BY COLE SINANIAN
cole@queensledger.com
New York’s blossoming tenants movement got another windfall from City government last week with the release of the Mamdani Administration’s “Rental Ripoff” report, a 68-page plan that seeks to hold negligent owners accountable, make housing safer and more accessible for working-class New Yorkers, and empower tenants to collectively bargain with their landlords.
Building off the testimonies of the more than 2,000 renters engaged during the Mamdani Administration’s five “Rental Ripoff” hearings that took place earlier this year, the report offers 23 recommendations centered on strengthening enforcement against the city’s most common housing violations, expanding “holistic enforcement actions” to hold the most negligent building owners accountable, and empowering tenants to confront their landlords through transparency measures and collective bargaining.
It comes amid a broader push from the Mamdani Administration to wield City government in tenants’ favor, with the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) recently approving a historic two-year rent freeze and the City’s intervention in the sale of 93 bankrupt buildings owned by the Pinnacle Group — a company known for its negligence and tenant disputes.
“This report is a roadmap for an administration that stands with tenants,” wrote Mamdani in the report’s introduction.
According to the report, tenants at the hearings frequently cited their sense of powerlessness when interacting with their landlords as a major concern. This manifested as management and building superintendents that would ignore maintenance requests while conditions deteriorated, investments in cosmetic repairs without addressing structural issues, shoddy repairs that would be certified despite failing to address the problem, and landlords who’d obscure their identities through layers of Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) that.block tenants’ access to the owners of the homes.
Among the most common and disruptive housing violations are broken elevators, accounting for 19% of Department of Buildings (DOB) complaints filed in the past five years. And with an average response time of 45 days, older residents are often left risking their health to climb multiple sets of stairs for weeks while they wait for repairs. The report highlights the DOB’s Third Party Elevator Inspection Pilot Program, which would bring in non-DOB elevator inspectors to improve the agency’s slow response times, as well as allowing the installation of small, “European style” elevators in walk-up apartments to improve accessibility. To address mold issues, the report proposes periodic, “roof-to-cellar” HPD inspections and civil penalties, as well as intra-agency collaboration to track whether repairs have been effective.
The report also touts Mamdani’s “Fix the City” initiative — first outlined in the administration’s recently announced “Block by Block” housing plan — which aims to pull the worst buildings up to code through targeted, portfolio-wide investigations of the ten most negligent landlords and City intervention in ownership transfers.
But perhaps the report’s most politically significant points come in its third section, which proposes empowering tenants to take matters into their own hands by codifying their right to form a union and collectively bargain with their landlords into City law. While the rules of organized labor have been dictated by Federal labor law since the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, a similar legal framework for tenant unions does not yet exist in the US, though, as the report notes, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has issued guidance on tenant organization-owner relations at HUD-assisted properties.
Such a legal amendment would mark a major win for New York City tenant organizers, who have long sought to boost renters’ political power in a dynamic historically skewed in favor of landlord interests.
“Holding bad landlords accountable, really focusing on improving HPD response to bad conditions, going after violations and making sure landlords were clearing violations that had been sitting open for years and decades without any repercussions, these are kinds of things that really materially improve tenants lives,” said tenant organizer and State Assemblymember-elect Samantha Kattan during an interview in May. “And I think we’re just going to keep seeing more of that from the administration.”
Landlord groups like the New York Apartment Association (NYAA), meanwhile — which has been critical of Mamdani’s housing policy and dismissed the RGB’s rent freeze vote as a political stunt — criticized the report, calling the imposition of additional fees counterproductive and warning it could lead to even worse conditions for tenants.
“Here is what the report will not say,” wrote NYAA CEO Kenny Burgos in a statement. “That distress has a cause. Buildings cannot be maintained on frozen revenue. Boilers, roofs, elevators, and facades do not repair themselves.”
“The administration froze the rent, and now proposes new mandates, new fines, new fees, and new liens on the same buildings it admits are struggling,” Burgos continued. “It is disingenuous to tell New Yorkers the poison is the medicine.”
While officials have committed to launching the “Fix the City” initiative by the end of 2026, the rest of the report’s recommendations will require coordination between the MOPT and the City Council before they’re translated into law.
But for at least one Queens tenants association, political pressure seems to be already having an effect on their relationship with building management.
At La Mesa Verde, a large Jackson Heights apartment complex owned by A&E Real Estate Holdings — a company frequently cited as among the city’s most negligent landlords — years of chronic mold, pests, failing heating and broken elevators pushed residents to organize the independent Mesa Verde Tenants Union and file a harassment lawsuit against the company. Now, conditions are finally improving, residents say.
On Thursday, the company’s Vice President of External Affairs, Patrick A. Wehle, came to the building, residents told the Queens Ledger, and verbally committed to addressing several ongoing issues, like one of the building’s two elevators, which hasn’t worked in two years.
“I can’t believe it because it was out for so long, and they really did not care,” said Emily Benko, a carpenter and longtime resident of La Mesa Verde.
Benko, who helped organize her building as part of the tenants union, was optimistic that bad landlords would fall in line with new pressure coming from the City government, though skeptical of the administration’s ability to effectively enforce its pro-tenant policies.
“There’s so many laws that are already on the books that landlords don’t follow, and there aren’t really repercussions,” she said.
“But I think it sends a message,” she continued. “And I know that it’s making the landlord feel scared because they’re acting when they didn’t feel there was any reason to act before because there weren’t as many consequences.”
