On a chilly afternoon in January, the newly elected mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, stood at a portable lectern in the lobby of a large apartment building in Jackson Heights, Queens. He had come to announce that the city had settled a lawsuit against A&E Real Estate, the owner of the building, for violations at 14 of its properties. But really he had come to send a message, both to the city’s landlords and to the constituency that had just swept him into office: New York City’s tenants.
“For years, A&E has operated with callous disregard for those residing in its properties,” the mayor said. “This is not just a failure to serve those to whom it holds an obligation. It is overt cruelty to tens of thousands of New Yorkers.”
It was an unusual scene: The mayor of New York using the occasion of a relatively small settlement — $2.1 million — to call out one of the city’s largest landlords inside one of the landlord’s own buildings. When it comes to the matter of housing, Mamdani is practicing a very different kind of politics.
There’s an adage in mainstream Democratic circles that property owners vote at higher rates than renters, and therefore you should campaign and govern for owners. Mamdani has made a different calculation. New York has long been a city of renters — 69 percent of its residents don’t own their homes — and he aimed his candidacy at them, promising to “Freeze the Rent,” a phrase that quickly became the campaign’s trademark slogan, the progressive version of “Build the Wall.” Citywide, he dominated precincts with the largest share of renters, not only the poor but also younger, higher-income renters, including residents of the so-called Commie Corridor, the neighborhoods across Queens and northern Brooklyn that formed his base.
The leaseholder of a rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queens, Mamdani was the first tenant to be elected mayor of New York City since Ed Koch in 1977. (Even the progressive Bill de Blasio owned a million-dollar brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn — and, for that matter, a small rental property.) More to the point, Mamdani was the first politician in the city’s modern era to tap into the political power of the city’s tenant class. Now that he was in office, it was time to transition from campaigning for renters to governing for them. And a large, rent-stabilized apartment building in the densely populated working-class neighborhood of Jackson Heights was a natural place to start.
Standing behind him that afternoon was Cea Weaver, the 37-year-old head of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. A self-identified socialist and veteran tenants’ rights activist, Weaver was one of a few advisers who had suggested to Mamdani that he make a public example of A&E. She was familiar with the company from her years in the trenches of the city’s housing wars and had even organized at some of its buildings. A&E’s executive chairman, Douglas Eisenberg, had always been an intriguing figure to her. He was part of the city’s powerful real estate community — the developers who saw themselves as the builders and shapers of New York — but he wasn’t a builder. “He’s a member of that group, but he’s an outlier,” Weaver told me. “He’s a straight-up slumlord.”
Entire books have been written about the complex swirl of economic forces and political decisions that produced New York’s affordable-housing crisis. But at the end of the day, the crisis can be reduced to the gulf that separates the ownership class from the tenant class. And that gulf can be reduced to a single word: rent. The rent is the crisis. Only 1.4 percent of the city’s apartments are now available for rent, and a mere 0.4 percent of those apartments cost less than $1,100 per month. More than half of New York’s renters spend in excess of 30 percent of their income on rent — qualifying them as “rent burdened,” according to the definition used by most economists. A third spend more than 50 percent. Mamdani has a plan to build a lot more affordable housing, but that will take years. He wants to deliver for struggling tenants now, and it’s Weaver’s job to figure out how.
Most cities have only a smattering of rent-regulated housing units. In New York, more than 40 percent of the rental apartments, a million or so units, are stabilized, which puts the city in a unique position. It has what is effectively a dial to exert at least some measure of control over the housing market. These apartments are the legacy of a city with a long history of crowded slums, tenant activism and progressive politics. But they are now at the center of what may be the defining debate of Mamdani era.
To some, they are a precious natural resource, a bulwark against the city’s ever-growing imbalance between housing costs and wage growth — the only thing allowing many thousands of middle-class New Yorkers to live in the city and preventing many thousands more from winding up in shelters or on the streets. To others, these apartments, with their artificially suppressed, market-distorting rents, are a big reason the city is facing an affordable housing crisis in the first place. It’s a debate that mirrors a larger one on the left as a new generation of progressives challenges the free-market orthodoxy of older, more moderate Democrats.
New York may be a city of renters, but it is also the beating heart of real estate capital. There is no clearer demonstration of power in New York than developing a large piece of property. Mamdani has visions of developing a lot of it — starting with 12,000 homes over a rail yard in Sunnyside, Queens, a plan that he has asked a former New York City real estate developer and Queens native, President Trump, to help make a reality. The real estate industry plays an outsize role in the city’s economy. In New York’s postindustrial incarnation, real estate appreciation powers its financial growth: Real estate taxes are by far the city government’s single largest source of income, accounting for as much as 50 percent of its tax revenue, which has given the industry an elevated stature in New York.
The battle between reformers like Weaver and owners like Eisenberg has long defined the politics of the city, determining how its scarcest and most valuable resource — its land — is used. But under Mamdani, the balance of power is shifting, perhaps significantly.
“We got used to the landlords and developers — the ones who build the city and provide its tax base — being the protagonists and to the tenants being a special interest group,” says Samuel Stein, a housing-policy analyst at the Community Service Society in New York. “Now the tenants are the protagonists — they are a large majority of the city and the ones experiencing the conditions in its buildings. And the landlords and developers are the special interests.”
The first thing to know about Douglas Eisenberg is that, whatever the new mayor’s staff might say, he doesn’t think he’s a slumlord. “We got into this to make a reasonable return, but also to do the right thing,” Eisenberg says of his entry into the city’s rent-stabilized market roughly 15 years ago. “We wanted to find buildings that had not been taken care of — capital-starved; the bigger the mess, the better — so we could roll up our sleeves and do the work and turn the building around.”
I didn’t expect Eisenberg to agree to speak with me when I reached out to him in late January, and his publicist initially advised him not to. But he was eager to tell his side of the story and invited me to meet him at his company’s office, which occupies the 17th floor of a modern skyscraper in Midtown, around the corner from Trump Tower. I have been writing about the city for many years and have met a lot of swaggering real estate moguls along the way. Eisenberg has a very different demeanor — soft-spoken, even earnest. He had clearly spent a lot of time preparing for my visit and brought out a folder of documents to illustrate the existential problem his business is now facing.
Eisenberg presides over one of the biggest portfolios of rent-stabilized properties in the city. His company owns a total of about 16,000 apartments in around 180 buildings across every borough except Staten Island, including the Riverton Houses, a historic middle-class housing complex in Harlem where the former mayor David Dinkins lived for many years.
This year has not gotten off to a great start for Eisenberg. Like many developers and landlords, he donated generously to Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral campaign, giving $125,000 to one of his political action committees, hoping for a miracle. After the election, Eisenberg moved quickly to settle the city’s lawsuit against his company, signing the agreement on the last day of the Adams administration. He assumed that he had at least put that matter behind him. Instead, he was soon accused of “overt cruelty” by the new mayor in the lobby of one of his own buildings.
Five days after the mayor’s news conference in Jackson Heights, the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, announced the release of his annual “worst landlord” list outside another one of A&E’s buildings in Brooklyn: Two of the company’s executives — its president and chief operating officer — took the top two spots. According to Williams, those two executives were cited for a record 8,761 violations in 2025. On top of all this, A&E is facing at least a dozen lawsuits from tenants who have accused it of overcharging renters, failing to deal with a host of problems in its buildings — rampant infestations, black mold, broken elevators, chronic leaks and more — and harassing tenants in an effort to push them out of their apartments. And Eisenberg says he is still in the process of trying to renegotiate the terms of a $506 million loan for a group of properties that he defaulted on last year.
Eisenberg, who is 55, grew up in Manhattan, attending the Trinity School and then Cornell University. He spent two college summers in the early 1990s working for Mayor Dinkins, but when he graduated from college in 1995, he joined his father’s real estate company. Sixteen years later, he struck out on his own, forming A&E on the kitchen table of his Upper East Side apartment. He and his co-founder had a simple business plan, one that they believed would be both profitable and socially redeeming: They would buy neglected rental buildings, fix them up and raise the rents.
At the time, New York State’s rent-stabilization laws were designed to incentivize owners to invest in their properties. For example, if Eisenberg spent $40,000 on a given unit, he would be entitled to raise the rent $1,000. Upgrades to buildings — like replacing a boiler or a roof — could also be passed along to tenants in the form of individual rent increases. There were vacancy bonuses too: Whenever a rent-stabilized apartment became empty, he could increase the rent by up to 20 percent. In addition, there were the incremental annual increases typically approved by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, which regulates the pricing for stabilized housing. Once the price of an apartment crossed a certain threshold — the number varied from year to year, based on a variety of factors — it was removed from the rent-stabilization system, and he could charge whatever he thought the market would bear.
But in 2019, the state’s rent-stabilization laws abruptly changed, and A&E’s business model soon collapsed. That year, a newly elected slate of progressive legislators led the passage of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act. Under the new law, Eisenberg could no longer raise rents when apartments were vacated, and strict caps were placed on his ability to pass along a percentage of his expenditures to tenants. Rather than adding 1/60th of what he spent on apartment improvements to the rent, he could now add only 1/180th. And instead of adding 6 percent of what he spent on building upgrades to individual rents, he could add only 2 percent. It also became much more difficult for him to take action against tenants who failed to pay their rent; the new law significantly slowed the eviction process and empowered housing courts to postpone evictions for up to a year.
Even as Eisenberg’s ability to generate income from these buildings was being squeezed, his expenses were soaring. Since 2019, he says, the taxes on his rent-stabilized portfolio have gone up 109 percent. The water and sewer costs in these buildings have risen 50 percent. And his insurance premiums have gone up a staggering 239 percent — a stark reflection of insurers’ declining faith in the health of the city’s rent-stabilized housing stock. During this same period, the average rent in his rent-stabilized portfolio rose only 15 percent.
Foreclosures of rent-stabilized buildings are already spiking across the city. Greg Corbin, a distressed-real-estate expert at Northgate Real Estate Group, estimates that they were up 30 to 35 percent last year. He expects foreclosures on rent-stabilized buildings to reach record levels in 2026. And even these numbers may understate the challenge that landlords are facing. Many lenders are doing everything they can to avoid foreclosing on these properties because they have no desire to take possession of them; their value as financial assets is in steep decline, and because they are generally old buildings with spotty records of capital investment, they are expensive to maintain. Even in the face of the housing crisis, there are an estimated 50,000 empty apartments in the city — “ghost apartments” that owners say aren’t worth investing capital in because the rents are too low to recover their expenses.
Facing mounting losses and the prospect of defaults and foreclosures, landlords say that they’ve had no choice but to cut back on maintenance in ways both large and small. Eisenberg, for instance, stopped buying expensive rodent repellent trash bags at his properties, with predictable consequences. He acknowledges that violations are rising at his buildings, but he also told me that he has been trying to address them — an inherently slow process because he has to wait for the city to send building inspectors to his properties who often need permission from tenants to access their apartments. And Eisenberg says that he has never tried to push a tenant out of a building in order to drive up the rent; he only undertakes eviction proceedings as a last resort, he says, when tenants fall months behind on their rent.
Eisenberg walked me though the finances of a representative building in Queens to demonstrate the untenability of his situation. A&E purchased the building, which has around 175 apartment units, in 2013 for $25 million. The company borrowed $17.5 million, or 70 percent of the total purchase price, to complete the deal. The building was in bad shape and required about $3 million in repairs, including a new roof, a new boiler and major facade work. In 2014, A&E’s first full year of ownership, the building’s net income was about $1.2 million. In 2018 — before the new stabilization laws went into effect — it was $1.7 million. By last year, net income had fallen to less than half that, $681,000 — not nearly enough to cover the building’s annual $1.2 million in debt-service payments.
Maybe most striking of all is the fact that the property is $1.7 million in arrears. Nearly half of its tenants are behind on their rent — some by many months. The building is now worth about 30 percent of what A&E paid for it 13 years ago. “After 2019, we spent a lot of time trying to tinker with our model to try to figure out a way to make it work,” Eisenberg said. “I think what you’ve seen is that it’s impossible to make it work. The math is just the math.”
The math may soon get even worse. Starting this month, the city’s Rent Guidelines Board will hold its annual public hearings to debate how much landlords of stabilized buildings will be allowed to raise rents — the mayor’s opportunity to turn his campaign promise into policy. Less than two years ago, as a member of the New York State Assembly, Mamdani was arrested while protesting the board’s decision to approve an increase of 2.75 percent for one-year leases and 5.25 percent for two-year leases. Now, a majority of the nine-member board are his appointees, making even a small increase unlikely.
“We are in such deep trouble right now, and people don’t understand it,” says Kenny Burgos, a schoolmate of Mamdani’s at the Bronx High School of Science who runs the New York Apartment Association, a lobbying group representing owners and landlords. “What is the value of a rent-stabilized building right now? It sounds callous to say it, but the next owner has just bought New York City dirt that happens to have a building on top of it.”
The affordable-housing crisis is a national phenomenon: Nearly half of all renters across the country are now considered “rent burdened.” But it is also a generational phenomenon. About half of the young participants in a recent New York Times/Siena poll said their primary concern was affordable housing — and that they worried about it more than every other expense item combined, including retirement, health care, education, bills, transportation and food. In 2014, the median age of a first-time home-buyer in the United States was 31. Last year, it reached a record high of 40.
Property ownership has long been viewed as a pillar of American wealth generation, but to an increasing number of young Americans, the notion of ever owning a home has become pretty much inconceivable. This is especially true of young Americans who live in New York City, where the median apartment sells for close to $800,000. One way to look at Mamdani’s rise — and, in turn, Cea Weaver’s — is as the coming-of-age of a generation that identifies not with owners but with tenants. “My generation does not see homeownership as an attainable thing,” Weaver told me when we met for the first time in January at City Hall.
Weaver grew up in Rochester, N.Y., and attended Bryn Mawr College, where she wrote her thesis about mass public-housing experiments in the United States and Germany. After graduating in 2010, she moved to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to become a tenants organizer. It was the aftermath of the mortgage crisis, and private-equity firms and other investors were swooping into the market to buy up buildings that had fallen into foreclosure, often intending to push out tenants and drive up rents. While Eisenberg was building his portfolio of rent-stabilized buildings, Weaver was organizing tenants in rent-stabilized buildings that were in financial distress. It was often frustrating work. She was, she said, consumed by battles over individual buildings, but what she really wanted was to address what she saw as the larger structural problem: real estate speculation.
In 2019, Weaver led the effort to overhaul New York’s rent-stabilization laws, helping draft the bill and spending months driving across the state to rally support for it. It was around this time that she first met Mamdani at a reading group for the socialist magazine Jacobin. He was a few years younger, with different political ambitions, but he was also steeped in the tenants’ rights movement. Mamdani soon started working with immigrants across Queens who were at risk of losing their homes, and Weaver became an important influence on him: In an interview in 2021, he said that he gets all of his ideas about housing from her.
When Mamdani told Weaver in the summer of 2024 that he was planning to run for mayor, he made it clear that he wanted tenants to be a key part of his constituency. “We can win if we get renters, new immigrants and young people,” he said. That’s basically what happened. An election that was expected to turn on public safety instead turned on affordability — housing in particular — and the city’s diffuse tenants’ rights movement coalesced behind him.
It’s hard to overstate how differently Weaver views housing policy from what has long been the conventional wisdom on both the left and the right. To begin with, she is deeply skeptical of the very concept of homeownership, going so far as to describe it in a 2019 social media post as a “weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth-building’ public policy.” The post resurfaced after Weaver’s appointment by Mamdani, landing her on the cover of The New York Post and drawing mockery from Vice President JD Vance. She told me that she would use different language if she were writing it today, but she also defended the basic thrust of her argument: Housing policies have historically prioritized owners over renters under the guise of democratizing wealth-building, but in practice, these policies have only widened inequality.
Against this backdrop, you can see New York’s rent-stabilized apartments as more than just temporary living spaces. They are as close as many of their residents will ever get to owning a home, providing both security in the form of predictable rents and an inheritance that can be passed down to their children in the form of a lease. “When people say that they want homeownership, they’re not always saying that they want to become millionaires or join the propertied class,” Weaver told me. “They are saying that they want stability and control and dignity.”
To Weaver, the crisis isn’t that property owners aren’t collecting enough rent to cover their loans. It’s that millions of New Yorkers can barely afford to keep a roof over their heads. “Nonpayment went up because people are poor,” she said when I asked her about the growing number of tenants who have fallen months behind on rent. “The inequality in this city is crazy.”
The math may not work for Eisenberg, but Weaver wants to change the whole equation. As she sees it, he and many owners like him overpaid for rent-stabilized buildings and took on too much debt under the assumption that they would be able to meaningfully raise rents and turn over apartments, year after year. To the extent that these owners now find themselves underwater, unable to cover their loans and sliding toward foreclosure, she sees an opportunity to reset the values of these buildings and their debt levels. That could happen through negotiations between lenders and owners or, when necessary, through foreclosure sales and bankruptcy auctions.
The process is likely to be messy and financially damaging, and perhaps even ruinous to current owners. But Weaver argues that tenants will ultimately benefit: Once the finances of these buildings have been restructured, a greater percentage of their rent rolls can go toward maintaining the properties and a smaller percentage can go toward banks and investors. “There was a business model that was based on speculation,” she says. “Now there needs to be a new business model that is based on the reality that these buildings are rent-stabilized and are going to stay rent-stabilized.”
For decades, New York — and many other cities — have hewed to the belief that the best way to create affordable housing was to incentivize private investment in it, and that the best way to drive down rents was to loosen rent-control restrictions. Weaver believes that this whole approach was wrong and that encouraging real estate speculation has only exacerbated the city’s housing crisis by spurring landlords to seek out ways to evict tenants and push up rents. What Eisenberg sees as a virtuous circle — upgrading buildings, raising rents, increasing property values — Weaver sees as a vicious cycle that New York finally has the opportunity to break.
On a bitter-cold Friday night in late January, a few days after my interview with Eisenberg, I met Weaver for a beer at a bar near her apartment in Crown Heights. Once we settled into a table in the back, I asked her if, after all of her years as a grass-roots organizer, she had any reservations about joining the city’s bureaucracy. “I’m a socialist,” she said. “If you’re going to believe in socialism, you have to make a lot more people believe in government.”
Weaver has long wanted to see the government take a much more aggressive role in shaping housing policy in New York, and she is suddenly in a position to make it happen. As an organizer, she struggled to turn out tenants for meetings; now, she can leverage the resources of the city to reach thousands of tenants at a time and turn out the mayor for events and meetings. In the months ahead, as more property owners default on their loans, she envisions the city intervening in foreclosures and bankruptcy auctions to help determine the future of these buildings, trying to steer them toward less profit-driven stewards, like nonprofit groups or even the city itself.
It’s a radical notion in a hypercapitalist city whose modern economy was built on the concept of private land ownership — a wholesale rethinking of how the city’s economy works and for whom. Weaver tried to do this on a much smaller scale as a tenant organizer, without much success. But she now has the full force of City Hall behind her. “We haven’t had a governing moment like this in a long time,” Weaver told me. By now, it had gotten loud in the back of the bar, and we had moved to the front. “We don’t really owe anyone anything,” she continued. “It’s exciting, but it’s also pretty scary.”
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