New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced plans to hold a series of public “rental rip-off” hearings that will enable tenants to voice their frustration over their dilapidated rental housing buildings.
The New York Times reports the hearings will be used to gather research for a study that will be incorporated into the new mayor’s housing policies.
“I want these hearings to expose the ugly underbelly of our city,” Mamdani said. “The rats that scurry through hallways; the children that shiver in their beds in the dead of winter because the heat is off.”
The dates and locations for the hearings have yet to be scheduled. It is also unclear whether the landlords and property managers of the buildings in question will be able to present their experiences during these hearings.
Mamdani announced his plans during a press conference during a news conference at an apartment building in the Bronx where he also named Dina Levy, a tenants’ rights advocate and the former senior vice president of New York State’s Division of Homes and Community Renewal, as the new head of the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
“Dina will no longer be petitioning HPD from the outside,” Mamdani added. “She will now be leading it from the inside, delivering the kind of change that can transform lives.”
Photo: Bingjiefu He / Wikimedia Commons
Good job Mayor Manddami on starting this. As a landlord myself, I could never lease any home or rental unit it poor condition and it sickens me to hear some of the stories I get from residents from other places. Code enforcement is key!
so how long did Mamdani live in an affordable rent controlled apt and he didnt complain meanwhile his parents are rich and so is he……what a joke!!!!!
What a blissful world you live in. If I get your “logic”, Mamdani is a hypocrite for having lived in a rent controlled building and not living off his parents but his own income and responsibility, and consequently not permitted to highlight that others in NYC live in shitty apartments that are not fixed because of this? Makes no sense unless the angry is all you want
That’s a good step. However, the tenants should also be required to keep their units clean, pick up trash and clean common hallways. That’s what they do in Germany.
Wonder if any of these that are not maintained are under rent control?
Down with slumlords, for sure. But beware Mr Mayor, because good landlords are valuable housing providers who accept a lot of risk to take on often old properties, and have to invest much to update and upgrade and maintain these. You can’t then punish them and take away the reward of better rents. There is inflation in everything. What next, fixed prices for groceries, or gas, or other goods and services? This is the free market, let competition with other landlords control the rents.
Rent control has been a failure wherever it was tried.
Rent control IS a terrible idea, no support for that. However, as has been proven with the system of computer price fixing (the Pages controversy) the ‘free market’ cannot remain unfettered because they (the landlords) just cannot be fully trusted either.
The problem is always looking for smart regulation. Not ‘more’ or less’, just ‘smarter’, the ‘right kind’ or ‘amount’.
This is going to hilarious and sad to see NYC destroyed even further…for those of you who think this is a good idea, you don’t understand socialism or remember NYC from the 70s and 80s. NYC will be a 3rd world country before this clown is done. This clown was elected by Karens (see the voting data) who are fools but will never admit they were wrong.
I’m no fan of New York City (too many jerks, false sense of superiority). However, people have been predicting its ‘downfall’ almost my entire life, if not longer. It hasn’t happened, and it won’t. It survived cousin-lovin’ Giuliani, Cuomo Redux, Addams…
The hilarious and sad ‘third world countries’ within the United States are places like Alabama (more cousin-lovin’!), Arkansas, Mississippi, Floriduh, Texas, Kansas, pick a Dakota, any Dakota…drive through them…heck, drive through Tennessee outside of the Nashville Metro area…see the near-ghost towns with their abandoned gas stations STILL sporting chrome-trimmed pumps left over from decades ago. That isn’t happening in New York City…
There are tenants who Do NOT CLEAN and BLAME the house provider so DO NOT PAY the rent. Most seem never to have $$ for rent
That implicates the landlord for not doing enough due diligence getting those people in their property in the first place. You might not know if they will be ‘clean’, but you can definitely have standards for income coming in. Every landlord I deal with does this, and none (so far) have ever had a problem minus one scam artist that even ran off with his company owners truck. Write a tight lease if cleanliness is an issue, with fines and check-ups and allowing for easier evictions when they violate terms. Agents and owners get lazy and stupid about how to write things up. No imagination. As long as it doesn’t violate the law, anything can be put into a contract (which is what a lease obviously is).
Bad renters and bad landlords whine over things they control, and the good ones suffer even when they do things ‘right’. None of that is new.
Making it harder for landlords to feel safe and protected while renting their homes is a real issue. Its super easy for one bad renter to cause a landlord to loose their home and be bogged down by debt, essentially loosing everything in the process. Imposing well-meaning laws to protect renters from greedy slumlords of multiunit buildings is the right thing to do but will probably just end up hurting mom and pop landlords and further eroding the middle class. (The same way restricting airbnbs hurt people trying to pay their mortgages that were barely getting by.) There needs to be a distinction between corporate enterprises that gobble up property and ruin neighborhoods, and people who were once renters, trying to get a foot up and pull themselves up to the middle class by owning a property that ends up being valuable to the housing market (thats a win/win). Demonizing all home owners is stupid, many homeowners are previous renters, who now in a sense just pay their rent (mortgage) to the banks, and they have the most to loose. This is my situation, I have provided a very nice rental for the community at a good price, but I am thinking about selling my rental because its too much headache and I don’t feel protected at all. Over regulating in favor of renters can actually have a reverse effect on rental housing on the market, when landlords decide not to rent anymore. There needs to be fairness in housing laws that go both ways, not all renters are angels, and there needs to be different laws for corporate entities with 100’s of rentals and individuals with a couple of rentals.
Hard to take you too seriously when you pulled the ‘poor AirBnB’ owners card. The vast majority of those are totally investors who are looking to illegally run a hotel, one room at a time. I know, because my town had to ban them and the excuses and lies (they were all caught in lies because the village did their homework) about their properties (some had four different properties in town but claimed they lived in ALL of them). This is not some resort town, it is city-adjacent, but not next to downtown by any means. It is just a blue collar suburb. However they were renting out homes and condos for parties, then claiming (repeatedly) they had NO idea it would happen (again). Each of those folks that came to the meeting would (and did) ALL classify themselves as ‘mom and pop’ and ‘small business owners’. Also, how many people are ‘just barely getting by’ in their own home that they are ALSO renting out as AirBnB? If they are just getting by on their INVESTMENT mortgage, they invested poorly, that isn’t anybody else’s fault. They were also not angels.
Renters can suck, and so can property owners. We all need to stop pretending one side is ‘the problem’.
Considering how many rental units have been gobbled up the past ten years, the problem does not seem to be people getting OUT of the landlord-business. The real issue is the current regime giving away tax breaks to those mega-corporations so they have endless money to price out the mom-and-pops and make renting nearly unaffordable. That isn’t from some local government trying to make sure landlords clean up their trash and mow their lawn.
This is great but at the same time however I hope you will also help landlords…we have people sub letting in rent controlled and stabilized apartments and we have people who make more money than allowed…etc etc…its needs to be a 2 way street…I hope you will be the first TWO SIDED mayor…help the tenants who need it and are being abused but also help the landlords clean up the messes….I am a property manager…taking care of buildings is easy…its all about preventative maintenance…you also have to efficient up the maintenance witnin the city departments
It should definitely go both ways. Clean out the abusive tenants, because they hurt the system, and force the active slumlords to clean up their end of things.
I got out of property management because I had too many owners that wanted to milk the cow dry, but never let it feed. Roofs were patched forever, never replaced. Security doors left unlocked when somebody broke the knob. Security lights unfixed because ‘it was too hard to rewire’. Leaks left to perpetually drip, just getting some pipes rodded out every so often instead of a true fix. They want the money, but never the responsibility.
There are good landlords and good tenants, but the bad ones are more than people like to admit, and they hurt everyone.
Update: ““We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” Mamdani said to his supporters, who got their first taste of collectivism in practice when their “block party” turned into a miserable affair without food or bathrooms.”
On Monday, an old video of Mamdani’s new tenant director Cea Weaver surfaced on social media. In the clip, Weaver called for the seizure of private property and said that white people will especially feel the impact.
The whole Democrat party is evil and populated by useful idiots and Stalins.
One could just as easily say ‘The whole GOP is evil and run by Hitlers.’ One of those is, in fact closer to being true, but it would require a true understanding of history and government types (by actual definition, not what a biased news source fed its mindless mob) to figure out which.
Nobody is going to seize private property, at least not before the United States’ military illegally seizes…I don’t know…Greenland. People need to settle down, use a few synapses for critical thinking, not rote regurgitating of talking points from cable channels that literally had to pay out billions for getting caught lying (amongst other things).
“It is also unclear whether the landlords and property managers of the buildings in question will be able to present their experiences during these hearings.”
I seriously doubt they will even want to show up. The good landowners will not tenants there complaining, and the bad ones will not show their face because they are truly scumbags.
The real question will be how people running the show now will fix things from the ‘inside’. Code enforcement is key. If they do not have enough inspectors, nothing can really improve. If they do not crack down on bad apples, the whole barrel will continue to spoil. Landlords have the bigger ‘voice’, money. Usually. Things got so bad in New York City, they elected a guy that outright told people he had some kind of out there ideas and the majority shrugged and said, “Well, nothing else has worked…” It might also fail, obviously. I’m not falling in love with this dude in the least, but I’m not writing him off just for having different ideas. I’m a results person. If there are better living outcomes for tenants, and land owners can still make money to make it worth it, everybody wins.
Too often, people in real estate make it about winners and losers and ‘getting the other side’…but that isn’t the right way to think of deals. Let us hope this all works out for the best, instead of defaulting to wishing for the worst just because he looks a certain way or comes from a different background. That is all subjective perspective. If it fails, then we know. If it succeeds, then we know something else.
Behind every slumlord was a nice landlord that got walked over too many times. There are a lot of tenants out there who have zero respect for property, others around them, and landlords even when they’re nice and generous. I’m always super respectful and kind toward everyone no matter the position and some tenants will basically take that and behave like the trash they are anyways. There are far more slum tenants than there are slumlords because most landlords want to maintain equity value in the property.