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Mamdani’s Office of Mass Engagement will be knocking on doors this spring, urging New Yorkers to testify at upcoming Rent Guideline Board hearings. The board will vote in June on rent adjustments for tenants in roughly 1 million rent stabilized apartments.
In June, the city’s Rent Guidelines Board will hold public hearings as its members decide wether to raise rents this year for tenants in roughly 1 million rent stabilized apartments—and the mayor wants New Yorkers to show up.
Zohran Mamdani announced the launch Wednesday of Organize NYC, an effort to get more people engaged with city government and harness the grassroots momentum that fueled his odds-defying election campaign.
Overseen by the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement Commissioner Tascha Van Auken—Mamdani’s field director when he was running for office—Organize NYC’s first big project will focus on mobilizing people around the RBG vote in June.
Just under half of all the city’s rental apartments are rent stabilized. City staffers and volunteers will start knocking on doors this month in neighborhoods like Flatbush and Jackson Heights to inform people about the upcoming hearings and encourage them to weigh in, the mayor said.
And while Mamdani campaigned on a promise to freeze the rent, he insisted the outreach “is not about telling New Yorkers what they should say” and that canvassers would engage both tenants and landlords.
“The decision of whether or not to raise the rent impacts more than 2 million New Yorkers,” Mamdani said. Last year, he noted, only 400 people testified at RGB hearings, what he said “shows that so many people are divorced from the very processes that determine their own lives.”
“The decision is supposed to be informed by the testimony of all those it impacts—landlords, tenants,” he said.
Supporters of a freeze point to the city’s ongoing affordability crisis and high homelessness rates, saying many rent stabilized households can’t afford another increase (the RGB voted to raise rents every year under former Mayor Eric Adams). Rent stabilized landlords argue a freeze would make it harder for them to maintain their buildings as they struggle with rising operating costs.
The public will be able to testify at hearings on June 4, June 8, June 11 and June 16. More details here.
Here’s what else happened in housing this week—
ICYMI, from City Limits:
- New York City’s only solar incentive is a property tax abatement that most nonprofit and affordable housing providers can’t use. A proposal in Albany would change that.
- NYCHA is required to provide ASL interpretation to deaf or hard of hearing tenants who request it during inspections and repairs. But residents say this often doesn’t happen. “It’s almost been like pulling teeth.”
- “The best way for people to move out of shelter is to have a voucher. It gives them the support that they need, and it also is economically better for New York taxpayers,” says former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who heads homeless shelter provider WIN and is urging the mayor to keep his campaign promise to expand eligibility for CityFHEPS vouchers.
ICYMI, from other local newsrooms:
- A Gothamist investigation found serious issues of “chronic violence and dysfunction” at the city’s 200-bed homeless shelter for women in Downtown Brooklyn.
- The New York Times takes a closer look at the complicated case of the Bed-Stuy home where City Councilmember Chi Osse was arrested while trying to prevent a resident’s eviction.
- Claire Valdez, the Mamdani-backed Democratic Socialist Assembly member running for Congress, called for universal rent control in an interview with City & State.
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