BY LUAN ROGERS
WOODSIDE — For some Queens tenants, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s promise to freeze the rent doesn’t go far enough.
At a tenants meeting in Woodside convened by the Queens Tenants Coalition on April 1, organizers announced plans to protest in Albany for a statewide Right to Counsel law and called on Mayor Mamdani to reduce rents for rent-stabilized tenants, ahead of a Rent Guidelines Board meeting on April 9.
Since 2017, the City’s Right to Counsel program has guaranteed free legal assistance to low-income tenants in housing court. The Queens Tenant Coalition is pushing local assemblymembers to expand the law statewide. At the meeting, organizers laid out plans for a May trip to Albany to serve mock “eviction notices” to local assemblymembers who decline to sponsor the legislation.
In an open letter to Mayor Mamdani and the Rent Guidelines Board, the Queens Tenant Coalition called on the City to bring down rents for rent-stabilized tenants.This proposed roll-back would go beyond Mayor Mamdani’s campaign promise of a rent freeze. During former mayor Eric Adams’ administration, stabilized rents increased by 12 per cent citywide.
The Queens Tenant Coalition is made up of organizers from across the borough who advocate for stronger tenant protections. Representatives from both Catholic Migration Services and Chhaya Community Development Corp led Wednesday’s meeting in Woodside.
Nabiha Nasir works as an organizer with Chhaya Community Development Corp, a housing advocacy group that represents the city’s South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities. She helps tenants in Jackson Heights form housing associations in their own buildings. According to Nasir, tenant organizing “empowers tenants and helps create a housing system that is not just for profit.”
Doreen Mohammed, an organizer with the Astoria Tenant Union, echoed this sentiment emphasizing that “the more organized we are, the more we can resist.” Having grown up in Jamaica, Queens, Mohammed has witnessed the steady increase of rents over time. “Rents are going up and up, but wages are staying the same,” she said. “Either we organize or we get priced out and displaced.”
In their letter to the Mayor, the Queens Tenant Coalition outlined how the City’s lenient code enforcement “allows landlords to treat violations as a cost of doing business”. Organizers from the Queens Tenant Coalition urged tenants to submit testimonies ahead of a code enforcement town hall on April 22nd.
Many tenants identified issues with landlords refusing to pay for repairs, even after an increase in rent. After his landlord raised his rent, Sunnyside resident Juan Donado, has had to sleep in his living room, because of ongoing noise pollution from his downstairs boiler. “The apartment is losing value, because I can only use half of it”, he said.
Regina Shanley, a 79-year-old Queens resident, has been involved in tenant organizing for over 20 years. In her own rent-stabilized apartment, Shanley has to contend with leaks which cause her bathtub to fill up every time her upstairs neighbor takes a shower.
Nonetheless, Shanley attests to the power of tenant solidarity. She asserts that “if just one tenant complains, the landlord pays no attention, but if we are all together, then we have power.”
