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Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal is hiring a full time organizer to create a borough-wide tenant union, continuing a trend of city government supporting tenant groups.
Brad Hoylman-Sigal, Manhattan’s borough president, is hiring a longtime tenant organizer, Alejandro Coriat, to create a Manhattan-wide tenants union.
The new role, which was a campaign promise for the borough president, comes as the city has seen a surge in tenant power. Mayor Zohran Mamdani aligned himself with tenant groups during the campaign and stood with unionized tenants in Brooklyn on his first day in office.
Politicians are focusing on tenants as the cost of living in New York City remains a top political issue.
“Tenants are under more pressure than ever, and there’s also at the same time a feeling that tenants are finally in the driver’s seat under the new city administration,” said Hoylman-Sigal.
Coriat, who has been organizing tenants in Manhattan for almost a decade, will work with existing unions and nonprofits to help educate tenants about their rights, using some of the resources of the borough president’s office.
“A Manhattan Tenant Union is going to be a project that is pretty daunting, and the way to go about it is… to nurture tenant unions, whether at the neighborhood level or at the level of particular portfolios, and through the interconnections of all those different bodies try to foster the emergence of something that goes beyond,” said Coriat.
Manhattan has the highest rents in the city, and rising. But it also has over 200,000 of the city’s 1 million rent-stabilized rental units and large concentrations of affordable housing. Buildings in upper Manhattan, Harlem, Washington Heights, and Inwood consistently have high numbers of housing code violations, year after year.
Hoylman-Sigal and Coriat hope that the position will improve coordination between tenant groups and help renters fight for repairs.
“It’s about enforcement of our city laws and our administrative code, whether it’s the right to hot water and heat and soon, cooling, to be protected from tenant harassment, to be safeguarded from unconscionable rent increases or to be evicted willy-nilly from your from your apartment,” said Hoylman-Sigal.
Since January, the newly-reactivated Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants has intervened on behalf of tenants in disputes with their landlords and unapologetically encouraged tenants to get organized.
Landlords have been critical of the city’s support for tenant organizing, which they say frames landlords as villains.
Some took issue with Mamdani’s “rental ripoff” hearings, with posters that framed it as a prize fight between tenants and landlords, as well as his rent freeze promise, which they argue fails to consider rising costs of operating housing in the city.
“To constantly attack, vilify, and beat up on [private property owners], I don’t think is effective, and I don’t think it’s fair, and I don’t think it’s appropriate for city funds to be used to create an office that’s going to undermine my ability to run my property,” said Ann Korchak, president of the Small Property Owners Association of New York.
Both Hoylman-Sigal and Coriat support the mayor’s promised rent freeze for the city’s 2 million rent stabilized tenants, which passed a major milestone last month. The Rent Guidelines Board will hold a final vote on allowable rent increases on June 25.
“It’s definitely an exciting political moment. It’s really humbling,” said Coriat.
Here’s what else happened in housing this week—
ICYMI, from City Limits:
- In 2022, developers behind two Atlantic Avenue projects committed to making a “record-setting” 35 percent of the apartments affordable. But after interest rates shot up and the owner cited cost pressures, nonprofit partners recruited by Councilmember Hudson agreed to renegotiate, rather than pursue enforcement.
- The city instructed marshals to suspend all scheduled evictions Thursday in light of the Knicks parade. The civil court also halted any defaults—automatic judgements in favor of the landlord when a tenant does not appear in court, citing possible transit disruptions because of crowds.
- Some City Council members are considering a “no” vote on any budget deal that doesn’t include a significant expansion of the city’s housing voucher program, CityFHEPS, revealing a rift with Council Speaker Julie Menin. The expansion has not appeared in either the mayor or the speaker’s budget plans.
ICYMI, from other local newsrooms:
- How an alleged real estate scammer stayed in business despite years of complaints, via Gothamist.
- Former NYC Comptroller Brad Lander, who is now running Congress in a competitive election against incumbent Dan Goldmand, is taking heat for failing audit a migrant shelter contractor accused of corruption, according to The City Reporter.
- City & State spoke to New York Building Congress President and CEO Carlo Scissura about the city’s building boom.
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