NEW YORK — Kaela Brown pays $1,200 a month for a room in a Brooklyn apartment, but her dream home turned into a cruel nightmare last summer.
There was a hole in her ceiling, allowing water to creep down the walls. She was awakened at night by the sound of mice. Swarms of gnats and black flies would also swirl around her head.
For months, Brown said, her landlord ignored her pleas for help. She eventually got through to the city housing department, which sent an inspector who walked in her front door and immediately asked a chilling question.
“Is anything dead in here?” Brown, a 25-year-old bartender, recalls the inspector asking. “There were so many flies they thought something was dead, but there was nothing dead.”
Brown recounted her story Thursday night at New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first “rental rip-off hearing.” The event, which drew about 500 people to a Brooklyn school, gave New York residents an opportunity to vent about the conditions of their apartments, while also providing input on how the city should crack down on bad landlords.
Those who showed up complained about sordid conditions: water leaks, roach and rodent infestations, mold, broken windows, and faulty smoke alarms and fire escapes.
Each participant had three minutes to tell their story to city housing administrators. Organizers also held exercises for residents to explain how they want Mamdani’s administration to respond to housing violations.
“Our housing plan will not only focus on production of affordable housing, but it will also focus on code enforcement, housing quality and tenant experiences,” Cea Weaver, director of the revitalized Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, told participants. “We want to make sure tenants have the tools and resources to know about their rights and directly enforce the rights themselves to get better conditions in their homes.”
The hearings were not well-received by New York’s influential property owners’ associations, which say negligent landlords make up just a tiny fraction of their members.
The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) published a report Monday that found that 89 percent of residential buildings in the city had no major housing code violations over the past two years.
“The new mayoral administration’s theatrics notwithstanding, what the data shows is that a very small percentage of buildings account for the lion’s share of violations, evictions and complaints,” James Whelan, REBNY’s president, said in a statement.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist, did not attend the hearing. But the event represents an opening salvo in Mamdani’s efforts to tilt the balance of political and regulatory power toward tenants, reviving a movement that has periodically flourished throughout U.S. history.
In a city where two-thirds of residents rent their homes, renters already had outsize influence in New York compared to many major U.S. cities. But over the years, tenant advocacy groups have complained that developers and landlords still held too much power to inflate rental prices and stall needed housing maintenance.
Mamdani established the hearings in January after he signed an executive order that said “many tenants face abusive landlord practices such as deceptive or hidden fees, retaliation for advocating for their rights, poor housing conditions, economic discrimination, abusive eviction practices or neglect of needed repairs.”
Over the next two months, a hearing will be held in each of the city’s five boroughs. After city leaders hear testimony from tenants, they will have 90 days to compile a report to Mamdani outlining how to improve conditions.
“Such plan shall be designed to ensure that violations are logged and corrected on a significantly faster timeline,” the executive order states.
Mamdani’s outreach to renters is occurring after they gave him decisive margins in last year’s elections after he vowed to freeze monthly rents on rent-stabilized apartments. Nearly 60 percent of renters supported Mamdani in the November election while he won fewer than 40 percent of the vote among homeowners, according to network exit polls.
As mayor, Mamdani has vowed to build 200,000 new affordable housing units over the next 10 years. On Thursday, Mamdani traveled to D.C., to meet with President Donald Trump to enlist federal support for the plan.
Mamdani asked Trump for help in building 12,000 new affordable units over a rail yard in Sunnyside, Queens. White House officials said Trump, who was born in Queens, was intrigued by the idea.
But Mamdani’s affordable housing plans are expected to face pushback from some homeowners, especially in outer sections of Queens and Brooklyn, where residents don’t want higher-density buildings in their neighborhoods. Mamdani’s plan to freeze rents of rent-stabilized apartments has also been panned by landlords, who say the plan would cripple their investments.
In its report, REBNY said most housing code violations are occurring in rent-stabilized units. The landlords of those properties, according to the association, are already too stretched financially to invest in needed repairs.
“The overwhelming share of property owners provide quality housing, create jobs and generate significant tax revenue for New York City,” Whelan said.
Anna Luft, associate director of housing policy and advocacy at the New York Legal Assistance Group, which advocates for renters, acknowledged that many New Yorkers who pay market rental rates do not have to worry about substandard apartments. But Luft said that shouldn’t distract from the poor and middle-class New Yorkers who live in properties that are not properly maintained.
“The real estate board is right, this is not a rampant issue for New Yorkers who are paying $4,000, $5,000 and up to $12,000 and $14,000 a month for their unit,” Luft said. “This is for the New Yorkers who are really struggling to make ends meet and relying on subsidies and whose landlords … feel for whatever reason it’s not worth doing repairs.”
Last month, during an extreme cold snap, more than 80,000 New Yorkers reported to city officials that their housing unit lacked heat or hot water, according to City Limits, a local news website that focuses on housing issues.
At Thursday’s hearing, Angelina Bowkett testified that nearly every resident in her 80-unit building “was living in slum-like conditions.” Bowkett, president of the tenant’s association, said residents have repeatedly asked city housing officials for help to address “no heat, hot water, roaches and mold.”
The New York Housing Preservation and Development agency “needs to be held accountable for the fires that happen, the gas leaks that happen and people living in these conditions,” Bowkett said. “We have people who can’t open their windows so, if there is a fire, people will die.”
Nikki Miller, 42, said she has been trying for months to get her landlord and city inspectors to address water damage in her ceiling that has led to mold. For the first time in a long time, Miller said, she feels like the city government under Mamdani is willing to listen to her.
“In the past we haven’t had mayors who even spoke on issues like this,” Miller said. “The fact this is front-of-mind and something happening so early in his being mayor, I am hopeful.”
After Brown told her story about the flies, she said she also felt relieved to know someone was listening. But as she left the hearing on Thursday, she still dreaded returning home.
“The flies have now gone away,” Brown said. “But there is still a hole in the ceiling that was never addressed and the mice stayed.”
Dan Diamond contributed to this report.
The post New Yorkers describe horrid apartments at Mamdani’s rental rip-off event appeared first on Washington Post.
