{"id":310385,"date":"2026-07-31T02:07:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T02:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/310385\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T02:07:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T02:07:10","slug":"mamdanis-new-program-could-talk-tenants-into-trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/310385\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani\u2019s New Program Could Talk Tenants into Trouble"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fresh off the city\u2019s imposition of a two-year rent freeze<\/a> for the city\u2019s nearly 1 million households living in rent-regulated apartments, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has launched<\/a> a new initiative. The $53 million<\/a> Office of Mass Engagement, created on the mayor\u2019s second day in office<\/a>, will manage \u201cvolunteers\u201d going door to door to help tenants organize against their landlords.<\/p>\n

Talk to Tenants, as the program is called, represents the mayor\u2019s desire to run a permanent feel-good campaign focused on housing, but it\u2019s also a significant escalation of government\u2019s traditional role in engaging with New Yorkers. New York\u2019s government will use taxpayer money to favor one type of \u201cvolunteer\u201d speech, protected by the First Amendment, over equally protected, competing speech, and it will use that favored speech to instigate people to take actions that may not be in their own interests.<\/p>\n

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Mamdani ensured that the Office of Mass Engagement took a lead role in his rent-freeze push. In April, the OME organized volunteers to knock on New Yorkers\u2019 doors to encourage them to testify at hearings ahead of the rent-freeze decision made in June by the Rent Guidelines Board, a quasi-independent entity whose appointees are named by the mayor. About 1,000 people testified before the RGB\u2014more than double last year\u2019s total.<\/a><\/p>\n

In the rent-freeze engagement effort, Mamdani at least pretended to be neutral. Volunteers organized by the OEM would \u201cnot advocate for any specific outcome in the RGB vote or guide what participants say if they choose to testify,\u201d his office promised<\/a>. \u201cInstead, the campaign focuses on ensuring more New Yorkers can take part in decisions that directly impact their lives.\u201d This message was similar to a city\u2019s Board of Elections telling people to vote.<\/p>\n

With Talk to Tenants<\/a>, however, the mayor has dropped the pretense. Volunteers will visit rental buildings with histories of housing violations \u201cto connect tenants with organizing resources and inform tenants of their right to organize.\u201d The campaign is about \u201cempowering renters to turn shared experiences into collective action,\u201d including \u201cwidespread collective action to win better repairs and respect from the landlord.\u201d The city will also hold workshops to teach New Yorkers how tenant organizing works and how to build \u201ctenant unions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nobody disputes that individuals enjoy constitutional rights to organize themselves. New Yorkers have had little difficulty recognizing and exercising these rights. At the city\u2019s five \u201crental ripoff\u201d hearings in late winter and early spring and at the Rent Guidelines Board meetings in late spring and summer, most attendees signaled their group affiliation via clothing or signage: the Met Council on Housing<\/a>, Community Action for Safe Apartments<\/a>, or CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities<\/a>. Many buildings also have their own tenants\u2019 associations, and state and city law requires<\/a> that landlords allow these groups to use common building areas to meet.<\/p>\n

The problem with Talk to Tenants is that, in using city-funded infrastructure to help \u201cvolunteers\u201d organize tenants, it pushes the city further onto one side of a contentious relationship, when government\u2019s constructive (and proper) role is to serve as a neutral enforcer of the law. For instance, the city has a clear role in ensuring that property owners keep their buildings up to code, including the provision of heat, hot water, and pest control. The mayor is right<\/a> to propose improvements to inspections and enforcement of these regulations. If a tenants\u2019 group reveals systemic code violations, the city may find it easier to work with the group rather than with individual tenants, one by one. The city also has a role in ensuring functional markets, including policing against deceptive advertising of properties for rent.<\/p>\n

But the city should not be involved in creating tenant organizations or unions where none currently exists. First, by organizing \u201cvolunteers\u201d with one ideological purpose, Mamdani is favoring one type of free speech and free organizing over another. The administration tried to cover itself on this point, with a deputy mayor stating<\/a> that the latest exercise is an effort to help people \u201cknow their rights.\u201d But Talk to Tenants isn\u2019t concerned with letting renters know they have a right, say, to join a lawsuit<\/a> challenging rent regulation altogether. City Hall isn\u2019t launching parallel initiatives to ensure that New Yorkers know that they have a right to join the Federalist Society, to protest outside abortion clinics, or to start a movement advocating for a third Trump term. The government\u2019s role is to create a neutral space for exercising rights, not to provide selective support to advocates for specific action.<\/p>\n

Second, the city may harm vulnerable tenants by encouraging them to engage in collective action that goes against their individual interests. \u201cWidespread collective action to win better repairs\u201d could be code for a rent strike<\/a>, in which tenants band together and withhold monthly payment to force better living conditions. But more rent strikes might mean more buildings falling into distress, above the current 9.3 percent<\/a> of rent-regulated buildings. As a chart<\/a> in Mamdani\u2019s Rental Ripoff report notes, housing quality steadily improved for decades until the mid-2010s, to a record low of just 10 percent of buildings with multiple serious violations. Since then, housing quality has fallen, in large part because a 2019 law<\/a> constrains landlords\u2019 ability to reinvest in their buildings. The mayor\u2019s rent freeze will cause conditions to worsen further, as owners\u2019 costs continue to go up even as much of their income stagnates. Moreover, rent strikes carry significant individual risks for tenants, putting them in peril of eviction or a housing-court record that hobbles their ability to find a better apartment.<\/p>\n

Finally, there\u2019s a practical reason that it\u2019s unwise for city-led \u201cvolunteers\u201d to encourage people who haven\u2019t already organized to do so. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, organizing tenants in a distressed or even abandoned building was often a true self-help, grassroots movement.<\/a> People living in many falling-down buildings did their own major repair and renovation work, collected rent among themselves, and maintained order and security in buildings. But if you can\u2019t do the basic work of organizing yourselves, you likely won\u2019t be able to do this much harder work. Few if any buildings are in this dire state today, and encouraging tenants to force fragile buildings into greater disrepair when they are unprepared to do the sweat-work themselves is irresponsible.<\/p>\n

The mayor\u2019s effort may simply be part of a long-term city play for nonprofit takeovers of more buildings, as more property owners determine that they cannot make the economics of rent-regulated buildings work. But tenants should understand: the reason the mayor is making so much noise about housing is that the city has no new money to run housing<\/a> that doesn\u2019t pay for itself, nor to subsidize nonprofit groups to do the same. The mayor\u2019s words will be cheap for him; they\u2019ll be costlier for many of the people who take him and Talk to Tenants too seriously.<\/p>\n

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