In politics today, everyone assumes you’re on one team or the other. So you can imagine what happened when I wrote a column headlined, “Mamdani poised to help real estate in several ways. No, really.”
A number of people unfamiliar with my work assumed I was a Mamdani fan telling real estate people that everything will be OK if and when he becomes mayor, and that he might even benefit them.
A Californian named Bernie Salzberg emailed me, “How you can write anything positive about this poisonous snake oil salesman is just ridiculous.”
So if Mamdani rescues a child from a burning building, the media should ignore it?
Perhaps Salzberg owns a rent-stabilized building in New York City because he felt obligated to lecture me about the travails of that asset class. “You need to speak with people actually running property so you can learn a little about the business,” he wrote.
Salzberg was clearly unaware that I have spent the past six years doing exactly that, not to mention editing or writing hundreds of stories about the subject.
Given that Salzberg lives in Solana Beach and hasn’t been reading The Real Deal closely, I might be better informed on the issue than he is. But my real complaint is that he (and some others on social media) jumped to a conclusion based on a perfectly legitimate column.
We wouldn’t be doing our job if we only reported the Mamdani positions that the industry dislikes, and not the ones they agree on (such as ditching parking mandates, building more homes and ending “member deference” in the City Council).
When I emailed Salzberg back with a link to my author page, which links to all of my bylines (including “The three reasons real estate hates Zohran Mamdani” and “‘Unmitigated disaster’: Socialist’s $100B housing plan,” I expected he would write back, “Sorry, my bad!”
But instead, the Salzberg Realty president neglected to read them and instead replied with another patronizing lecture.
“Erik, have another glass of Kool Aid while you give this some thought,” Salzberg wrote. “Hopefully people like you will smarten up and stop looking at the handsome young man with the great smile and quick words cloaking the disaster that lies within.”
I should have answered, “Handsome young man with the great smile? How can you write anything positive about this poisonous snake oil salesman?”
Read more
The magical thinking of Zohranomics
The Daily Dirt: What affordable housing costs in the real world, not Mamdani’s
It turns out some real estate people like Zohran Mamdani
