Plenty of New Yorkers have complaints about their apartment. Few find themselves venting those problems to the mayor of New York City.
So Ann Maitlin, who like many New Yorkers is a self-proclaimed “tough cookie,” found her stomach churning with nerves on Wednesday as she got ready to share frustrations about her landlord with Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
On Wednesday evening, New York City held its third “rental rip-off” hearing, this time in the Bronx, where hundreds of city residents gathered to share the problems they are experiencing in their apartments during listening sessions with city officials.
Mr. Mamdani did not attend the first two hearings, but had come to the Bronx to hear for himself what types of problems New York City tenants faced, especially at the hands of unscrupulous landlords.
But before the hearing officially began, the mayor met directly and privately with Ms. Maitlin and two other Bronx residents.
For a moment, the country’s biggest city felt a little like a small town. There sat the man with the keys to City Hall, dutifully nodding while the three Bronx tenants listed the headaches and hassles behind their own doors and under their floorboards: bugs, leaky faucets, broken heat, stalled elevators.
The three were nervous, but they were facing a sympathetic audience — a mayor who until three months ago was a tenant, one who has pledged to put the city’s renters at the center of his affordability agenda.
Ms. Maitlin scribbled out a speech in a spiral-bound notebook. “There are leaks, holes, vermin, roaches, mold and dangerous warped and splinter wooden floors,” she wrote. She practiced reading it aloud with a timer.
As the mayor held the private meetings, the scene in the auditorium of the Fordham University campus center felt a bit like a Madison Square Garden concert, with hundreds of people waiting, somewhat impatiently, for the mayor to come onstage. “Where’s the mayor?” “Where’s Mamdani?”
The intensity seemed to wane as Joanne Grell, a community leader and tenants’ rights activist, got onstage to welcome the headline act. “Let’s give a big, boogie-down Bronx welcome to our Mayor, Zohran Kwame Mamdani,” Ms. Grell said.
The gathering briefly went sideways. A group of about 20 residents of New York City public housing had come to protest. They were frustrated because the rental rip-off hearings have been focused on people living in privately owned apartments, even though the mayor is technically New York’s biggest landlord, overseeing the New York City Housing Authority.
When the mayor took the stage, shouts broke out: “Public housing first, mayor!”
Kevin McCall, a civil rights activist, stood in the center of the auditorium with his fist in the air, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: “Mayor Mamdani don’t care about NYCHA residents.”
“I want to thank you for sharing your testimony—” Mr. Mamdani said from the stage, at which point a protester shouted: “Except public housing!”
“If you are a NYCHA resident,” the mayor said insistently, “We want and welcome your stories.”
From there, the audience warmed again to Mr. Mamdani. The mayor described the pain of personally hearing how tenants like Ms. Maitlin were struggling at home. He said one tenant had shared with him a video of her building, showing how the elevator was broken, and how one neighbor had to carry her disabled daughter from the school bus up the stairs.
Mr. Mamdani also explained that he spent part of the day listening to 311 calls, prompting applause and then chuckles from the audience. “If it was you that called to ask whether you could put your mirror out with the recycling,” Mr. Mamdani said, “you actually have to put it out with the trash.” (That line killed.)
The mayor was mostly among supporters, with few landlords present. Their absence was understandable: Mr. Mamdani wants to freeze the rent on rent-stabilized apartments; he has proposed a property tax increase as a way to pay for his affordability agenda; and the rental rip-off hearings clearly are not designed to make the landlords feel at home.
Linda Seward, 74, one of the three residents who sat down with the mayor to share her apartment troubles, looked a little shellshocked as the evening wound down. “I’m still nervous,” she confessed.
Ms. Seward had typed up the speech she read to the mayor, which described the biting cold in her apartment that has forced her to rely on a space heater, as well as the rats that scurry around her building. “It is disgraceful that we have to live this way,” she told the mayor. “The question is how will the black mold affect my life as time goes on?”
Ms. Seward had practiced reading her speech over and over. She had a lot to say, and she had been warned: The mayor had exactly three minutes.
Emma Goldberg is a Times reporter who writes about political subcultures and the way we live now.
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