After New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled his plans to make affordable housing more available in the city, Fox News personalities and guests fixated on the plan’s efforts combating negligent landlords. They declared that enforcement against negligent landlords amounted to “public theft,” said it was a “throwback to Stalin,” and ranted that legal action to turn over properties from them to more responsible stewards will lead to “mass killing” and similar atrocities.
Research/Study
Fox's deranged reaction to NYC Mayor Mamdani's affordable housing proposal
Fox personalities side with negligent landlords and rant about “wealth confiscation” and “mass killing”
Written by Zachary Pleat
Published
-
Mamdani proposes affordable housing initiatives, action against negligent landlords
-
- NBC News: “New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled proposals Tuesday to build 200,000 affordable housing units and preserve an additional 200,000 over the next decade as part of a comprehensive housing plan.” The article continued: “The plan, dubbed ‘Block by Block, a Housing Policy for a New Era,’ includes $22 billion in new investments to build affordable housing, $5.6 billion in funding to enhance the New York City Housing Authority and a new $40-per-hour minimum wage for construction workers on city-financed projects. The proposal also outlines new aggressive code enforcement measures, investment in a city-backed home insurance provider and loosened regulations around prefabricated homes.” [NBC News, 5/26/26]
- Politico: “Mayor Zohran Mamdani plans to tackle ‘inequitable’ residential growth across New York City that allows many wealthy neighborhoods to add scant housing amid a massive shortage.” The article continued: “Mamdani will roll out a set of zoning and land use initiatives on Tuesday aimed at changing this paradigm, as one plank of a wide-ranging housing plan. City Hall will explore land use changes to allow residential development in neighborhoods with the lowest rates of affordable housing production, and citywide zoning reforms to permit more housing to be built near public transit, among other policy changes.” [Politico, 5/26/26]
- Mamdani’s “Block by Block” affordable housing plan includes numerous steps to take action against negligent landlords, including a formal process to seize their buildings if they refuse to comply. Chapter 1 of Mamdani’s “Block by Block” plan details how the city plans to enforce regulations and code requirements against “a small group of persistent ‘bad actor’ landlords [who] have willfully and routinely neglected their buildings.” This includes plans to “aggressively use the 7A Program” to “initiate legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers from day-to-day management,” and “where appropriate, engage with lenders to force compliance or immediately begin foreclosure proceedings when landlords refuse to comply.” Gothamist reported that the city is also working on formalizing procedures for tenants to purchase their buildings either sold by or seized from their landlords. [New York City, The Office of the Mayor, May 2026; Gothamist, 5/26/26]
- In a speech outlining his plan, Mamdani said: “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.” Mamdani continued, stating that those “responsible stewards … include community land trusts, nonprofits, or even the tenants themselves.” [CBS New York via YouTube, 5/26/26]
-
Fox personalities and guests side with negligent landlords, claim Mamdani’s plans will lead to mass violence and death
-
- Fox Business host Charles Payne on Mamdani’s plan to transfer ownership from negligent landlords: “This will be public theft. Public theft.” Payne added: “He’s actually hijacking a real problem; the transfer of ownership of private property from struggling landlords — mostly folks who own one or two buildings, in part because of, you know, rent controls and things like that — and he is hijacking the problem. Because this is what Democrats do very well — they take a problem, they take acute pain — then they find a way to hijack it and give it to their friends.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 5/28/26]
- Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Mamdani’s plans regarding negligent landlords: “I'm thinking, do people not know where this always leads? I mean, socialism to communism always leads to mass killing.” Ingraham continued: “It just does. It leads to extermination.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 5/27/26]
- Fox Business host Jackie DeAngelis on Mamdani threatening a “property takeover”: “It feels like wealth confiscation, that’s honestly what it is.” [Fox Business, The Evening Edit, 5/27/26]
- Washington Examiner editor-in-chief Hugo Gurdon on Fox: “All socialist systems, ultimately, use force, and you can see it with Mamdani now” regarding his plans for negligent landlords. [Fox News, The Will Cain Show, 5/27/26]
- Fox anchor Sandra Smith said Mamdani’s plan to hold negligent landlords accountable “is outright blatant theft,” while guest and Republican NYC council member Vickie Paladino cited a quote she attributed to “Zohran’s good buddy” streamer Hasan Piker: “Let the streets run red with their capitalistic blood.” Piker previously explained that the quote, which was slightly different, “was in a conversation that I was having with a landlord friend of mine, and it's of course hyperbolic and it's not meant to be sincere. This is not sincere advocacy. It's not a real policy that I would ever advocate for.” [Fox News, America Reports, 5/27/26; Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 9/17/25]
- Fox Business host Larry Kudlow claimed Mamdani “is a throwback to Stalin” over plans to address negligent landlords, likening the plans to “when the Soviet Union would confiscate the means of production.” Kudlow continued: “This stupid kid is doing the same thing, because it's what he thinks is the right thing to do. I mean, it's a throwback. I mean, nowadays the modern socialist Democratic Party uses regulatory apparatus to do this kind of thing. This kid's coming in and just, he's just taking the assets and changing ownership. … It’s like setting up little soviets.” [Fox Business, The Big Money Show, 5/27/26]
- Discussing Mamdani’s plans for negligent landlords on Fox Business, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) said: “Let’s be real and call it what this is — trying to seize private property, that is communism.” She additionally claimed: “New York City is actually the biggest slumlord in the city of New York.” [Fox Business, Varney & Co., 5/27/26]
- Fox anchor Martha MacCallum on Mamdani possibly turning over properties from negligent landlords to tenants: “This is Marxism. It’s collectivism. It’s government apprehending all of the means of production, property, all of the things that Marx writes and talks about are exactly what we’re seeing here.” [Fox Business, Varney & Co., 5/27/26]
- On Fox & Friends, network contributor and New York Post columnist Miranda Devine said Mamdani’s “communist prescriptions” targeting negligent landlords will lead to “bloodshed and mayhem and abject misery.” Devine added that Mamdani has an “eerie smile ... when he closes his eyes and says something really frightening.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 5/27/26]