Following his inauguration Thursday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued an executive order to revitalize the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants and announced a series of upcoming public hearings for renters across the city to air their grievances.
Mamdani in the lobby of an apartment building in Brooklyn on his first day in office, where he announced plans to restore the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. (Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office).
Housing was the first item on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s checklist after he was sworn into office Thursday.
Standing in the lobby of a Brooklyn apartment building—where residents have been organizing for the city to intervene on their behalf, after their violation-riddled homes went up for bankruptcy auction—the new mayor pledged “to champion the cause of tenants too long ignored and homes too expensive.”
“On the day where so many rent payments are due, we will not wait to deliver action,” said Mamdani, speaking on Jan 1. “And we will stand up on behalf of the tenants of this city.”
It was a fitting first-day press conference for the new mayor, who campaigned for the last year on a promise to freeze rents for tenants in the city’s roughly 1 million rent stabilized apartments.
Here’s a rundown of what Mamdani did on housing during his first five days in office:
Revamping the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants
The new mayor signed an executive order to “revive” the office, which was launched by former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2019 but was largely dormant during Mayor Eric Adams’ administration, according to reporting from the Real Deal.
Under his administration, the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants will serve as a coordinating body to defend tenants rights and ensure habitable building conditions, Mamdani said. He appointed tenant organizer Cea Weaver to lead the office.
“The affordability agenda starts with the rent,” said Weaver, who emphasized that 70 percent of New Yorkers are renters.
Weaver previously ran the nonprofit Housing Justice for All, and helped lead the fight to pass the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act in 2019, which strengthened New York’s rent regulation laws.
She gave City Limits some insight into how she might lead the office during an interview last month.
“We are going to hold you accountable to operating [affordable housing] alongside the housing maintenance code. If you can’t do that, we are going to offer you money so that you can do it, but you have to make the homes affordable,” Weaver said. “And if you still don’t do it, we’re going to take it away from you. Making that pipeline more clear is what I hope the Mayor’s Office of Tenant Protection can do.”
Task forces focused on housing production
Mamdani signed two other executive orders on his first day establishing new task forces to help speed up residential construction, as the city faces its worst housing shortage in several decades.
Newly-appointed Deputy Mayor for Housing and Planning Leila Bozorg will oversee both efforts. The first will spend the next six months reviewing all city-owned properties to identify those where new housing could go. This will be “a deeper dive into the entire city’s inventory,” than previous, similar efforts, Bozorg said.
“Especially for sites that aren’t clearly available for housing right now,” she said. “So they may already have other city facilities on them, other public facilities or even private facilities that we’re in contract for.”
The second task force will work to remove bureaucratic and permitting barriers that increase housing costs and slow construction, according to the mayor.
Mamdani announcing Dina Levy, right, as his housing commissioner on Sunday. (Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
Citywide public hearings for renters
On Sunday, Mamdani announced a series of upcoming public hearings focused on getting feedback from renters across the five boroughs.
“New Yorkers will be invited to participate and to share the realities that animate their daily lives,” he said. “I want these hearings to expose the ugly underbelly of our city. The rats that scurry through hallways. The children that shiver in their beds in the dead of winter because the heat is off.”
The so-called “Rental Ripoff” hearings will take place over roughly the next three months—the new administration’s first 100 days. They will be led by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) alongside several other agencies, and officials will use what they hear “to craft policy recommendations that we will then implement and deliver across the city,” Mamdani said.
“These are hearings that will give New Yorkers an opportunity to testify in person as to the struggles that they have had to deal with, oftentimes in isolation,” he told reporters.
At the same Sunday press conference, Mamdani announced the appointment of Dina Levy as the new commissioner at HPD, the agency that oversees both the city’s new affordable housing production and enforces the housing maintenance code in existing buildings.
Levy, a longtime housing and tenant organizer, most recently served as the Senior Vice president of homeownership and community development at Homes and Community Renewal (HCR), New York State’s affordable housing agency.
“The work ahead will be hard,” Levy said Sunday. “We will need to increase the resources to build more affordable housing. We will need to try new innovative and sometimes scary innovations in order to overcome this crisis. And in many respects, we will need to embrace a willingness to rethink how we do business.”
Intervening on behalf of Pinnacle Tenants
Mamdani’s first press conference as mayor last week was hosted at a Prospect Lefferts Gardens building owned by Pinnacle Group, part of portfolio of 93 rent stabilized buildings that are in bad condition and up for a bankruptcy auction.
As City Limits previously reported, Pinnacle tenants have been calling for the city to preserve their buildings’ affordability and help them address dire maintenance issues, including 5,000 open housing code violations.
Mamdani tours an apartment at a Brooklyn building previously owned by the Pinnacle Group, and now in bankruptcy. (Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
Mamdani promised to answer that call, directing Steve Banks—the new administration’s recently appointed top lawyer, who previously served as the homeless services commissioner under de Blasio—to intervene in the auction on behalf of both tenants’ and the city’s interests.
How exactly that might play out isn’t entirely clear yet. Banks pointed to an earlier bankruptcy case he worked on in the late 1980s and early 1990s on behalf of the city and the Legal Aid Society, which involved two Manhattan buildings being used as homeless shelters. They were able to convert those properties into two permanently affordable apartment buildings, he said.
“That kind of creativity resides within the Law Department,” Banks told reporters. “We will be working with the Law Department lawyers to do what is in the best interest of New Yorkers in that bankruptcy case, the same as so many years ago, we came up with a pathway forward when people said it was not possible.”
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