When Hugo Chávez seized Venezuelan apartments for the people, millions ended up in gang-infested concrete slums.
That playbook just landed in New York City.
What Mamdani did the moment he signed the law tells you exactly who this was built for.
How COPA Strips NYC Private Property Rights and Hands Them to Mamdani's Allies
New York City's democratic socialist mayor Zoharn Mamdani signed the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act – COPA – this week, handing city-selected nonprofits a 145-day exclusive window to purchase roughly 2,100 apartment buildings before those properties can ever reach the open market.
If a nonprofit makes an offer and an owner rejects it, COPA grants the group a right of first refusal – meaning if any other buyer appears within the following year, the nonprofit can match the price and take the building.
Taxpayers are bankrolling this operation at up to $380,000 per apartment, plus tax breaks and waived fees.
Then Mamdani tweeted out Jacobin magazine to celebrate – the pro-communist outlet named after the French revolutionary faction that launched the Reign of Terror and executed thousands by guillotine.
He bragged that COPA is now the largest Opportunity to Purchase program in the nation.
RealClearInvestigations senior writer Mark Hemingway spelled it out: the real plan is to "make lefty NGOs wealthy real estate barons and thus able to spend more on politics advancing lefty causes."
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton called it a communist mayor's scheme to hand taxpayer cash to leftist groups to seize private property.
Mamdani's own housing advisor, Cea Weaver – whose mother owns a house in Tennessee – believes homeownership is racist and that government should "impoverish the white middle class."
She runs the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants.
New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino identified which groups are first in line for those buildings in Tablet magazine: the same organizations behind the anti-ICE riots and the pro-Palestine mobs that have been shutting down campuses and blocking city streets for months.
Hand billions in real estate to your activist base and every Democratic Socialists of America – DSA – candidate in every city across America gets trained, funded, and staffed by organizers with ties to that nonprofit empire.
Mamdani is running machine politics with apartment keys instead of envelopes.
NYCHA Has 600000 Unanswered Work Orders and the Fifth Amendment May Kill COPA Anyway
While Mamdani was moving to give his allies control of those buildings, his administration was already presiding over a catastrophic failure in city-managed housing.
NYCHA – New York City's public housing authority – was sitting on more than 600,000 unanswered maintenance work orders the day Mamdani declared war on private landlords, and that number is what government-run housing looks like in New York.
Mamdani wants more of it.
Rent control forces landlords to collect less than maintenance costs, so the building deteriorates, the city brands the landlord a bad landlord, seizes the building, and hands it to a nonprofit facing the exact same math – except now the building keeps deteriorating under ideologically approved ownership with no one left to blame and no market exit.
Venezuela tried this, Cuba tried this, and 70 years of socialist housing policy produced the same crumbling result on three continents.
Former Mayor Eric Adams vetoed this exact bill in his final year in office over constitutional concerns.
The legal landmine waiting to detonate is Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, the 2021 Supreme Court ruling that when the government strips an owner's right to control his property, that constitutes a taking under the Fifth Amendment requiring just compensation.
Landlord groups are already preparing lawsuits timed for the moment COPA takes full effect next November.
Mamdani is building a DSA-aligned nonprofit empire planted across five boroughs, insulated from every market force that would otherwise shut them down, and loyal only to the socialist political machine that put them there.
Hugo Chávez made the same promise to Venezuelans about their apartments. Mamdani celebrated with the guillotine magazine while his allies moved to collect.
Sources:
- Derek VanBuskirk, "Mamdani's Housing Plan Could Create Army Of Left-Wing Real Estate Barons," The Daily Caller, November 11, 2026.
- Amy Curtis, "Mamdani Signs COPA Into Law, and the Lawsuits Are Sure to Follow," Townhall, November 11, 2026.
- Antonio Graceffo, "Mamdani's Housing Program Follows the Socialist Playbook: Create the Crisis, Seize the Property," The Gateway Pundit, May 28, 2026.
- Vickie Paladino, "Moscow on Hudson," Tablet Magazine, June 18, 2026.
- AG News Staff, "Mamdani Hands Nonprofits First Crack At Buying Troubled NYC Apartment Buildings," American Greatness, November 12, 2026.
- Staff, "Mamdani's Nonprofit Takeover of New York Housing," Washington Examiner, May 29, 2026.
- Staff, "How Mamdani Is Merging Socialist Activists With New York City Government," The Daily Signal, October 4, 2026.
