It started with a scream, less a battle cry than the klutzy rattle of someone unwittingly dragged to an acting class: “AHHHhhhhgh!”
“Let it out,” advised the M.C. It was a Thursday night in a Queens high school gym, and nearly 300 people showed up to see the fulfillment of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first-day promise to New Yorkers: a space to vent frustrations about their landlords.
The posters advertising the gathering — the city’s second of several so-called Rental Rip-off Hearings — looked like they were made by whoever designs fliers for Bowery Electric. There was a table with custom key chains, “New Yorkers vs Bad Landlords”; a sound system gently playing the Talking Heads; and at least one pair of neon pink, heart-shaped “Tax the Rich” earrings.
Circling the gym, Starbucks cups in hand, were pairs of 20- and 30-somethings, brought out on this drizzly night by a nascent civic curiosity. Some had never gone to a political event before, but fresh out of college and recently transplanted to New York, they have found a unifying identity in complaining about their landlords.
Many seemed drawn to the enchanting underdog quality of the movement: Even if their white-collar jobs were nonunion, they learned they can organize at home. The revolution, they’ve determined, will have roommates.
There was John Hemminger, 27, who saw videos of Mr. Mamdani talking about a rent freeze and then searched, “How do I know if my apartment is rent stabilized?”
There was Srinidhi Emkay, 28, a software engineer, who until Thursday evening, had never canvassed or done anything more political than go to a University of Wisconsin student government meeting.
And there was Madison Alleman, 31, an actress who moved from Salt Lake City. She said she tried to unionize the vegan restaurant where she worked in Utah, but was thwarted by the pandemic. She was chuffed to learn that in New York, she could be part of a union in her home.
Bumping up against the dispiriting numbers suggesting they might never own a house, some young New Yorkers are embracing the label of being long-term renters, considering it a facet of their identities as elemental as their hometown or faith. They feel overwhelmed by fast-moving national political news, and are in some cases flummoxed by the tumult of social justice movements that swelled in 2020 and came under attack in 2025. There is something appealingly direct to them in complaining about cockroaches and broken elevators, many of them said.
And they have been galvanized by the ascent of a mayor who recognized renters — 69 percent of the city — as an undersold electoral force.
“I’m not super political, but of all the things that would activate me, housing is the big one,” said Andrew Lee, 31, a data scientist who lives in Manhattan. “My biggest thing is a lot of landlords think of properties as a math problem. I am a row in a spreadsheet.”
His friend Audrey Dadalt, 32, a brand manager, felt similarly. “Millennials realize that a lot of us are going to be renters for life,” she said.
For those who came to New York because it represented something — vim, hustle, new faces — rent activism has become a way to feel part of a community, a cause that has bonded them to 90-year-old neighbors who offer unsolicited dating advice.
Samara Kamal, 25, joined the Astoria Tenant Union after her boyfriend learned about it on Instagram. Now she views her aging neighbors as her city “aunties.”
There is certainly friction at the heart of groups that bring together people who have little in common beyond matching maintenance requests. Many tenant associations span generations of people who don’t speak the same languages. That’s something newly awakened rent activists are struggling to address.
Adrian Singleton, 32, is a Cotopaxi-wearing geologist who went to Oberlin College and then to graduate school at Purdue, where he helped start chapters for the Democratic Socialists of America chapter and Students for Bernie. He said that previous activism feels tepid now compared with how emboldened he feels organizing as a renter.
Mr. Singleton said he spent every night of his first winter in New York City inside a sleeping bag because the landlord didn’t fix his broken heat.
Recently, he and some neighbors went on a rent strike. He has since grasped that the strike has different stakes for them. “The risks will never be the same for everyone,” Mr. Singleton said. “For some tenants the risk may be deportation; for others it’s homelessness.”
The climax of the rental rip-off event on Thursday was a series of listening sessions. Renters waited outside a classroom, then each one got three minutes, on the clock, to meet with city officials.
Seated under classroom posters explaining the rise and fall of empires, they recited their troubles.
After their three minutes were up, they filed out, right past a whiteboard that showed students had been learning about “Scarcity & Opportunity Cost” and “Supply & Demand.”
Emma Goldberg is a Times reporter who writes about political subcultures and the way we live now.
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