. The idea was to use fresh food, safe housing and transportation — social and economic factors that researchers say determine 80 percent of a person’s health — to improve the lives of the sickest, most expensive patients.
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But the Healthy Opportunities Pilot shows the limits of such food-based interventions in public policy. These programs often require longer-term investments, chafing against the cost-cutting instincts that characterize Trump’s second term and legislatures in most red states — the policy level at which most MAHA ideas are put into practice.
In the case of HOP, the Joe Biden administration approved a Medicaid waiver last December to continue the program in North Carolina, which Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, hoped to expand throughout the state over the next two years. But in June, the Republican-led state legislature declined to fund it. State lawmakers argue the program costs more than it saves — a claim that state policy experts dispute because of the way Republican lawmakers were calculating the numbers. These experts say the long-term savings potential was given short shrift.”
“Trump is carving out his own brand of capitalism — launching extraordinary federal interventions in the economy through ownership stakes in private companies alongside sweeping tariffs, tax cuts and deregulation. But the way he’s using these tools isn’t really guided by a discernable economic strategy
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Trump’s policies, taken together, are more like “an idiosyncratic hodgepodge.””