Part II - Soft Collectivization: What History Teaches About Government-Directed Property and Why COPA Fits the Pattern
A 3 Part Series on NY City's Slide Into Communism by Kim Hermance & Danielle Cassase, Co-Founders & Co-Directors of Project CIVICA
Property is not merely an economic asset. It is a form of social power. Who controls property determines who bears risk, who reaps reward, and who retains independence. Across history, societies that replace voluntary property exchange with state-directed allocation, even gradually and with benevolent intent, have produced strikingly consistent outcomes.
The Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), as passed by the New York City Council and later vetoed, reflects early structural features of these systems. Understanding why requires examining not rhetoric, but history, incentives, and governance design.
What Collectivization Actually Means
Collectivization is often misunderstood as outright nationalization. In practice, it more commonly appears through incremental mechanisms: state-directed allocation of ownership, priority rights granted to favored entities, restricted exit for private owners, and procedural barriers that replace voluntary exchange. These systems rarely abolish ownership overnight. Instead, they constrain it—gradually transforming owners into participants in a government-managed process.
Ideological Framing and Administrative Direction
Policy outcomes are shaped not only by statutory text but by the ideological frameworks of those charged with implementation. In his inaugural address on January 1, 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani contrasted what he described as “cold, rugged individualism” with the “warmth of collectivism,” explicitly framing collective control as morally preferable to individual ownership. The relevance of such statements is not rhetorical. They reflect an explicit rejection of private ownership as a social good, a premise that directly informs policy mechanisms that subordinate individual property rights to collective or state-directed control.
Consistent with that framing, Mayor Mamdani appointed Cea Weaver as Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. Weaver is a longtime tenant organizer and a publicly identified member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Following her appointment, past public statements resurfaced in which she described private property—particularly homeownership—as a mechanism of oppression and urged supporters to “elect more communists” and to “seize private property.” While some posts were later deleted, the statements were widely circulated and discussed in the press.
These views are relevant because they illuminate the moral framework guiding policy design. When policymakers explicitly reject private ownership as a social good, laws that subordinate individual property rights to collective or state-directed outcomes are not aberrations; they are logical expressions of that worldview.
The Historical Record of Collectivization
Across the twentieth century, collectivization was attempted repeatedly across diverse cultures, economies, and political systems. The outcomes were remarkably consistent.
Soviet Union (1929–1933): Under Joseph Stalin, forced agricultural collectivization eliminated private farms, criminalized resistance, and consolidated land into state-run collectives. Peasants were stripped of property, livestock, and autonomy. Resistance was met with deportation or execution. The result was catastrophic famine, particularly the Ukrainian Holodomor, which killed an estimated 5–7 million people.
China (1958–1962): Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward abolished private farming in favor of People’s Communes. Production quotas were politically inflated, leading the state to seize grain that did not exist. Farmers were prohibited from retaining food. The resulting famine killed an estimated 30–45 million people—the deadliest famine in human history.
Cambodia (1975–1979): The Khmer Rouge eliminated all private property and forcibly collectivized agriculture. Markets, currency, and private ownership were abolished. Approximately one-quarter of the population died from execution, starvation, or forced labor.
North Korea: A fully collectivized system of land and food production produced chronic shortages for decades. In the 1990s, the regime’s rigid control and inability to adapt contributed to a famine that killed hundreds of thousands, with some estimates exceeding one million deaths.
Ethiopia (1970s–1980s): Socialist villagization programs displaced millions of rural residents into collective settlements. Combined with price controls and state procurement, these policies contributed to mass starvation killing over one million people.
Cuba (post-1959): Nationalization of land and housing eliminated private markets and price signals. The result was chronic housing shortages, widespread disrepair, rationing, and infrastructure decay that persists more than six decades later.
Why Collectivization Fails: Structural Causes
These outcomes were not accidents or the result of uniquely bad actors. Collectivization fails for structural reasons:
First, incentives collapse. When individuals cannot benefit from better decisions, harder work, or long-term investment, productivity predictably declines.
Second, centralized planning replaces local knowledge. Bureaucracies cannot replicate the granular, real-time information embedded in decentralized ownership, leading to misallocation, waste, and shortages.
Third, responsibility is severed from outcomes. When no individual or entity clearly bears the cost of failure, errors compound, data becomes politicized, and correction is delayed or suppressed.
Fourth, collectivization rests on flawed assumptions about human behavior. It presumes people will consistently act against self-interest for abstract collective goals. When this fails, systems escalate control and coercion to enforce compliance.
COPA as Soft Collectivization
COPA is not mass collectivization. It does not abolish private ownership. But it reflects the same underlying logic. By granting certain nonprofit entities a mandatory right of first refusal on private property sales, COPA substitutes state-directed allocation for voluntary exchange.
Historically, collectivization has rarely begun with outright expropriation. In the Soviet Union, early land reforms preserved nominal ownership while imposing compulsory procurement quotas and state-preferred distribution. In Eastern Europe, postwar housing systems retained formal private titles but constrained sale, pricing, and transfer, producing chronic shortages and deterioration.
In Cuba, private ownership of housing technically persisted after nationalization, but exit was restricted, transfers required approval, and market pricing was replaced by administrative allocation. Over time, maintenance collapsed, informal markets flourished, and accountability disappeared.
These systems did not fail because ownership vanished overnight. They failed because ownership lost its core attributes: voluntary exchange, clear responsibility, and the ability to exit. COPA reflects these early-stage features by inserting state-favored intermediaries into private transactions and conditioning exit on procedural compliance.
This structure adds uncertainty, delay, and friction to housing transactions without clearly assigning responsibility for long-term maintenance, reinvestment, or failure. When owners cannot easily exit, incentives to invest decline.
Housing markets are highly sensitive to incentives. Even modest distortions—restricted exit, delayed sales, procedural uncertainty—reduce transactions, suppress supply, and ultimately undermine affordability and stability over time.
Governance Without Accountability
Although COPA is initiated by public authority, the most consequential decisions occur between private nonprofit entities and property owners, outside meaningful public oversight. Valuations, financing terms, and internal deliberations are not subject to public open-records laws.
Public power compels participation. Private entities control outcomes. Responsibility is diffused. This governance structure mirrors patterns seen repeatedly in collectivized systems, where power is exercised indirectly, insulated from correction, and shielded from the public.
Conclusion
Collectivization rarely announces itself as coercion. It arrives framed as protection, fairness, or compassion. History shows that systems matter more than intentions. When ownership is diluted and exit constrained, decline follows predictably.
COPA should therefore be evaluated not as a moral statement, but as a structural experiment one whose early features closely resemble systems that have failed before.
References
1.Applebaum, Anne. Red Famine.
2. Dikötter, Frank. Mao’s Great Famine.
3. Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime.
4.Natsios, Andrew. The Great North Korean Famine.
5. de Waal, Alex. Evil Days.
6. Pipes, Richard. Property and Freedom.
7. New York City Council, Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), as passed December 18, 2025 (vetoed).
¹ Weaver quotation sourced from archived social media posts and contemporaneous reporting, including New York Post (Jan. 2026), City & State New York (Jan. 2026), and Gothamist coverage of mayoral appointments
On point.
This kind of legislation is leading NYC in a direct path to communism. It is so strange that after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and what was believed by many to be the end of communism it is literally come to the United States. A country with a constitution that guarantees to each state a republican form of government (article IV section 4).
It is a though the dark specter of communism was unleashed from beyond the walls of Berlin to the rest of the world.