Hundreds of New York City tenants vented their housing grievances at Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first “rental ripoff” hearing on Thursday — but remain dubious that their landlord woes will be fixed.
Roughly 500 tenants signed up to speak one-on-one with Mamdani’s controversial tenant advocate, Cea Weaver, and volunteers from several other city agencies to vocalize ongoing housing and landlord disputes at the Downtown Brooklyn hearing.
Weaver began the “rental ripoff” hearing — which was slammed by New York City Housing Authority residents for largely excluding them — by listing notable discussion points for tenants to voice to city advocates, including rental junk fees for amenities including keeping pets and code enforcement issues.
“What are the things you have to pay every month that are not your rent and that are making housing more unaffordable in the city?” Weaver asked the crowd.
Tenants of privately owned buildings shared their complaints about their long-term housing quality issues and disputes with their landlords, while maintaining skepticism that their problems would improve despite the Mamdani administration’s promises.
“Mamdani’s made a pretty big statement about how he wants to get tenants’ rights recognized, and I think it’s great they’re having these kinds of meetings in the first place,” said Brooklyn renter Alex Reddihough.
“I’m not sure anything will come from this, but at least the city is giving an opportunity.”
The 41-year-old structural engineer who lives with his wife in Prospect Heights was first to line up for the hearing around 4 p.m. outside of K605 George Westinghouse High School.
“I’ve got some hope that the new mayor is going to enforce the regulations and understand what people are having to deal with,” he said.
Reddihough has been in the same rent-stabilized one-bedroom unit on Eastern Parkway for years, paying $2,950 rent a month — but has dealt with mouse infestations, heat and hot water issues, and repeated “patch jobs” of other maintenance issues.
Residents have filed multiple 311 complaints, but they get closed out within “hours,” he recalled, alleging no one from the city ever actually comes to check complaints.
Though he belongs to a tenant association, Reddihough said many older rent-stabilized tenants are afraid to report problems over fears of eviction.
“It makes me sad that they’re kind of scared and they don’t feel like there’s an avenue to make the state of living better,” he said.
Joshua Rodriguez, a Red Hook resident on Coffey Street for over 40 years, spoke one-on-one with Weaver during the hearing for advice on how to move forward with his housing court case and enforce repairs in his building.
“It’s cool that it exists in general because in my lifetime I haven’t really seen anything like this,” Rodriguez said of the hearing. “Most of the time, we get ignored, especially people of color and people who are lifelong New Yorkers.”
“I guess I don’t have too much faith in the government, but this new administration, maybe, maybe we’ll see a little bit of a change,” he said.
The start of the meeting was disrupted by a notorious online agitator who calls herself “Crackhead Barney.”
The profane performance artist stormed the stage and took to the podium, where she shouted, “NYCHA [tenants] should be allowed to speak today. NYCHA should be allowed in the motherf–cking building. NYCHA should be allowed to speak. This is bulls–t.”
“There’s no tenants association without NYCHA. Poor people have a f–king voice.”
NYCHA tenants — nor any tenant — was given time to provide their public testimony during the hearing and were instead offered one-on-one meetings.
Public housing residents can still attend the forums and speak individually with NYCHA officials in attendance about repairs, heat or hot water issues and other worries, according to the mayor’s office.
The city is planning to host separate, additional tenant engagement for NYCHA tenants, a City Hall spokesperson said.