If you spend your time influencing people with propaganda talking points to get elected, you are the worst kind of person there is.
Joined September 2014
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My name’s Clarence retweeted
MorePerfectUnion “If you spend more than $80,000 renovating an apartment you are trying to turn it from affordable to luxury.”
NYS Lawmakers “Renovations cost $30,000. Anything more than that is greed.”
And then…
Public housing. “We need at least $489,000 per unit to renovate.”
City of New York. “We are giving a public housing development $529,000 per unit to renovate it.”
I mean COME ON!
My name’s Clarence retweeted
These NYC apartments are standing empty, not because the owners don't want to rent them, but because rent stabilization laws prohibit them from charging enough to earn back the costs of necessary repairs.
My latest for @WSJFreeEx
HUD Wants To Make It Easier To Bring Private Capital Into Public Housing bisnow.com/news/national/cap… via @Bisnow
My name’s Clarence retweeted
Here’s what’s really happening in Crown Heights, and it’s a preview of where this goes citywide.
A landlord dies. New York’s rent laws already made it illegal for him to raise rent enough to pay for major repairs, so the building falls apart. Nearly 1,000 code violations pile up across 3 buildings over a decade.
Then the city uses that neglect as leverage: a $2.2M lead-poisoning judgment forces a sheriff’s auction. No check to the family. The judgment holder credit-bids it, then flips it for $7.6M to a city-approved buyer, with a tenant union and City Hall shaping the deal from the start.
@ZohranKMamdani calls this a win for tenants.
Look closer: it’s a legal machine that turns private property into government-directed property, one distressed building at a time, using code violations, not eminent domain, so nobody has to call it a seizure.
And guess who’s on the hook to fix 88 units with a decade of deferred repairs? The city’s already been funding emergency work here for years under HPD’s Alternative Enforcement Program.
Expect taxpayers to keep paying, long after the press release fades.
This isn’t reform. It’s a template, and it starts with the buildings the state made impossible to maintain in the first place.
As Comptroller, I’ll audit what HPD has already spent on emergency repairs at these 3 buildings, and every dollar tied to ‘transfers’ like it, because the fix isn’t more government control of housing, it’s a free market that lets owners actually maintain their buildings.
My name’s Clarence retweeted
Excited to announce Unlock Our Housing NYC, a new coalition of tenants, housing groups, and property owners spotlighting the issue of vacant rent stabilized apartments.
Digital and TV ads start running statewide today. In our first month we knocked on nearly 60,000 doors and signed up more than 6,000 advocates.
unlockourhousingnyc.com
My name’s Clarence retweeted
I wonder if @NYCDSA co-chair @unionGustavo's parents will pay the pied-a-terre tax on the rowhouse they bought him in Bed-Stuy (Gustavo *E.* Gordillo is the father of our local Gustavo *L.*). The home showed up on the list Mamdani's office released.
Fair market value: $1,457,000
My name’s Clarence retweeted
Rent Stabilization Is an almost perfect example of a Ponzi Scheme.
In 2019, Albany Broke It.
Every Ponzi scheme depends on the same mechanic: new money entering the system pays for the promises made to the people already in it. Rent stabilization worked exactly this way, and for decades it more or less held together.
Here’s how. The longer an incumbent tenant stayed in occupancy, the deeper their discount grew relative to market and costs.
That growing discount had to be paid for by someone, and that someone was the newcomer.
Vacancy increases, renovation-driven investments, and modestly higher entry rents brought fresh capital into the system every time a unit turned over. New money subsidized old promises. It was never stated this way, but that was the deal. It barely worked. But it worked.
Turnover (naturally occurring from death and self initiated vacancies NOT evictions) kept enough new rent flowing in to cover rising costs, and the future value embedded in eventual turnover gave owners something to borrow against. This last part is key and is always missed or reframed as a negative.
That leverage financed boilers, roofs, elevators, and facades.
The system’s solvency was built not just on current rents but on the promise of future ones.
Then in 2019, the legislature did what regulators do to actual Ponzi schemes: it shut off the flow of new money. No vacancy increases. No meaningful renovation recovery. No incentive for any tenant to ever leave or ask for a buyout, and no incentive for any owner to bring a vacant unit they’d lose money on back.
Could Albany have addressed harassment or subsidized distressed buildings directly instead? Sure. But by eliminating turnover and any return on investment, it guaranteed that newcomers could no longer offset costs, and it wiped out the future value that had historically financed building improvements.
That leaves exactly one entity capable of making up the difference: the Rent Guidelines Board. And the RGB is a politically controlled body, vulnerable to public pressure, that routinely ignores its own cost data. A system that once relied on market-rate newcomers now relies on the annual mercy of nine appointees. Under a freeze, it doesn’t rely on anything at all.
These are inconvenient truths for those who insist that costs aren’t up, distress isn’t real, quality isn’t falling, and that housing somehow pays for itself. But buildings run on cash, not intentions.
Without new, higher rents entering the system, the math doesn’t work. It never did and was never asked to. THAT is what’s different about rent freezes today and the current system with costs up rent collections down.
It’s broken and the only answer being given by current leaders is to break it further to move more of the cost of housing to taxpayers.
A city and state facing billions in deficit with a federal government that hasn’t even funded the federal housing units in New York it’s already responsible for?
That’s an odyssey of extreme hubris.
My name’s Clarence retweeted
This speech from Zohran Mamdani on America’s 250th changed my politics.
I’ve never seen a more pompous individual whose life has been void of any sacrifice or hard work confidently lecture as if people like him hold the key to human prosperity.
Here’s a guy who had never held a job until he found the angle to satisfy his thirst for attention through politics at age 30, sit behind George Washington’s desk and give us a lecture on what is supposed to be a day of celebration.
Instead of celebrating what this country built, prosperity and human rights that spread across the globe from basically nothing, he turns the moment into a lecture about how America is this flawed project desperately in need of topdown change from useless academics and politicians who’ve never built anything of value for anybody.
As I get older, I have started wrestling with my own ridiculous and undeserved comforts, and the massive sacrifices of generations that made them possible. We should be expressing sheer gratitude for the families who crossed this country in covered wagons chasing a future, for the young men who died in muddy fields and frozen trenches defending it. At some point we let the children forget about this, and it's going to be a tragedy.
Our ancestors didn’t sacrifice so we could sit around demanding more redistribution while building nothing of value ourselves and living in opulence kings couldn't have dreamed of. They built something exceptional through risk, and relentless work.
Watching someone like Mamdani use the 250th as an opportunity to lecture us about what’s wrong with America, it just flips a switch for me. I’m done with the ingratitude.
We need to defend America from those that leech off it's greatness and attempt to redefine it.
My name’s Clarence retweeted
The budget just went up to 128 billion, basically out of nowhere.
We’re completely detached from reality here. Everyone in the chamber is congratulating themselves like they accomplished something.
This is actually nauseating.
My name’s Clarence retweeted
So a two year rent freeze.
Buildings will have more violations. Many more will go bankrupt. The city will need billions to keep them alive. In the mean time less housing will be available.
Campaign promises fulfilled.
New Yorkers I suspect will give the Mayor a long leash for “trying”. But eventually when housing isn’t more affordable and the quality has only gotten worse…wont really have private property owners to blame anymore.
My name’s Clarence retweeted
Rent Guidelines Board member Christina Smyth just resigned from the board — hours before they were slated to vote on whether to enact Mayor Mamdani's rent freeze promise.
This rebuilt board was required to deliver a rent freeze. Everything since has been theater," she wrote.
My name’s Clarence retweeted
🚨🧵 MAJOR BREAKING: German government has been grooming DSA leaders for over a decade, and nobody noticed? 🇩🇪
Last night, Darializa Avila Chevalier — endorsed by NYC-DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) — beat a five-term incumbent to win New York's 13th congressional district.
@AsraNomani has been reporting on their ties to Cuba and the China/Singham network. But what’s not known is DSA’s deep ties to the German government.
The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS) is the political foundation of Die Linke — the German parliamentary party formed from the merger of the Party of Democratic Socialism, itself the legal successor to East Germany's ruling Marxist party, the SED.
Under German law, every party in the Bundestag gets a taxpayer-funded foundation. Die Linke's share is approximately EUR70MM annually.
Most German party foundations sponsor conferences, publish research, and fund exchange programs. What RLS-NYC did was put its own staff inside DSA's organizational leadership — concurrently — for over a decade.
In 2012, RLS opened a New York office. EIN 45-3658022. Their own annual report states: "With the help of funds from the BMZ and the Foreign Office, the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung maintains a network of international relationships. This includes financing its foreign offices."
Over the last 13 years, Berlin has sent millions to this office.
Despite these ties, no FARA registration for the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung was identified in the Department of Justice database.
As always, patience as I pull together the thread.👇
My name’s Clarence retweeted
This is the DSA co-chair. Let me summarize what he says in this video:
We’re using the Democratic Party as a ballot-access vehicle, not because we share its goals. We build our own organization, get elected under the Democratic label, caucus with Democrats when it’s useful, and push our own agenda from the inside. We see the Democratic establishment as an obstacle, not a home.
My name’s Clarence retweeted
Everyone in New York wants more for their money. Nobody wants to hear a landlord complain. Fine. So let me make the renter’s case instead.
Century old rent-stabilized housing is the bedrock of NYs housing supply. Except slowly but surely it’s falling apart or becoming inaccessible. The turnover laws turn every chance to make them better into a financial loss. So they sit empty, benefiting no one or continue to fall apart as housing does when it’s been around since the 1920s.
Change that one rule and here’s what you get. A gut renovated apartment. New kitchen, new windows, new plumbing, lead gone, better housing.
In a neighborhood with a train.
Renting below what the new building down the block charges for an overpriced place with paper thin walls and tin cup fixtures.
That is not affordable housing. Affordable housing is subsidized, and you have to qualify for it. As has been shown, you’ll never have to prove you qualify for it. You just rent it, and you pay less for more.
We’re not asking anyone to feel bad for us. We’re telling renters there’s a better deal sitting empty or doomed, and one rule can be changed to make the good deal more accessible to more people.
My name’s Clarence retweeted
Editorial: "The DSA is exploiting Mamdani’s mayoralty for a stealth revolution"
Excerpts:
For all his smiling charms, Mamdani is the willing tool of a movement running a very old and ugly playbook — radicals not only determined to take over the Democratic Party, but to wield state power, in this case the government of NYC, as a Socialist tool.
Start with his Office of Community Engagement — which is already costing taxpayers $53 million, a full 10 times the advertised level.
The OCE is a DSA agitprop shop, pure and simple.
Witness Mamdani’s housing plan, which quite literally aims to expropriate the property of his class enemies — in this case, mom-and-pop property owners — and hand their buildings over to nonprofits run by the politically connected.
No matter that nonprofit-run housing has failed for decades to deliver for tenants; it’s a success for the nonprofits themselves, and those who run them.
His push for “free” 2K seats for NYC toddlers is spending $73 million for 2,000 seats — $36,500 per kid, 50% higher than what a private day care would cost.
Why not simply give those big bucks to parents as vouchers for private day care?
Because they’re not run by members of the politically connected nonprofit-industrial complex, ready allies of the socialists’ agenda.
nypost.com/2026/06/13/opinio…
My name’s Clarence retweeted
This article was written by a 26 yr old college student by the name of Alyssa Ahlgren, who's in grad school for her MBA. What a GREAT perspecitve..👍🏽
My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us!
I'm sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis (Florida) trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of presidential candidates calling for policies to "fix" the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around.
I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook's, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we've become completely blind to it.
Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don't give them a second thought.
We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty One Times!!!
Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful. ??
Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, "An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity."
Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in.
When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I've ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided.
My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let's just say I didn't have the popular opinion, but I digress.
Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country.
People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they've never seen prosperity, and as a result, we elect some politicians who are dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism.
Why? The answer is this,?? my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn't live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or we didn't see the rise and fall of socialism and communism.
We don't know what it's like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don't have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it's spreading like a plague."
My name’s Clarence retweeted
Since a government mandated renewal lease at a massively below market rent is not an arm's length transaction, shouldn't the IRS consider a rent stabilized lease a "bargain purchase" with the arbitrage subject to income tax? This would ameliorate the means testing problem of high income people benefiting from insane low rents because at least they would have to pay tax on the giveaway. Why not?
My name’s Clarence retweeted
Let me be the Gentrifier Whisperer.
A lot of these newcomers arrived yesterday, figured out how to game low-turnout closed party primaries, and now think they're qualified to lecture lifelong New Yorkers on how to run our city. They weren't here for the crack epidemic. They weren't here for the crime wave. They weren't here when families fled neighborhoods they now brag about moving into.
They inherited communities other people fought to save. Then they read a book on Marx and decide decriminalization, decarceration, antisemitism, attacking mainstream Democrats, and higher taxes are the answer.
My name’s Clarence retweeted
Mamdani’s “rent freeze” isn’t about affordability. It’s a Trojan horse for seizing private property.
He knows rent control fails — it restricts supply and worsens shortages — and his own tenant organizer Cea Weaver wrote about that problem in a 2025 essay.
“It is true that a rent freeze, without additional intervention, risks deepening the crises within the market… Owners may choose not to invest…”
That leaves the door open for government to snatch up property — and Mamdani’s new plan does just that.
In 2020 he said the quiet part out loud: if guaranteeing housing requires “the abolition of private property,” that would be “preferable” to the current system.
His allies are even more explicit — calling homeownership and private property a “weapon of white supremacy.”
Freezing the rent was never the end goal — it’s an opportunity to abolish private property and give government more control.
Great joining @kayleighmcenany @SatAmericaFNC