In his first days in office, the mayor announced plans to gather New Yorkers to share stories of negligent landlords. Could the public takedowns lead to real change?
Landlord complaints are often a private affair; your friends gather to share stories about roaches or mold and yet rents keep going up. Tenants call their landlords to no avail, a super might show up (late) to provide a makeshift patch that guarantees the issue will recur again. We live in squalor alone, or alongside a few roommates who might offer their limited solidarity while their calls, too, go unanswered. But newly-elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to shine a light on the varying issues tenants face: Just a few days after being sworn in, he announced that he would be implementing a series of "Rental Ripoff" hearings, in which tenants from all five boroughs would be invited to share their nightmare landlord experiences.
According to the city’s Executive Order, "Protecting Tenants from Rental Ripoffs and Abusive Landlord Practices," these hearings, held over months, would require the cooperation of multiple city agencies, including the Department of Housing and Preservation (DHP), and would bring together tenants, community organizations, social service providers, and more to gather testimonials of poor living conditions, price-gouging, hidden fees, and negligent landlords. It sounds, frankly, kind of fun—who doesn’t love a public flogging? But when the problem is with buildings, the process to get repairs and remedies is messy, slow, and not always effective, as it relies on coordination between multiple agencies and with shadowy LLC landlords. Will the Rental Ripoff hearings simply become a venue to air one’s grievances, or a real means to address how renters find fixes?
It’s not surprising that Mayor Mamdani would open his tenure with a housing agenda; he ran on a housing plan with the slogan "freeze the rent," that promises 200,000 new rent stabilized apartments. Using his mayoral power to address existing housing conditions should also come at no surprise, as the city logged nearly 900,000 housing code violations in 2024. But those likely only represent a portion of tenants living in difficult or untenable situations.
Charlie Dulik, director of organizing at the nonprofit Housing Conservation Coordinators in Manhattan, characterizes the city’s reporting and response system as frustrating and deflating. Most tenants might call a landlord or super to fix an issue, though some—"not enough," he says—will call the city’s 311 hotline to get patched through to DHP or the Department of Buildings, depending on the problem. "People in my experience are pretty patient and generous," he says. But if the city sends an inspector without notifying the tenant, they may assume the problem is fixed. "It leaves people equally jaded dealing with the city as they do with their landlord."
There are other options for remedy: Tenants can begin a proceeding in the city’s housing court called a Housing Part, which Dulik says is akin to suing one’s landlord in court. Though he says it’s relatively easy for a complainant to represent themselves (a lawyer is not necessary), these proceedings can take weeks And, he continues, "It's also pretty underwhelming." Judges, he says, are predisposed to give the landlord more time to make repairs.
"I think what most often happens in even successful cases is that the city becomes involved and reaches a settlement where they say we're forgiving all or a decent chunk of the violations that have been accrued in exchange for your super duper pinky promise that you do these repairs now—that’s the best case scenario," he says.
The problem, it seems, isn’t just with bad landlords but uneven enforcement methods that might, at best, slap landlords on the wrist for serious infractions. Mamdani’s Rental Ripoff hearings will likely bring out these stories, which will, "provide the initial research for a report that would shape his administration’s housing policies," per the New York Times’ reporting. It’s no secret that there are never enough building inspectors, lawyers, staffers for hotlines, and city employees, making for long and arduous remedies. Dulik hopes that hearing these stories firsthand might inspire the mayor to prioritize expanding the agencies and personnel responsible for ensuring compliance.
Take, for instance, the city’s Emergency Repair Program (ERP): If a landlord doesn’t remedy building issues, the city can take the wheel deploying contractors to repair the problem and bill the landlord for the work, with additional fines and fees. There’s a high threshold to meet for this to happen, says Dulik. In his experience, he’s seen the city prioritize smaller repairs that can be fixed in a day rather than address "major issues" that can be a logistical headache, but he hopes to see the program expanded. "The city actually makes money off of it, the tenant gets the repair done more quickly, and it probably serves as a little bit of a warning to other landlords: you’re going to pay three times more if you don’t fix this problem," he says. Expanding the program would bring in city revenue and send a signal to landlords that the public is invested in holding landlords accountable—both through reputation and their checkbooks.
Naturally, not everyone is on board with such public shaming. The Real Deal’s managing editor Erik Engquist predicts that the hearings might turn public opinion further against landlords, making it more difficult to create programs that help landlords fund repairs and "greasing the skids" for anti-landlord legislation. He’s being dramatic (he likens them to other "show trials" in places like Stalinist Russia), but it does raise the question of whether or not public shaming works. New York City, among other cities, maintains public scofflaw landlord lists, usually defined by the number of building violations, as a primary means of public shaming. According to the NYC Public Advocate’s office, the 100 Worst Landlord list is updated annually and ranks landlords based on monthly open housing code violations.
But these lists don’t often have teeth to hold landlords accountable; in Chicago, the legal owner of scofflaw buildings isn’t included, leaving only a faceless LLC to absorb the indignity. LLCs don’t usually make public the name of the individual (or individuals) who own the property, rendering it nearly impossible for tenants to contact them and making court proceedings more difficult, too. It’s a problem with transparency that New York has attempted to address: The Progress and Poverty Institute notes that 43 percent of mid-rise NYC apartments are owned by LLCs, and while a 2019 law states that in residential property transactions ownership information be disclosed to NYC’s Department of Finance, "this only applies to properties with between one to four units, and the information is not available in a public database," the institute reports. A recent effort to make LLCs transparent was vetoed by Governor Kathy Hochul last year.
Still, even if the shaming that the Rental Ripoff hearings might bring isn’t effective at providing recourse to those living in roach-filled apartments, Dulik hopes that they will ultimately be a tool for organizing. "The Mamdani administration has been saying consistently, we want you to go organize your building, and so my biggest hope for this is that it could be a politically radicalizing moment," he says. There’s not a lot of new data that would come as a surprise—his organization is very familiar with the roaches, the broken boilers, the leaky pipes—butit could be a chance to galvanize renters living in similar circumstances under issue-based banners.
"Obviously, I want the administration to actually do something and translate the major issues brought up into action," continues Dulik, "but I also hope that tenant unions and local organizations are there saying, hey, Mamdani just said you need to join a group to fight politically to make this real." Though it’s doubtful that the city will abandon its commitment to property owners and real estate lobbyists, perhaps the Rental Ripoff hearings will "grease the skids" as Engquist predicts—for organizers and other groups looking to bring tenants together to build collective power.
Top photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.
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