Mayor Zohran Mamdani has spent much of his first few weeks in office cultivating a reputation as the scourge of the bad landlord. On day one, he denounced a major Brooklyn property owner, and then came his announcement of “Rental Ripoff” hearings to begin on February 26. Further, he is poised to unleash the full weight of the city’s legal apparatus to address such things as broken boilers and peeling walls.
But therein lies an important tale.
As The New York Post has reported, despite the New York City Housing Authority’s notorious reputation for mistreating tenants in the city’s public housing, the hearings will only focus on renters and landlords in privately owned buildings. Indeed, while tenants in private housing are being encouraged to testify about landlord abuses, testimony from public housing tenants will not be allowed.
Nor has Mamdani indicated any inclination to move legally against his own administration.
To be sure, after the uproar from public housing advocates when this distinction surfaced, Mamdani decided to slightly alter his plan and allow the under-the-radar, quiet submission of individual complaints to officials at the hearings. But the ban on public testimony continues.
And yet the facts of the double standard are startling. NYCHA tenants are suffering through another winter of discontent with heat outages, chronic elevator breakdowns and mold infestations – and there is a reported backlog of $80 billion worth of repairs to safety standards, with $60 billion specifically required for urgent repairs over the next five years!
So the Mayor seems to be interested in tenant suffering only when it can be used as a cudgel against the private sector. When the suffering happens under public auspices, he spins it as a function of “federal underfunding” rather than a failure of municipal mismanagement and responsibility.
Once again, Mamdani has chosen ideology over reality. He views private profit as inherently exploitative and public ownership as inherently virtuous; he won’t acknowledge the reality that statistically and functionally the City of New York is the worst landlord in the five boroughs. He sees – and treats – private landlords as criminals to be prosecuted, but treats NYCHA officials as colleagues to be understood and tolerated.
However, until the mayor holds NYCHA to the same “zero tolerance” standards he applies to the private sector, his housing crusade will remain what it currently is: political theater offered as principled governance.