These Big Apple landlords are seeing red.
Landlords whose families fled countries run by communist regimes tore into New York Democrats for backing radical housing legislation that they said would make Mao proud.
As state budget fights commence, some Democrats in Albany are pushing for the inclusion of “good cause” eviction, which would bar landlords from evicting tenants except for lease violations like not paying rent.
The measure, which was first introduced back in 2019, also would in essence cap rent hikes by forcing landlords to go to housing court to justify increases greater than 3% per year or 1.5 times the rate of inflation.
“My parents ran away from communism and now New York is becoming communist — what’s the point of coming here?” Sheepshead Bay landlord Benjamin Louie, 39, told The Post.
Louie, who was born in Brooklyn after his family fled the city of Guangzhou in “dirt poor” China in the 1980s, said the 79 Democratic state lawmakers who have signed on to the bill are “showing their true colors.”
“They’re corrupt to the core,” he said. “It’s already hard to evict tenants. Now they’re making it harder.”
Among those leading the fight for the tenant-friendly housing policy are the bill’s primary sponsor, self-described Marxist state Sen. Julia Salazar, and Sen. Jabari Brisport, as well as socialist Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher, who recently jetted to Austria on an expenses-paid trip to learn about the nation’s heavily-subsidized social housing program.
One of the most shrill cheerleaders is the advocacy organization Housing Justice For All, which has received financial backing from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations — and has counted the New York Young Communist League as an “active partner” in its organizing.
“What we’re seeing now is that you have the socialists in the Democratic Party and now their communist allies who are trying to take away [our] security,” said Bronx landlord Valentina Gojcaj, who fled communist-ruled Albania with her parents in part due to the lack of property rights.
“Property ownership is at the core of our ethnicity — it was always said if you had land, at least you had food to eat,” Gojcaj, 57, said. “That fundamental belief is being shattered for us here in the United States.”
Ed Yau, 46, whose parents fled China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the mid-1940s and 50s, said he’s lost “a lot of faith” in New York Democrats for continuing to push for “good cause,” which he believes will drive more landlords to take their affordable housing stock off the market.
“The far-left, they have these ideas about affordable housing but there needs to be rational solutions,” Yau said, noting that he is currently struggling to evict a tenant who hasn’t paid rent in three years, has rented the apartment out on Airbnb, and set fire to his property.
If lawmakers “make it impossible to evict bad tenants, they’re going to find less of a housing stock available,” he added.
