Mamdani is socializing housing in NYC, costing taxpayers billions

You know Gotham is careening toward fiscal crisis when the city council’s problem with the socialist mayor is that Zohran K.Mamdani .

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is not socialist enough.In negotiating his first city budget with supposedly moderate council Speaker Julie Menin, Mamdani resisted socializing thousands of existing private apartments.But Lenin — er, Menin — won.Tuesday, in their $125.8 billion deal, Mamdani and Menin agreed to expand an eight-year-old de Blasio-era housing program called City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement.Under FHEPS, the city gives vouchers to people who are in a homeless shelter or who are at risk of being evicted from their apartment.With the voucher, a tenant can rent an apartment to get out of the shelter, or stay in her existing apartment, and limit her rent to 30% of her income.City taxpayers cover the rest, based on “fair market rents” that exceed $3,500 a month in some neighborhoods.As of last fall, 65,092 New York City households were using FHEPS vouchers, according to city comptroller Mark Levine — growth of nearly one-third over a year.Taxpayers spent $1.2 billion on the program in 2025, four times the cost of the 2022 figure.And that figure could have been higher.Former Mayor Eric Adams had resisted an earlier expansion, which would have been so expensive that the council didn’t even try to estimate its costs.The comptroller’s best guess was $1.1 billion to $4.5 billion per year.Mamdani realized quickly that such costs exceeded his socialist budget, and he tried to limit the expansion, too.But he and Menin agreed Tuesday: In lieu of the bigger program that Adams had resisted, they would launch a new expansion, adding at least $175 million for this new fiscal year, starting Wednesday, and $125 million annually after that.How did City Hall cut the cost down?Not through tightly restricting eligibility.A family of three making up to $76,350, half the area’s median income, will be eligible, as long as they ar...