Tenants can air their grievances at a series of events in every borough, where Mamdani administration officials say they’ll use what they hear to shape policies to protect renters. Registration is first-come, first-serve.

Mamdani with Dina Levy, his new housing commissioner, first announcing the renter-focused hearings last month. (Ed Reed, Mayoral Photography Office)

If you’re a renter with a complaint, the city wants to hear from you.

The Mamdani administration released details Tuesday for its upcoming “Rental Ripoff” hearings—events in every borough where tenants can share their experiences with city housing officials, who will use what they hear to shape policies to protect renters.

“You can’t fight for tenants without listening to them first,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a statement about the series, which will kick off Feb. 26 in Downtown Brooklyn and conclude on Staten Island’s North Shore on April 7. Additional hearings will be held in Long Island City on March 5, Fordham on March 11 and East Harlem on March 28.

Unlike hearings where all speakers stand up to testify briefly at a single microphone, the events will be set up more like a resource fair where attendees can record their testimony or sign up for one-on-one conversations with city officials. Capacity is limited, so participants must “pre-register” ahead of time for one of several time slots, and actual admission will be first-come, first-serve, a mayoral spokesperson said.

“We may not be able to accommodate everyone who pre-registers,” a message on the city’s registration website notes. Those unable to attend in person can email their testimony here.

The hearings will include staff from the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the Department of Buildings, and the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.

Officials say they’re looking to hear about “challenges ranging from mold, broken appliances and unsafe construction conditions to hidden fees and surprise charges.” The administration will publish a report three months after the last hearing “with recommendations for policy changes and action plans based on testimony.”

The administration’s flyer advertising the upcoming
hearings. (City Hall)

Mamdani first announced the events during his first few days in office, after running for election on a tenant-focused campaign where he pledged to freeze rents in stabilized units and to crackdown on unscrupulous property owners. Renters account for 69 percent of the city’s households, with roughly half living in rent-regulated apartments, according to a 2024 report from the comptroller’s office.

Still, the hearings rankled some landlord organizations, who criticized the administration’s flyer advertising the series as pitting tenants against building owners.

Real estate groups have fiercely opposed Mamdani’s rent freeze plan—and donated heavily against him during the election—saying it will make it harder for owners of rent-stabilized apartments to keep up with operating costs and make repairs.

“Framing his ‘rental ripoff’ hearings as a prize fight between tenants vs. landlords makes it disturbingly clear that this new Mayor’s housing policies are going to be driven by marquee-like politics, circus-like slogans, and us-versus-them divisiveness,” said Ann Korchak, board president of the Small Property Owners of New York (SPONY), said in a statement Tuesday.

To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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By PAUL WISEMAN, Associated Press Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 130,000 jobs last month, but government revisions cut 2024-2025 U.S. payrolls by hundreds of thousands.

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The unemployment rate fell to 4.3%, the Labor Department said Wednesday.

The report included major revisions that reduced the number of jobs created last year to just 181,000, weakest since the pandemic year of 2020, and less than half the previously reported 584,000.

The job market has been sluggish for months even though the economy is registering solid growth.

But the January numbers came in stronger than the 75,000 economists had expected. Healthcare accounted for nearly 82,000, or more than 60%, of last month’s new jobs. Factories added 5,000, snapping a streak of 13 straight months of job losses. The federal government shed 34,000 jobs.

Average hourly wages rose a solid 0.4% from December to January.

The unemployment rate fell from 4.4% in December as the number of employed Americans rose and the number of unemployed fell.

Weak hiring over the past year reflects the lingering impact of high interest rates, billionaire Elon Musk’s purge last year of the federal workforce and uncertainty arising from President Donald Trump’s erratic trade policies, which have left businesses unsure about hiring.

Dreary numbers have been coming in ahead of Wednesday’s report. Employers posted just 6.5 million job openings in December, fewest in more than five years.

Payroll processor ADP reported last week that private employers added 22,000 jobs in January, far fewer than economists had forecast. And the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that companies slashed more than 108,000 jobs last month, the most since October and the worst January for job cuts since 2009.

Several well-known companies announced layoffs last month. UPS is cutting 30,000 jobs. Chemicals giant Dow, shifting to more automation and artificial intelligence, is cutting 4,500 jobs. And Amazon is slashing 16,000 corporate jobs, its second round of mass layoffs in three months.

The sluggish job market doesn’t match the economy’s performance.

From July to September, America’s gross domestic product – its output of goods and services – galloped ahead at a 4.4% annual pace, fastest in two years. Consumer spending was strong, and growth got a boost from rising exports and tumbling imports. And that came on top of solid 3.8% growth from April through June.

Economists are puzzling out whether job creation will eventually accelerate to catch up to strong growth, perhaps as President Donald Trump’s tax cuts translate into big tax refunds that consumers start spending this year. But there are other possibilities. GDP growth could slow and fall into line with a weak labor market or advances in AI and automation could mean that the economy can roar ahead without creating many jobs.

Wednesday’s report included the government’s annual benchmark revisions, meant to take into account the more-accurate jobs numbers that employers report to state unemployment agencies. They cut 898,000 jobs from payrolls in the year ending March 2025.

Despite recent high-profile layoffs, the unemployment rate has looked better than the hiring numbers.

That is partly because President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown has reduced the number of foreign-born people competing for work.

As a result, the number of new jobs that the economy needs to create to keep the unemployment rate from rising – the “break-even’’ point — has tumbled. In 2023, when immigrants were pouring into the United States, it reached a high of 250,000, according to economist Anton Cheremukhin of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. By mid-2025, Cheremukhin found, it was down to 30,000. Researchers at the Brookings Institution believe it could now be as low as 20,000 and headed lower.

The combination of weak hiring but low unemployment means that most American workers are enjoying job security. But those who are looking for jobs – especially young people who can be competing at the entry level with AI and automation – often struggle to land one.

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press

MOSCOW (AP) — Moscow will observe the limits of the last nuclear arms pact with the United States that expired last week as long as it sees that Washington is doing the same, Russia’s top diplomat said Wednesday.

The New START treaty expired Feb. 5, leaving no restrictions on the two largest atomic arsenals for the first time in more than a half-century and fueling fears of an unconstrained nuclear arms race.

Russian President Vladimir Putin last year declared his readiness to stick to the treaty’s limits for another year if Washington followed suit, but U.S. President Donald Trump has argued that he wants China to be a part of a new pact — something Beijing has rejected.

Remarks to Russian lawmakers

Speaking Wednesday to the parliament’s lower house, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that even though the U.S. hasn’t responded to Putin’s offer, Russia will respect New START’s caps for as long as it sees that the U.S. observes them too.

In this photo released by The State Duma, The Federal Assembly of The Russian Federation Press Service, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gestures as he delivers his speech at the State Duma, the Lower House of the Russian Parliament in Moscow, on Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026. (The State Duma, The Federal Assembly of The Russian Federation Press Service via AP)

“The moratorium declared by the president will remain as long as the U.S. doesn’t exceed these limits,” Lavrov told lawmakers. “We will act in a responsible and balanced way on the basis of analysis of the U.S. military policies.”

He added that “we have reason to believe that the United States is in no hurry to abandon these limits and that they will be observed for the foreseeable future.”

“We will closely monitor how things are actually unfolding,” Lavrov said. “If our American colleagues’ intention to maintain some kind of cooperation on this is confirmed, we will work actively on a new agreement and consider the issues that have remained outside strategic stability agreements.”

US-Russia talks in Abu Dhabi

Lavrov’s statement followed a report by Axios claiming Russian and U.S. negotiators discussed a possible informal deal to observe the pact’s limits for at least six months during talks last week in Abu Dhabi. Asked to comment on the report, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that any such extension could only be formal, adding that “it’s hard to imagine any informal extension in this sphere.”

At the same time, Peskov confirmed that Russian and U.S. negotiators discussed future nuclear arms control in Abu Dhabi where delegations from Moscow, Kyiv and Washington held two days of talks on a peace settlement in Ukraine.

“There is an understanding, and they talked about it in Abu Dhabi, that both parties will take responsible positions and both parties realize the need to start talks on the issue as soon as possible,” Peskov said.

The limits of the New START treaty

New START, signed in 2010 by then-President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, was the last of a long series of agreements between Moscow and Washington to limit their nuclear arsenals, starting with SALT I in 1972.

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New START restricted each side to no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads on no more than 700 missiles and bombers deployed and ready for use. It was originally set to expire in 2021 but was extended for five years.

The pact envisioned sweeping on-site inspections to verify compliance, although they stopped in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and never resumed.

In February 2023, Putin suspended Moscow’s participation, saying Russia couldn’t allow U.S. inspections of its nuclear sites at a time when Washington and its NATO allies openly declared they wanted Moscow’s defeat in Ukraine. But the Kremlin also emphasized it wasn’t withdrawing from the pact altogether, pledging to respect its caps on nuclear weapons.

In September, Putin offered to keep the New START’s limits for another year to buy time for both sides to negotiate a successor agreement.

Even as New START expired, the U.S. and Russia agreed on Feb. 5 to reestablish high-level, military-to-military dialogue following a meeting between senior officials from both sides in Abu Dhabi, the U.S. military command in Europe said. The link was suspended in 2021 as relations grew increasingly strained before Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022.

The Associated Press receives support for nuclear security coverage from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Outrider Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

DULUTH — One person was killed in a shooting Tuesday in the Lincoln Park area.

The Duluth Police Department said officers responded to the reported shooting on the 400 block of Piedmont Avenue and found a male victim dead from apparent gunshot wounds.

The agency did not immediately specify the time of the incident, but issued a statement just after 4:30 p.m.

The man’s identity and further details were not immediately available, including whether any suspects have been detained or are being sought. Officers were on scene, and the public was being asked to stay away from the scene.

If it is deemed a homicide, it would be the first reported in the city in 2026. Duluth saw five homicides in 2025, including three involving gun violence.

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