Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Rental Ripoff hearings start this week. Designed to reveal the problems that residential tenants face when dealing with brokers and landlords, the hearings will give renters a chance to vent about some of the turmoil they experience.
Organized by the Office of Mass Engagement under Commissioner Tascha Van Auken, the hearings are meant to highlight some of the reasons for New York City’s ongoing housing crisis. Both tenants and landlords are welcome to participate, but tenant testimony is expected to predominate.
The hearings will look at the problems in the city’s rental market, such as surprise fees, threats of landlord retaliation, racial and economic discrimination, illegal evictions, and cases of building maintenance neglect.
“NYCHA tenants are, of course, going to be allowed to take part in attending,” said Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. She emphasized that while the “purpose of the hearings is to seek policy guidance from New Yorkers about how we can better regulate the private market to serve their needs,” senior NYCHA staff will also be present to log complaints, open service requests, and make sure that conditions in NYCHA buildings are addressed.
With private-market landlords, heat complaints are the dominant issue, Allia Mohamed, CEO and cofounder of Openigloo, NYC’s largest crowdsourced tenant review site, told the AmNews. Openigloo tracks tenant concerns, and Mohamed said heat outages, mold, and unresponsive landlords rank among the most common complaints.
On Openigloo, renters read and share reviews about their rental experiences and can access city data about properties they are considering moving into. As Mohamed explained, Openigloo provides context that city data can’t always capture: “If you call 311 and you file a complaint on heat and the city inspector comes a week later, but now the weather is warm, they’re not able to actually convert that complaint into a violation,” she said. “On an Openigloo review, you might get reviews from the tenants [who] live in the building that give a little bit more context to those complaints.”
Weaver also suggested that the Rental Ripoff hearings will be able to gather more detailed data that can lead to action. “We’re not looking to do in-person 3-1-1,” she said. “We’re looking to improve the ways in which violations get recorded and then ultimately resolved … We’re looking to collect more information about the ways that tenants are asked to pay monthly fees –– whether that’s a credit card processing fee, whether that’s a pet fee, [or] a fee because your family makeup changed,” she said. “I think that both landlords and renters have an interest in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our housing inspection system.”
Borough locations for the hearings have not yet been named, but the dates have been set: Downtown Brooklyn will host the first hearing on Thursday, Feb. 26 (5:30–8:30 p.m.); Long Island City, Queens, Thursday, March 5 (5:30–8:30 p.m.); Fordham, the Bronx, Wednesday, March 11 (5:30–8:30 p.m.); East Harlem, Manhattan, Saturday, March 28 (11 a.m.–5 p.m.); and North Shore, Staten Island, Tuesday, April 7 (5:30–8:30 p.m.).
At each hearing location, there will also be a resource fair to link tenants with support services, and one-on-one meetings with agency commissioners will give tenants the chance to have their stories influence policy suggestions. “The hearing will have an on-site resource fair where agency partners such as our Tenant Support Unit, will be available to help with individual issues. However, the goal of these hearings is to uncover policy recommendations to be able to more effectively and systematically protect tenants in their homes,” the city’s announcement for the hearings explained.
Those interested in testifying at a Rental Ripoff hearing can sign up by emailing rentalripoff@cityhall.nyc.gov. Anyone unable to attend in person can submit digital testimony via email, or record their testimony at the hearings.