Jacobin61%
Zohran Mamdani’s City Hall Wants to Build Tenant Unions 79%
By Alex N. Press51%
7/20/2026, 8:46:38 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Appeal to Emotion, and Optimism Bias, with Indoctrination as the most egregious example at 23.3% saturation with 344 hits. Analysis detected 2,912 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,476 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 71.3% and a BS Rank of 79% (4,085 of 18,786 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 78.30% of the article peer group.
At New York’s first “Rental Ripoff” hearing this year, tenants packed a high-school gym in Brooklyn to share horror stories.
“We’ve had our neighbors trapped in elevators.
We’ve had people slip and fall.
We’ve had windows fall on people.
We’ve had the ceiling collapse on people,” Angela Landress, a representative of one Flatbush tenant’s association, told the crowd.
The hearings were more of a listening session than a traditional hearing, with Cea Weaver, the head of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, speaking one-on-one with tenants to gather their complaints.
As Weaver — a longtime tenant organizer profiled by Liza Featherstone earlier this year for Jacobin — told attendees, “Tenants pay rent every month, and we deserve a say in what happens in the decisions that the city makes that impact our lives.
I also believe that the most protected tenant is an empowered tenant who knows their rights and can organize with their neighbors.”
The Mamdani administration is now trying to encourage that kind of organizing.
The mayor’s office is launching “Talk to Tenants,” a campaign that will send volunteers door-to-door in buildings with chronic housing code violations, connecting renters with organizing resources, neighborhood organizations, and training on tenants’ rights and how to build tenant associations.
The effort will be led by the Office of Mass Engagement in partnership with the Office to Protect Tenants.
It will begin in East Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood, and Flatbush, targeting areas with particularly distressed housing.
“The Rental Ripoff hearings showed us something that every tenant already knows: when landlords neglect their buildings, New Yorkers are left with no heat, kitchens overrun with cockroaches, mold, and broken elevators,” Mamdani told Jacobin.
“When neighbors organize, they have the power to hold bad landlords accountable and win safe, dignified housing.
‘Talk to Tenants’ is about empowering New Yorkers to build that power one conversation, one building, and one block at a time.”
The city already funds community organizations that organize tenants in distressed rent-regulated buildings through HPD’s Partners in Preservation program.
But under the new initiative, city hall, which describes tenant organizing as a cornerstone of its housing plan, will use its own significant reach and infrastructure to make the first contact.
“From a next-door neighbor who is available to bring in your mail when you’re away to widespread collective action to win better repairs and respect from the landlord, the community and solidarity of a tenant association is the very foundation of New York City,” said Weaver.
“The most protected tenant is an organized tenant.
Through the ‘Talk to Tenants’ campaign, we are calling on New Yorkers to join together with their neighbors and partner with us to secure dignified and affordable housing for all.”
The administration announced the program following its findings from the Rental Ripoff hearings.
The Rental Ripoff report, which summarizes testimony from more than 2,400 New Yorkers, found that the most common housing issue reported to the city’s 311 service is a lack of heat and hot water: over the last three years, heat and hot water complaints made up 35 percent of all reported housing maintenance issues.
Pests, mold, and leaks were also frequent complaints.
“Many of these complaints come from a small group of properties, suggesting that some tenants repeatedly face hot water outages or unsafe cold conditions, and that there is a persistent set of noncompliant building owners,” the report states.
Announcing the findings and a suite of reforms — including requiring disclosure of the use of artificial intelligence to alter rental listings — and strengthening enforcement against negligent landlords at a press conference in the Tenement Museum last week, Mamdani opened with tenant organizing history.
“December 1907 was not a happy time to be a tenant in New York,” the mayor said.
“Two out of every three New Yorkers were living in crammed tenement housing, like those brought to life here in the Tenement Museum.
It was brutally cold.
Nearly one hundred thousand New Yorkers had just lost their jobs in an economic crisis, and in response, many landlords decided to raise the rent.”
The mayor went on to recount how tenants responded: by organizing.
More than ten thousand families went on a rent strike, one of the largest rent strikes in New York history.
Recounting that history will be part of the city’s door-knocking initiative.
Sumathy Kumar, director of the New York State Tenant Bloc, said the history matters because tenants are often made to feel that whatever is happening in their building is theirs to endure alone.
She pointed to Harlem in the early 1960s, where Jesse Gray and other organizers led tenants on rent strike over rats, broken heat, and other slum conditions.
At one Manhattan Civil Court hearing, tenants arrived carrying rats they had trapped in their apartments.
They placed the evidence of their landlords’ neglect directly before the court.
“Every force in the real estate industry is trying to tell you that as a tenant, you’re not powerful,” said Kumar.
“When you learn about the history of tenant organizing and you join with your neighbors and your neighbors across the city, it gives you the power and the will to fight for more.”
The city’s organizing effort will extend beyond door-knocking.
Throughout the summer and early fall, the Office of Mass Engagement also plans to host “NYC 101” workshops on tenant organizing, building tenant unions, and the role collective action has played in improving conditions in New York buildings.
“So much happens at the door,” Kumar told me.
“You get to have a conversation about things that are bringing you together.
When we start knocking on each other’s doors, talking about our issues in our apartments, all of a sudden you’re creating a group of people who are acting in solidarity and winning together, even if they’re totally different.”
“The tenants need to run the meeting and the organizing effort,” Kumar said of what meetings are most likely to lead to ongoing tenant associations.
“The most important thing in this door-knocking is to find the tenants who are ready to build their own union.
That’s when it’s going to be a long-standing fighting organization.”
Earlier this year, tenants in more than ninety Pinnacle Group buildings organized across the landlord’s housing portfolio as the company entered bankruptcy.
Through the Union of Pinnacle Tenants, they elected representatives and pushed to participate in a bankruptcy proceeding where tenants rarely have a seat.
The Mamdani administration later joined their call to delay the sales.
The campaign did not end in total victory.
Bankruptcy law still narrowed what tenants — and elected officials — could achieve.
But residents had accomplished something important: they had organized themselves into a constituency that could not be ignored, and city hall had joined them; the Union of Pinnacle Tenants remains active.
“We need to be organizing people right now all the time,” said Kumar.
“You never know when a foreclosure might happen or when a sale might happen.”
The goal, she argued, is to build organizations that are ready when those moments arrive.
That is ultimately what Mamdani’s initiative is trying to do.
Instead of waiting for tenants to organize, the city is asking whether it can help those organizations get started without directing them.
Kumar argued that inspections and stronger enforcement cannot substitute for organized tenants.
“Those are not going to work unless the city is partnering with organized tenants at the building level,” she said.
The limits of enforcement are one reason tenant organizers have long argued that inspections alone cannot transform neglected buildings.
City agencies can issue violations and bring cases, but organized tenants are often the people who keep pressure on landlords after inspectors leave.
“Every New Yorker has heard the stories — or lived them themselves: landlords who refuse to make basic repairs, ignore dangerous conditions, and leave tenants to deal with mold, pests, and other hazards.
‘Talk to Tenants’ is about reminding renters that they have the right to a safe, clean, and well-maintained home — and the right to organize with their neighbors to demand it,” said Commissioner for the Office of Mass Engagement Tascha Van Auken.
“Change often begins with a conversation between neighbors.
By knocking on doors and connecting tenants with organizing resources, we’re helping New Yorkers build the collective power to hold negligent landlords accountable and fight for the homes they deserve.”
The administration is trying to pair enforcement with organizing.
Its Fix the City initiative, scheduled to launch by the end of this year, will assess large housing portfolios with the most egregious and long-standing code violations and seek to transfer ownership of these properties, while Talk to Tenants is intended to help residents build the organizations that can keep pressure on landlords.
What happens after those first conversations is up to the tenants themselves.
Analysis
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