In his first few days in office, Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order directing city agencies to hold “Rental Ripoff” hearings across the city. The hearings will be held in every borough during the mayor’s first 100 days in office and will give New Yorkers a chance to speak out about the challenges they face as tenants.
Large and small property owners will also be encouraged to testify at the hearings, but tenant testimony will likely predominate, since 69% of the city’s households are renters and Mamdani has vowed to address the city’s ongoing housing crisis.
Almost every city resident — born-and-bred New Yorkers, transplants, and long-term residents — can recount an apartment rental nightmare story. Securing a home in New York City often means avoiding hidden rental fees; treading lightly or facing retaliation from landlords or supers; experiencing discrimination or illegal evictions; living without heat or hot water; or giving in and living with rats and roaches in dilapidated conditions.
“Yeah. I mean, the rip-offs are real and I think the framing of it has to be too,” said Imani Henry, founder and lead organizer of Equality for Flatbush (E4F), which engages in anti-gentrification and tenant advocacy work.
So far, E4F has not advised the tenants it advocates for to participate in the upcoming city hearings. The organization has some pause about which tenants’ concerns might be prioritized. “That’s the thing I’m most concerned about, the framing of it,” said Henry. “I think it’s important that it also be focused on longstanding tenants, people who have lived in their apartments 30, 40 years, who are not getting services or who are being conned into different things, because we’re seeing that. And also the framing of new people, particularly, younger people, not just the people who are new to New York.”
The “Rental Ripoff” hearings will be conducted by the newly established Office of Mass Engagement (OME) under Commissioner Tascha Van Auken. OME will work alongside the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), the Department of Buildings, the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, and the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.
Specific dates and locations for the hearings have not yet been announced, but they are expected to feature testimony from tenants, landlords, tenant organizations, social service agencies, advocacy groups, legal service providers, and property managers.
Few landlords or landlord associations have issued official statements or confirmed that they will participate in the hearings. But Edward Garcia, the director of Housing and Community Development at the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NWBCCC), noted that his organization works with for-profit and nonprofit developers who own affordable housing projects, as well as private owners who often need assistance maintaining their properties. NWBCCC helps these property owners when they apply for grants that will improve their buildings and benefit tenants. “We have been an institution that has done primarily tenant organizing, but in our history and in our current work, there’s a lot of work that engages private developers, nonprofit developers and private owners as well, who also have a commitment to providing better housing for their tenants,” Garcia said.
Julie Colon, NWBCCC’s lead housing organizer, says she is urging tenants to take the mic at the Rental Ripoff hearings. “It’s always important that government agencies … listen to tenants’ rights and the people who are directly impacted by those issues,” Colon said. She emphasized that while New York law prohibits landlord retaliation, some landlords might try to harass and intimidate tenants who want to testify, and that could scare many people off.
But Colon points to NWBCCC’s ongoing push for the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA) — a community-controlled property ownership model — as the kind of policy change that could come from investigations like the Rental Ripoff hearings. “Tenants have the right across New York to organize, and it’s illegal for landlords to retaliate against them. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop things from happening, but hearings like the Rental Ripoff hearings can and should lead to policy change,” she said.