Bloomberg\u2019s successor, Bill de Blasio, criticized him for expanding an underclass, what he called \u201cthe other New York.\u201d During his term he oversaw three rent freezes for tenants in the city\u2019s one million rent-stabilized units, but otherwise he followed a playbook on housing that too often resembled Bloomberg\u2019s. Catastrophic tax exemptions and neighborhood-by-neighborhood rezoning led to a speculation boom and skyrocketing rents.<\/p>\n
One inflection point came in late 2018, when then-governor Cuomo championed a deal that would have brought Amazon\u2019s second headquarters\u2014a billion-dollar development project\u2014to Long Island City. \u201cHQ2,\u201d as it became known, was to include a waterfront esplanade and enough office space to fill three Empire State Buildings. It was also set to receive nearly $3 billion in subsidies.<\/p>\n
After the bid went public, a coalition of grassroots groups\u2014many of which I know in my capacity as an organizer with the national Tenant Union Federation\u2014rallied to oppose the project. The central question was rent. At the time Queens was already the site of the steepest rent hikes in the country, and many tenants feared that the HQ2 project would supercharge gentrification across the borough.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur members saw the writing on the wall,\u201d Sasha Wijeyeratne, the executive director of CAAAV and CAAAV Voice, told me. \u201cThey knew that an influx of wealthy Amazon employees would raise rents, and the cost of everything else around them, and that the local bodegas, restaurants, and laundromats would be priced out.\u201d Responding to public pressure, politicians like Corey Johnson\u2014then speaker of the city council\u2014and councilmember Jimmy van Bramer came out against the deal. \u201cWhy do you need our money? We have 63,000 people who are sleeping in homeless shelters,\u201d Johnson asked. \u201cDon\u2019t you think there is a better way for us to spend $3 billion?\u201d Community members booed Amazon representatives out of a city council meeting.<\/p>\n
The pressure proved too much. In February 2019, three months after announcing the development, Amazon backed out. Organizers declared victory, but they were sober about the likelihood of the movement\u2019s ongoing success: if it wasn\u2019t HQ2 it would be another megadevelopment. During that time, Wijeyrante told me, tenant organizations began to have more sustained conversations about how to escape these reactive fights.<\/p>\n
Andrew Lichtenstein\/Corbis\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Demonstrators protesting the proposed Amazon headquarters in Long Island City at a meeting of the New York City Council, 2019<\/p>\n Tactics are what organizers do; strategy is why we do them. The tenant leaders, Wijeyrante suggested, felt a need to sharpen their long-term strategy. One way was to clarify precisely what they were up against\u2014not just individual landlords or management companies but the system of real estate and financial institutions that collaborate to set the terms of the market and influence policy in their favor. \u201cWe began zeroing in on real estate capital as the enemy,\u201d Wijeyrante said. \u201cWe needed to make that money toxic.\u201d<\/p>\n In New York, landlords and real estate capitalists exercise power through a lobbying group called the Real Estate Board of New York. \u201cREBNY exerts vast influence over the New York institutions that shape public policy,\u201d the longtime tenant organizer Cea Weaver told me, \u201cfrom the City Council to the Rent Guidelines Board to the state legislature\u2014all in service of their bottom line.\u201d<\/p>\n Weaver leads Housing Justice for All, a statewide coalition founded in 2017 that brings together over eighty tenant organizations, including CAAAV. In 2019, when she signed on as the coalition\u2019s first full-time staff member, she drove across the state to recruit organizations from Buffalo to the Mohawk Valley and organized busloads of tenants to go to the state capitol. They were campaigning for the passage of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which would make rent protections a permanent feature in New York\u2019s housing law, expand rent control, and restrict landlords\u2019 ability to exploit loopholes to escape regulation. That June the law passed\u2014a landmark victory.<\/p>\n The win would not have been possible without a new crop of legislators. In 2018 a coalition of seven candidates, one of them put up by a resurgent Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and six by the Working Families Party (WFP), had primaried and defeated members of the Independent Democratic Caucus\u2014a group of Democrats who had started caucusing with their Republican colleagues, often against the interests of the working class, including opposing rent stabilization. (Among the successful challengers were two candidates in this year\u2019s mayoral election, Jessica Ramos and Zellnor Myrie.) The DSA candidate, Julia Salazar, pledged not to take campaign contributions from developers and landlords and ran on a platform that stressed her support for rent control. This influx of new lawmakers produced \u201cnot just a functional Democratic majority in the state senate,\u201d the writer and urban planner Samuel Stein wrote at the time<\/a>, \u201cbut a group of reformers in office with strong allegiances to tenants and the tenant movement.\u201d<\/p>\n Even so, the organizers felt outpaced by the real estate industry and underprepared to sustain their achievements. \u201cAs long as I\u2019ve been a tenant organizer, I\u2019ve been told real estate in New York is like oil in Texas,\u201d Sumathy Kumar, the campaign director at Housing Justice for All, told me. \u201cThis is how power works in this state. They just throw their money around everywhere. It\u2019s not just that so many politicians are taking their money, it\u2019s also that they think they might start funding against them if they do anything pro-tenant. Electeds are terrified.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2022 another proposed development drew the movement\u2019s attention. That spring Silverstein Properties, BedRock Real Estate Partners, and Kaufman Astoria Studios petitioned the City Council\u2019s Land Use Committee to approve a development project called Innovation QNS. It involved rezoning a five-block manufacturing district to build 3,200 housing units in Astoria, a neighborhood in Mamdani\u2019s district where 87 percent of the residents were then tenants, nearly 70 percent<\/a> of them either rent burdened or severely rent burdened (which is to say, spending over half their incomes on rent). The proposal barely met the legal minimum requirement that 25 percent of its units be affordable\u2014a standard that rarely creates truly affordable housing in any case, having more to do with what a developer can afford to build than with what a tenant can afford to pay.<\/p>\n CAAAV, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), and Queensbridge Houses residents collaborated with the DSA, Queens Neighborhood Union, and other organizations to defeat the proposal. Among their supporters was Mamdani, then two years into his term as a state assemblymember in Albany and a steady ally of the tenant movement. (The previous year he had gotten arrested during a protest at Cadman Plaza calling for a pandemic eviction moratorium.) Now he spoke at protests and gave comments to the press, flanked by signs with slogans like OUR NEIGHBORHOOD \u2260 YOUR PIGGY BANK. \u201cI am in firm opposition to this proposal,\u201d he tweeted that June. \u201cMy opposition does not stem from its proposed density\u2026. It is entirely because of the absolute paucity of affordable housing within this proposal. To build 2,120 market rate units with a set aside of only the legal minimum of 25 percent affordability is not an answer to this housing crisis\u2014it is a cause.\u201d<\/p>\n Ultimately the tenant-led coalition, with sustained support from Mamdani, forced the developer to deepen the project\u2019s affordability requirements. Of the total Innovation QNS units, 1,100 would now be income-restricted; of those, five hundred would be rented at 30 percent of the area median income, which would make them available to individuals earning around $28,020 a year or families of four making $40,020 a year. It was a significant concession. If tenants were to go on the offensive in the coming years, it seemed, Mamdani was a promising early draft pick.<\/p>\n Last year CAAAV Voice convened a team of tenants from across the city to develop a proposal for a campaign to win a citywide rent freeze for rent-stabilized units, which they saw as a step on the path to universal rent control. They weren\u2019t alone. Other organizations involved with Housing Justice for All\u2014including Community Action for Safe Apartments (CASA), Housing Conservation Coordinators, Tenants & Neighbors, the Metropolitan Council on Housing, and New York Communities for Change (NYCC)\u2014were considering similar options.<\/p>\n It was a sign of a broader strategic shift. In Albany, a mighty backlash against the Covid-era eviction moratorium had helped REBNY regain ground after the tenants\u2019 2019 victory. In April 2024 \u201cgood cause\u201d eviction protections, which Housing Justice for All had spent years fighting to codify, finally passed, but the coalition was forced to accept major compromises\u2014including exemptions that left millions of tenants unprotected. Finding themselves on the back foot at the state legislature, they knew they needed to try something new. Within the movement, leaders started talking more seriously about an electoral strategy that would put organized tenants face-to-face with organized capital.<\/p>\n At the city level, meanwhile, the Rent Guidelines Board\u2014a nine-member body appointed by the mayor and charged with setting rents for the city\u2019s rent-stabilized units\u2014had become increasingly hostile to low-income tenants over the course of Eric Adams\u2019s tenure, raising rents twice in as many years. When the board voted through a third raise that June, a group of a hundred tenants, organized by the Rent Justice Coalition, protested the decision at Cooper Union and got arrested. Mamdani was among them.<\/p>\n Protesters calling for an extension to New York City\u2019s pandemic eviction moratorium, Brooklyn, New York, 2021<\/p>\n Three months later he reached out to CAAAV Voice and asked them to be among the groups that would endorse his candidacy on the day he announced his run for mayor. Soon thereafter, as CAAAV Voice\u2019s organizing director Alina Shen recounted to me, she found herself in an elevator at the CUNY Labor Center with Fahd Ahmed, the executive director of DRUM Beats, the political sibling to DRUM. She asked, \u201cHey, are you going to endorse? We need to make a call.\u201d By the end of the day they were in a group chat with organizers at NYCC. The next week they decided to run a joint endorsement process.<\/p>\n On October 21 over two hundred people affiliated with the trio of groups gathered at the NYCC offices with interpreters in four languages to pose questions to Ramos, Mamdani, and, over Zoom, Brad Lander. Mamdani might have seemed the clear choice: at the time he was the only candidate willing to commit to a rent freeze. But endorsing him was neither obvious nor risk-free: he had virtually no name recognition, and the crowded field included some longer-running and more experienced progressive champions, like Lander, who had deep relationships with institutions like the WFP.<\/p>\n Nor were tenants willing to line up behind Mamdani uncritically. When Mr. Chen, an elder with the Chinatown Tenant Union, questioned Mamdani, Shen recounted to me, the candidate greeted him with a friendly \u201cNi hao.\u201d Chen, uncharmed, held eye contact and told him, \u201cWe need reassurance you are not going to leave us behind as you ascend. You need to see how we live.\u201d After the meeting Mr. Chen followed Mamdani out of the room and made sure they scheduled a day for him to visit the neighborhood.<\/p>\n But in the end Mamdani\u2019s commitment to a rent freeze won out: each group agreed to endorse him on day one. \u201cEvery politician says New York is the greatest city on the globe,\u201d Mamdani said in his launch video on October 23. \u201cBut what good is that if no one can afford to live here?\u2026 This is New York. We can afford to dream.\u201d<\/p>\n In January the Housing Justice for All coalition launched a statewide electoral arm called the Tenant Bloc, which counts CAAAV Voice, DRUM Beats, and NYCC as members. It was an experiment in activating what the Cornell geographer Russell Weaver\u2014no relation to Cea\u2014has called the \u201csleeping giant\u201d in New York politics: tenants as a political class. \u201cTenants are half the state,\u201d the group declared. They could be a dominant political force\u2014if they organized themselves \u201cfrom the buildings to the ballot box.\u201d<\/p>\n The group\u2019s first major undertaking was a campaign to build support for a citywide rent freeze. The mayoral race was a natural occasion: organizers started knocking doors across the city, asking tenants to sign a pledge that they would vote for a candidate who supported the policy. Rather than back Mamdani from the get-go, as several of their members had, they hoped to build a base they could route toward whichever candidate they ultimately endorsed, applying pressure to the whole field in the process.<\/p>\n Among the campaign\u2019s co-chairs was Joanne Grell, a Puerto Rican single mother of two who lives in a rent-stabilized apartment in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, where she serves as president of the tenant association. She found the apartment on Craigslist twenty-four years ago, when her kids were two and five and she was freshly separated from her husband. It is a spacious two-bedroom in a thirty-two-unit prewar building, with a big kitchen and one tiny bathroom. She raised her kids there and put them both through college; now one is in medical school and the other just had a film premiere at Sundance. \u201cNone of this could have been accomplished,\u201d she told me, \u201cwithout stabilized rent.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2020 Grell went back to college, attending classes at night while working her job as an executive legal assistant at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital by day. One of her assignments, for a class on community organizing, was to observe an organization\u2019s meeting; she chose one hosted by CASA, based on the other side of the Bronx. When she went to the meeting, she felt that it was \u201chome for me,\u201d she said. \u201cI thought, you know what? My building does need repairs, we have common complaints, let me start a tenant association.\u201d Before long she had recruited all of her building\u2019s residents. \u201cI read a story that said one in twenty-four New Yorkers was a millionaire and I was like wait\u2014this is becoming the land of the rich,\u201d she told me. \u201cWe have to hold on with both hands.\u201d<\/p>\n This past January REBNY held its annual fundraiser, a $2,500-per-plate affair at a waterfront venue in Hell\u2019s Kitchen. Kathy Hochul gave remarks; among the honorees was Scott Rechler, CEO of the firm RXR Realty, which owns thousands of residential units in New York. Outside the venue the newly formed Tenant Bloc organized a picket they called the People\u2019s Gala\u2014Grell wore pearls and borrowed a full-length fur coat from her neighbor to look the part. To the rhythm of a bucket drum, the crowd chanted \u201cUP, UP WITH TENANT POWER\/DOWN, DOWN WITH REAL ESTATE,\u201d greeting landlords on their way into a banquet funded by their tenants\u2019 rent checks.<\/p>\n The Tenant Bloc\u2019s strategy involved more than just this kind of confrontation. It built a field operation that included over seven hundred volunteers and twenty-five field leads who knocked doors in every part of the city, collecting 20,646 pledges from rent-stabilized tenants to support a mayor who backed a rent freeze. In May the bloc formally endorsed Mamdani. A week later they gathered more than a thousand tenants for a rally at Riverside Church. Between the endorsement and the primary they sent tens of thousands of texts and placed tens of thousands of calls to get out the vote.<\/p>\n The component organizations of the Tenant Bloc ran their own operations. At the height of their activity CAAAV Voice was in five neighborhoods\u2014Sunnyside, Astoria, Jamaica, Sunset Park, and Chinatown\u2014nine times a week. Tenants like Parveg Hasan went to mosques every Friday to recruit voters. Elisa Martinez, a young tenant who grew up in Washington Heights, canvased her neighborhood with a focus on the Dominican community, which accounts for 15 percent of the city\u2019s rent-stabilized tenants. Delsenia Glover, the president of the historic Lenox Terrace Tenant Association in Harlem, organized her building to sign on to the campaign. Grell told me about a tenant named Mercedes, a retired social worker, who built a crew to take the petitions to college campuses. The bloc\u2019s call for a rent freeze\u2014and to rank Zohran first on the ballot\u2014broke into Whatsapp group chats and ethnic media, including El Diario, Bangla TV, and the World Journal, the largest Chinese newspaper in the US.<\/p>\n Predictably, real estate power players found their own ways to engage in the mayoral race. Last year two long-standing landlord lobbying groups merged to form the New York Apartment Association. (Its inaugural CEO, Kenny Burgos, is a thirty-one-year-old former assemblymember who makes landlord-friendly TikToks<\/a> and attended high school with Mamdani.) In June, as Mamdani rose in the polls, the NYAA announced that it would spend $2.5 million to support Cuomo via a Super PAC called Housing for All\u2014at the time the single largest donation in the mayoral election cycle.\u00a0<\/p>\n The election was supposed to be about crime. Eric Adams had won the office in 2021 on a law-and-order agenda, and when Andrew Cuomo entered the race it was with a platform to \u201cmake New York safer and more respectful of others.\u201d (He committed, among other things, to increasing the police force by 15 percent.) But over the course of the campaign it became clear that Mamdani\u2019s focus on the cost of living was resonating\u2014and that the single biggest threat to the city\u2019s affordability, the biggest line-item in working-class New Yorkers\u2019 monthly budgets, was rent. When the day-one endorsers got behind Mamdani, he was the only candidate supporting a rent freeze. By the last weeks of the primary the Tenant Bloc, along with the pressure of Mamdani\u2019s skyrocketing success in the polls, had moved six more candidates\u2014Brad Lander, Adrienne Adams, Zellnor Myrie, Jessica Ramos, Michael Blake, and Scott Stringer\u2014to join him.<\/p>\n Andrew Lichtenstein\/Corbis\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Zohran Mamdani getting ready to hold his rally at Brooklyn Steel, May 4, 2025<\/p>\n For his part, Mamdani did an elegant dance on housing. \u201cI\u2019ve already told you about my commitment to freeze the rent for every single rent-stabilized tenant,\u201d he told the camera, standing on Atlantic Avenue in a February video, tall residential buildings looming behind him. \u201cBut what about the other half?\u201d For them, he went on, \u201cwe need more housing\u2014a lot more.\u201d In his platform he promised to \u201ctriple the amount of housing built with City capital funds,\u201d including by significantly expanding the city\u2019s Senior Affordable Rental Apartments and Extremely Low and Low-Income Affordability programs, which subsidize the construction of affordable housing for seniors and low-income households, respectively. At the same time, he also threw his support behind such measures as upzoning wealthy neighborhoods, eliminating parking lot requirements, and encouraging housing growth \u201caround subway stations and other public transit hubs,\u201d policies that many developers might favor more than they do his slate of tenant protections.<\/p>\n In a city fraught with smug and unproductive housing discourse\u2014including plenty of bad-faith online screaming by YIMBYs and NIMBYs alike\u2014Mamdani suggested that we might not have to choose between support for tenant protections on the one hand and zoning reform on the other. In an \u201cask me anything\u201d session on Reddit this past April, one participant asked him whether he agreed or disagreed that \u201cmarket-rate development is helpful and good, and we should encourage more of it.\u201d His response was deft:<\/p>\n Agree that we need a LOT more housing of all kinds, and in my housing plan, I call for increased zoning capacity around transit hubs, upzoning wealthy neighborhoods, and fully eliminating the parking mandate citywide\u2026. I led with city capital\u2013funded affordable housing\u2026for two reasons: 1) I want to be held accountable to outcomes, but that\u2019s hard to do when it comes to piecemeal rezonings that are essentially just an invitation to private developers 2) we\u2019re a long ways off from for-profit developers building deeply affordable housing at scale. That\u2019s where the greatest emergency is, and it requires a public-sector approach. Mine will be a pro-housing administration, and it will be one that understands the importance of all kinds of housing growth so that we can meet the scale of this crisis.<\/p>\n The top-line item, however, never changed. In May the campaign released a thirty-second spot that ran for ten days as their main advertisement both on digital platforms and television, including during Knicks games during the team\u2019s playoff bid. It begins with Mamdani jogging down a residential block. Looking straight into the camera, he declares: \u201cI\u2019m running for mayor to freeze the rent for every rent-stabilized tenant.\u201d Block letters appear on the face of a building: FREEZE THE RENT. Cut to the building\u2014it\u2019s Grell\u2019s. She walks out in a jean jacket. \u201cYes,\u201d she says, \u201cthis guy\u2019s gonna freeze the rent.\u201d<\/p>\n Mamdani\u2019s win wasn\u2019t marginal\u2014it was a mandate. When the New York City Board of Elections released the primary\u2019s ranked-choice voting results, they showed him defeating Andrew Cuomo by 56 to 44 percent. Mamdani swept parts of the city that would be affected by the rent freeze. As Charlie Dulik has shown in a recent article<\/a> for NY Focus, he won more first-round votes than Cuomo in seven of the ten assembly districts with the largest share of rent-stabilized units\u2014districts that include much of Astoria, Long Island City, Inwood, Washington Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, central Harlem, and Chelsea, as well as parts of Flatbush and Midtown. Compared to the last municipal election, turnout in tenant-majority areas rose by 7.5 percent.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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