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The events will be a chance for public housing residents—some of whom felt left out by Mamdani’s earlier ‘Rental Ripoff’ hearings—to provide direct feedback and share concerns with city leaders.
Earlier this spring, Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked the city’s tenants to show up to a series of public events—dubbed the “Rental Ripoff” hearings—and share their bad landlord and rental horror stories with city officials.
But some said the initiative overlooked a key tenant constituency: the more than 500,000 New Yorkers whose landlord is NYCHA, which the mayor has direct control over. While NYCHA reps were on hand at the hearings to provide information to attendees, administration officials acknowledged the events were primarily geared to tenants in privately-owned apartments, and pledged to find other ways to engage with people in public housing.
On Friday, Mamdani announced the first of those efforts: three upcoming forums where NYCHA residents will have a chance to sit down and share their feedback directly with city leaders. The first is next Thursday, May 20 in the Bronx, and the remaining two will take place in June in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Advanced registration is required and space is limited, officials noted.
“These forums will give residents a new opportunity to weigh in on the issues that matter most to them and access services from a range of City agencies,” Mamdani said in statement announcing the so-called “NYCHA in Your Neighborhood” campaign.
The forums will include opportunities for residents to take part in “small-group discussions” with city officials, in the same vein as the earlier Rental Ripoff hearings. It will also feature resource tables where attendees can “engage one-on-one with NYCHA staff about apartment repairs, tenancy concerns, environmental issues and more.”
It comes as NYCHA grapples with $78 billion in repair needs, a result of decades of underfunding from the city, state and federal governments. Public housing tenants regularly contend with a litany of maintenance issues, like mold, malfunctioning elevators and heat and hot water outages.
In recent years, the housing authority has converted tens of thousands of units to the federal Section 8 program as a means to unlock additional repair money, including by turning developments over to private management. While some NYCHA leaders see opportunity in the model, many are deeply skeptical of the shift and are fighting to keep buildings as part of the traditional Section 9 public housing program.
Mamdani’s executive budget proposal, which he unveiled Tuesday, includes $5.6 billion earmarked for public housing repairs over the next five years, what he referred to as “the most city capital to NYCHA in recent decades.”
This includes $256 million over the next two years specifically for rehabbing vacant units, the mayor said. It takes NYCHA nearly a year to renovate apartments for re-occupancy after a tenant moves out, delays that have lead to more than 6,000 units sitting empty for months as more than 160,000 people are on the housing authority’s waitlist.
Mamdani and City Council members will spend the next few weeks wrangling over a final spending plan, which is due June 1. It’s likely lawmakers will push for additional resources for public housing: in a statement Tuesday, several members of the Council’s Progressive Caucus called the mayor’s proposal “a solid starting point” for negotiations, but said “there’s much more to be done,” when it comes to NYCHA vacancies and other issues.
The mayor’s “NYCHA in Your Neighborhood” forums will take place May 20, June 3 and June 17. You can find more details and register to attend by filling out this form.
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