By Michael Powell
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
On New Year’s Day, Zohran Mamdani completed his
inauguration festivities and departed for Brooklyn. In the working-class
neighborhood of East Flatbush, the new mayor stepped into the lobby of an old
apartment building on Clarkson Avenue and met with tenants on rent strike.
Their grievances were many: The building has 201 outstanding housing-code violations, including leaks, roach
infestations, black mold, and that most perilous of winter derelictions, a lack
of consistent heat and hot water.
The young democratic-socialist mayor had championed
working-class tenants throughout his campaign, promising to freeze rents in
rent-stabilized apartments for four years and even to seize control of
buildings owned by slumlords. This trip could be seen as a down payment on his
intent.
Mamdani faced reporters and photographers in the lobby.
“Landlords have been allowed to mistreat their tenants with impunity,” he
declared. “That ends today.” Cea Weaver, the new director of the Mayor’s Office
to Protect Tenants and, like Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of
America, stood at his side. Her disdain for private-market landlords is no less
fierce than Mamdani’s; she has argued that no tenant should be evicted for not
paying rent. A few days later, the mayor would announce “rental ripoff
hearings” at which tenants could excoriate bad landlords. (A social-media
promotion reads like a movie poster: “Mayor Mamdani & the Mayor’s
Office to Protect Tenants Present New Yorkers vs Bad Landlords.”)
As it happens, in the early 1980s, I worked as a tenant
organizer in the same neighborhood, including at a building a few doors down
from the one where Mamdani spoke. I empathize with the mayor’s fury and recall
my own outrage as I spoke with hardworking tenants who ran their ovens with the
doors open to stay warm and watched mice scamper across their floors. We
confronted bad landlords and ventured into the chaos of housing court in search
of justice that often proved elusive.
But over time the problems we were trying to address, and
the solutions, began to look more complicated. Rage, I learned, was not enough.
In my three years as an organizer, I received a bracing education in the
economics of rent-stabilized apartments, the terrible cost that crime wreaks on
struggling neighborhoods, and the delicate ecology of low-income housing. All
of which shapes my view of Mamdani’s promises: Rent freezes and promises for
the city to take over neglected apartment buildings make for good, visceral
politics but poor public policy.
***
I was born and raised in New York City, and grew up in a
rent-controlled apartment. My family’s sometimes-straitened finances meant that
we would remain renters. I became a tenant organizer in my early 20s, working
for the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, an offshoot of the city’s
Commission on Human Rights. My plan was to change the world, or at least my
corner of it.
New York at the time was far more desolate and
dilapidated than the expensive, albeit deeply unequal, financial capital it is
today. In East Flatbush in the early 1980s, I found blocks of attached brick
homes and boulevards with once-grand apartment buildings. But Church Avenue,
the commercial spine of the neighborhood, offered a dreary run of boarded-up
storefronts, interrupted here and there by diners, real-estate offices,
discount shops, and bodegas, where you could score a nickel bag of weed along with
your quart of milk. Farther east lay blocks with burnt-out apartment buildings,
ghostly at night, and lots strewn with bricks and old bathtubs, mattresses, and
cribs. To reach one tenant association I worked with, I had to navigate an
open-air heroin market. (I was safe enough; dealers assumed I was just another
white boy in need of a fix.)
One night, as I hustled along a deserted avenue to the
bus, I passed a row of commercial garages and felt momentarily hopeful: Thank
God these businesses remain. Then I heard the high-pitched whine of
electric saws behind metal gates, and I realized these were chop shops, where
men worked through the night to reduce stolen cars to marketable parts.
The city at that point had shed jobs and residents by the
hundreds of thousands. Many white residents in East Flatbush had succumbed to
racist fearmongering by real-estate speculators and sold their home for a
fraction of the assessed value; the speculators sold those homes to Black
buyers at exorbitant interest rates. As new arrivals tried to find
their footing, a tide of homicides and drug dealing swept in. In 1976, an
influential former local official wrote an essay in The New York Times advising that
the city should withdraw services from degraded neighborhoods, even razing
apartment blocks, closing subway stations, and leaving land to “lie fallow”; he
called it “planned shrinkage.” That did not happen, not exactly, but the
neglect was real. The working-class West Indians, Haitians, and African
Americans who poured into East Flatbush differed not so much economically from
earlier white residents, but they had to fight mightily to obtain the most
basic services.
Most tenants I worked with in East Flatbush hailed from
the West Indies, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Grenada, and nearly all of them
lived in rent-stabilized apartments. One building in particular comes to mind,
on Cortelyou Road. The tenants lived in a 1920s-era four-floor walk-up with 25
rent-stabilized units. (Under New York’s rent-stabilization laws, an appointed
board sets maximum allowable rent increases citywide.) The landlord, a
Jamaican-born insurance salesman, was not a bad guy; at best, he was a couple
of steps up the income ladder from his struggling tenants. He had sunk his life
savings into the building in hopes of turning a profit, and that was proving a
very bad bet.
The old boiler wheezed and stalled, the roof sprang
leaks, half-century-old pipes cracked, and the lobby intercom was defunct. The
building needed intensive care. But the rent roll was puny, and few tenants
could have paid more even if rent stabilization had allowed for it. One
evening, the landlord told us that he could not afford to run the building.
Tenant leaders were sympathetic, but this was about
survival. They persuaded a housing-court judge to push the landlord aside and
appoint an administrator who was empowered to spend rent monies only
on heat and emergency repairs. Tougher decisions followed. A young mother of
two was well liked but fell months behind on rent; when the city welfare
department gave her an emergency cash grant, she declined to use it to pay the
rent. A mother of three was romantically entangled with a man who had
commandeered a third-floor landing for his drug business and whose clientele
sometimes broke into apartments. The tenant association voted to move to evict
these women, their decision no less necessary for being sad.
The landlord walked away without a penny. There were no
proletarian hearings to denounce a slumlord, who in this case did not really
exist. Just deeply painful decisions. But the tenants managed to assure that
the building would remain what it is to this day: rent stabilized, still of
somewhat-precarious finances. I remember asking a tenant leader what she had
prayed for during those tough times. “A good super who understands boilers,”
she replied.
***
East Flatbush is a much healthier place today. New,
handsome apartment buildings have gone up, and you can see signs of that mixed
blessing known as gentrification. Church Avenue is revived, nearly every
storefront occupied, jazz clubs mixing with Haitian bistros, home-loan shops,
day-care centers, and Jamaican fish shacks. But the neighborhood still feels
fragile, acutely sensitive to any uptick in crime and any drop-off in city
services.
The multifamily-housing stock in East Flatbush remains
particularly vulnerable, as it does in all but the wealthiest of the city’s
neighborhoods. (New York has 1 million rent-stabilized apartments.) Today, even
many well-run rent-stabilized buildings are still only marginally profitable.
That is in part because of rent-law changes pushed through the state
legislature in 2019, and advocated by Weaver. These changes include laudable
protections for tenants, but the economic effects are more uncertain. Previously,
when a tenant moved out of a stabilized apartment, the landlord could raise the
rent by 20 percent. Landlords were also allowed to substantially increase rents
if they rehabilitated an apartment or made major improvements to a building.
Under the new law, they can raise rents by only minuscule amounts to cover
rehabilitation costs. One need not weep for landlords—some of whom have
prospered mightily—to note they no longer have much incentive to fix up
apartments.
Meanwhile, operating costs are rising faster than rental
revenues, according to the NYU Furman Center, which recently examined rent-stabilized housing. And rent
collections in many working-class buildings in New York never fully rebounded
after COVID. The result, predictably, is disinvestment: As managers have cut
back on maintenance, the number of code violations has spiked—a 47 percent increase in the past five years in the
rent-stabilized buildings that NYU examined. A study by Enterprise Community
Partners, an organization that supports affordable housing, found that costs
for affordable-housing operators—including insurance, maintenance, and
administrative expenses—jumped 40 percent from 2017 to 2024; six of every 10
projects the group has financed are losing money. All of this is risky business
for those who operate buildings that are 80 to 100 years old. These problems extend as well to rent-stabilized buildings run by
respected nonprofits.
Even the Mamdani administration has acknowledged the
near-impossible economics of rent-stabilized housing. After the mayor visited
the building on Clarkson Avenue, the city’s law department sued to delay the sale of the building and 92 others owned
by the same landlord in a bankruptcy auction; the landlord, the Pinnacle Group,
owed the city $12.7 million in arrears and fines. The city wanted to sideline
the leading bidder, and was trying to buy time, likely so it could steer the
portfolio to a more tenant-friendly buyer, or even the city itself.
I have no quibble with targeting the Pinnacle Group,
which is in bankruptcy proceedings on 93 buildings with 5,150 apartments, most
of which are rent stabilized; these buildings have a cumulative 5,000 code violations and 14,000 complaints. But in court
documents, the city’s lawyers pointed out that rents in Pinnacle’s portfolio
are “very low averaging” and that those revenues are too low to constitute a
“supportable business.” That is surely an obstacle to clearing up code
violations. A federal bankruptcy judge denied the city’s motion, ruling that
the new proposed buyer had submitted a “reasonable-sounding plan” to manage the
buildings—potentially saving the city from a very expensive rehabilitation
project.
All of this underlines why fixing the problem of
affordable housing in New York City is not so simple as freezing rents.
Mamdani’s deputy mayor for housing and planning recently said that the administration wants to lower costs
for landlords—for example, through property-tax reform, tax breaks for
renovating apartments, and attempts to slow the steep rise in
building-insurance costs. The mayor’s primary focus, however, is on what tenants
pay to live in this terrifically expensive city and the quality of their
housing. That’s far from irrelevant. But the question of how to get landlords
to deliver this housing without bankrupting their buildings matters just as
much.
***
There was also, for me as an organizer, the issue of
crime. Five years ago, Mamdani argued
that the New York Police Department was essentially evil and should have its
budget deeply slashed. He has softened that view considerably since taking
office, but many DSA comrades still hold it. I can speak only to my own
experience: Nothing so erodes the stability of neighborhoods and buildings as
failing to address crime.
I felt its pernicious effects personally in East
Flatbush. Tenants had formed an association at a building on Martense Street,
at a then-sketchy corner. The building had many ailments, and the landlord
seemed intent on doing as little as possible about them. Tenants identified
their greatest need as a working intercom. Absent that, the front door swung
ajar, a welcome sign to thieves. One afternoon, I walked downstairs after
talking with the tenant leaders and found five adolescent boys jiggering locks to
break into an apartment.
Yo, yo, yo, get out of here, I said loudly, waving
my hands to scat.
The littlest boy pulled out a strikingly large gun and
stuck it in my face. Shoot him, two boys yelled. Nah, leave the
motherfucker alone, the other two said. The boy considered his options,
then tucked the gun back into his waistband. He told me I was lucky to be
alive. I nodded in agreement.
Such episodes threatened civic life in a most elemental
fashion. A homeowner block leader who risked catching a stray bullet was far
less likely to walk to an evening meeting at a local church. Tenants told me
they worried that if they talked openly in their lobby about crime, snitches
for local drug dealers might overhear and report them. Other tenants sometimes
insisted on walking me to the subway after a meeting, placing themselves in
harm’s way.
I never once heard a tenant leader or block leader argue
for less policing. They wanted a respectful partnership with law enforcement.
At great risk, they monitored dangerous streets and rowhouses, took notes on
dealers and gangs, and passed this information along to the local precincts and
to the mayor’s office. Some cops and city officials were unresponsive, even
corrupt. But the best listened carefully and used that information to clear
notorious corners and round up gang leaders.
I once stood watch with tenants every night for a week
after we heard that their landlord had hired an arsonist—known as a “torch”—to burn down their building, so the landlord could collect the
insurance money. The city’s Arson Strike Force got involved, and the building
stands to this day.
The new mayor is fond of his On the Waterfront rhetoric,
and tends to suggest that, before the socialists came to power, city government
was dismissive of the poor and working class. He means well, but this is
nonsense. Thankfully, city officials—prodded by tenants and small-business
owners, clergy and homeowners, and, yes, some landlords—rejected advice to
consign neighborhoods such as East Flatbush to history’s dustbin. Beginning in
the 1980s, successive mayors, Democrats and Republicans, invested first hundreds of millions and then billions of
dollars in what became the greatest urban-rebuilding program in American
history. The city and nonprofits rehabilitated abandoned buildings and
constructed new ones, along with day cares and schools. The rubble-strewn lots
I once walked through are now smart-looking apartment buildings. Banks and
supermarkets sit on corners where drug dealers held sway. Citywide, many fewer
children are in foster care, fewer men are in prison, and far fewer New Yorkers
are murdered each year.
I took a walk recently through East Flatbush, alongside
the snow-laden Holy Cross Cemetery, down Church Avenue, and along a couple of
boulevards of prewar apartment buildings, as achingly beautiful and, in some
cases, as tattered as when I first arrived there. The city still faces many
challenges, but its recent history gives me hope that a new mayor and
administration committed to improving affordable housing can make a profound
mark. To do that, Mamdani will need to toss aside easy moral binaries—noble tenants
versus capitalist landlords, frozen rents versus runaway profits—and recognize
the painful trade-offs that will come with restoring rent-stabilized housing,
one of New York’s great resources.
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