New York City’s rulers regulate every detail, however minute, of a tenant’s interactions with a landlord, from the rent the latter may charge to the times and temperature of the heat he must provide. After all, the commies who’ve run the Big Apple for over a century now deem serfs too stupid to strike their own bargains. Plus, by regularly denouncing and hamstringing landlords, they curry immense favor with a pool of voters in which renters overwhelmingly outnumber those despised owners.

Ergo, government punishes landlords who fail to provide heat, especially during the sort of freezing weather the East Coast has suffered lately, with fines ranging from “$250-$500 dollars per day for each initial heat or hot water violation” to “$500-$1,000 per day for each subsequent violation at the same building during the same and/or the next calendar year from the initial violation or, during the same and/or the next heat season.” Alas, cynics fear that the City’s solicitude for cold renters is actually all about the money.

But I digress. So what happens when New York City is the landlord withholding heat and hot water from their tenants? Granted, those tenants are thieves and leeches, living on our taxes in subsidized housing, so spare them no sympathy. But still, how illustrative of Leviathan’s double standards to hear the beast’s excuses for a situation that, when it befalls a private entrepreneur, earns him nothing but contempt and robbery from the City:  

…thousands of public housing residents in the city were braving the cold without heat or hot water. The inhumane conditions in some NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority] buildings have persisted for more than a week, even as Mayor [Bill “Comrade” ] de Blasio urged private renters to alert the city if their landlords weren’t providing heat. … “The folks who work at NYCHA are trying to hold together something that really should’ve gotten investment a long time ago,” de Blasio said…

Yeah, Comrade, and private landlords try to hold together their properties, too, on the pittance rent-control and rent-stabilization laws allow them.

Meanwhile, Comrade will turn the heat back on with yet more money stolen from the taxpayers. Bureaucracy and red tape have delayed that heist, however, as Comrade and New York’s governor, Andrew “Stalin” Cuomo, battle over the loot. Should a private landlord plead that he’ll eventually fix whatever problem has landed him in court as soon as he has the money, the fines would bankrupt him. But when politicians and bureaucrats flog such an excuse, well, no sweat, so to speak.

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