New York's small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape

richwater•about 2 hours ago

Removing tiny pieces of red tape (a permit to sell ice cream) is a token gesture when he decided to install Lina Khan as Chair Of New York City Economic Development. Her entire reputation is built on being incredibly hostile to business.

General NIMBY-ism within the city combined with a ED chair who hates big business does not seem to bode well for the success of large projects.

ceejayoz•about 2 hours ago

> Her entire reputation is built on being incredibly hostile to business.

Her reputation is built on being incredibly hostile to malicious big business techniques that screw consumers and employees.

Banning non-competes, promoting right-to-repair, and requiring click-to-cancel were absolutely correct decisions that I laud her for.

richwater•about 1 hour ago

She also failed to secure wins when suing most big businesses because their strategy and evidentiary standards were subpar. Her ideological positions haven't really held up to court scrutiny.

ceejayoz•about 1 hour ago

> She also failed to secure wins…

You ought to make up your mind a little. Is she bad because of the policies she espouses, or the failure to implement them?

higginsniggins•about 2 hours ago

If anything, being against monopolies is actually pro small business because monopolies make it harder for small businesses to compete

1986•about 1 hour ago

> General NIMBY-ism

Mamdani explicitly campaigned on building more, especially housing, so not sure where you got that idea. NIMBYs show up at community board meetings, sure, but your post makes it sound like that's somehow the mayor's fault?

I'm also not sure if you're a New Yorker or not but the NYC EDC remit is a hell of a lot more than just "encourage big business". They run the ferry, for example, and other infrastructure projects

richwater•about 1 hour ago

> Mamdani explicitly campaigned on building more, especially housing

You can't claim to support building or improving housing while implementing rent freezes on 40ish% of all units in the city.

higginsniggins•7 minutes ago

Rent control is just one of many factors that affect an incentive to build. For example (and these are hypothetical numbers just to show the point), if rent control made developers 10 percent less likely to build but easing building restrictions made them 50 percent more likely, it would result in a net gain for building overall.

zbentley•44 minutes ago

Genuine question: why not?

There's pretty consistent reporting that rental building owners are earning considerable returns from rent. Rent freezes are one (of several) ways to encourage building owners to reinvest those returns to build/improve properties.

Whether it'll work at large scale is an unproven experiment (Detroit, Paris, Estonia, and many others all show competing possible futures here), but it doesn't seem hypocritical--not any more than, say, the idea of using high tax rates on businesses to encourage reinvestment of profits to drive growth/hiring/expansion.

ceejayoz•about 1 hour ago

Why not?

Wanna set your own rents? Build new housing!

victorbjorklund•about 2 hours ago

So what EXACTLY has she done since being installed that hurts small businesses owners?

qgin•about 2 hours ago

Make it easier to sell ice cream.

Make it harder to trap people in subscriptions with not viable way to cancel.

breakyerself•about 2 hours ago

Nice try Elon Musk. Lina Khan is fucking awesome.

New York's small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape

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