Honest question: What would stop anyone from just flipping these groceries? Buy up all the inventory at 30% less than retail, then sell it at 10% less than retail? Especially canned/packaged goods? Kinda seems like a taxpayer-funded arb opportunity ... Has this not occurred to any of them??

Mamdani just published a "Rental Ripoff Report." It proposes banning landlords from requiring both proof of income and a credit check. Landlords can pick one or the other, not both. So what would this do to the rental market? 1) It increases the landlord's risk. And since risk must be priced in, that only increases the burden on market-rate tenants. (Remember, many market-rate tenants in mixed use buildings will already be subsidizing their neighbors due to the two-year rent freeze.) This means the city becomes even more expensive. 2) The metric that does get screened becomes stricter. Landlords may demand 45-50X rent instead of 40X rent, for example, or a 700 credit score instead of 650. 3) More landlords will require third-party guarantors for market-rate tenants. Those companies (like The Guarantors and Insurant) often charge around one month's rent, pushing further costs onto the tenants. Children of wealthy parents will be able to tap mom and dad as a guarantor, while lower-income tenants will have to pay for these third-party services. 4) Word-of-mouth referrals become even more important, which turns the rental scene into more of an "insider's benefit" situation. This makes it harder for young, ambitious, top-tier talent to move into the city. 5) Mom-and-pop landlords get beat up the most. The owners of a 1,000-unit building can absorb a few losses, while the retired firefighter and nurse who own a Brooklyn duplex cannot. In NYC, evicting a tenant is often a two-year process, filled with delays, red tape, and extreme headaches. NYC has made eviction nearly impossible, which is why screening upfront is so important. Imagine forcing a bank to issue a mortgage with either income verification, or a credit check, but not both ... ... and then effectively prohibiting that bank from foreclosing on the property. That would rock the credit market. Mortgages would either get more expensive, or they would dry up, or both. This is the rental equivalent.