A New York City Democratic Socialists of America co-chair took aim at Big Apple landlords in a televised interview Friday, only to face sharp pushback from Fox News host Martha MacCallum.
Gustavo Gordillo, who helps lead the Democratic Socialists of America’s NYC chapter, appeared on Fox News’ “The Story,” where he criticized the profits earned by New York landlords and questioned whether those returns should be treated as acceptable.
“The problem we’re facing in our housing system is that we talk about tenants and we say, they have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, they have to be responsible financially,” Gordillo said.
“But when we look at the landlords, we don’t use those same standards,” he added, arguing that property owners are not scrutinized in the same way as renters.
Gordillo then claimed that “landlords in New York have been making a 12 percent return on their investment, on average,” prompting MacCallum to press him on what level of profit he would consider reasonable.
“What’s fair for the landlord to make if you don’t like 12 [percent]?” MacCallum asked.
Gordillo responded by saying landlords are “complaining” that a 12 percent return is insufficient, adding that he does not believe “anyone should have a constitutional right to double-digit returns on their investment.”
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MacCallum immediately followed up, asking, “No one should have a right to a double digit return on their investment?” Gordillo replied, “No one has a right.”
“Why are you talking about,” a dumbfounded MacCallum asks.
Gordillo says “that’s not in the constitution but what we see if when we implement a rent freeze we have landlords who are crying that the government is going to put them out of business,” before being shut down by the Fox presenter.
“Well, they’re trying to run a business and they’re trying to do it effectively,” McCallum says. “Are all landlords perfect? Are some landlords lousy? Of course they are.”
“But I just think that the idea that no one should make a double digit profit is the antithesis of the desire to like ‘you can be anything you want to be in New York,;” she says.
Last month, the city’s Rent Guidelines board made good on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s key campaign promise to “freeze the rent” for roughly 1 million rent-stabilized units — much to the dismay of many landlords who are already feeling the heat of struggling to break-even on their investments.
“Expense items are not proportional to the income the properties generate,” landlord Lav Bauta told The Post, whose firm Zion Equities owns about 800 New York City rent-stabilized units and manages 4,000 apartments.
“Rent-stabilized properties incur the same, or greater, expenses as their fair-market counterparts: insurance, wages, supplies, elevator service, utilities, etc. There is no support or control mechanism to cap expenses while incomes have been capped.
“You can see how this is clearly unsustainable, and we are not even making considerations for debt service which was foundational for providing the capital needed to perform ongoing repairs and reinvestment at the varying sites,” Bauta added.
