Meet New York State’s New Top Tenant Advocate

“What was so powerful about the rent freeze campaign is that we reached scale in New York City,” said Sumathy Kumar, the new director for Housing Justice for All and its organizing arm, the New York State Tenant Bloc. “We’re going to build off of that to keep tenant power at the top of people’s minds.”

Housing Justice for All and its organizing arm, the New York State Tenant Bloc, have had a productive few years.

The groups helped pass momentous rent stabilization laws in 2019, Good Cause Eviction in 2024, and led a campaign to freeze the rent for the city’s rent stabilized tenants last fall that helped propel Mayor Zohran Mamdani to City Hall.

Thursday, the organization announced Sumathy Kumar, a veteran organizer for Housing Justice For All, as their next director.

Kumar replaces Cea Weaver, a tenant advocate who left the post to lead the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

Mayor Mamdani celebrated the appointment in a statement, saying, “Sumathy Kumar and I have fought side by side in Albany to win real, transformative change for working-class families and, as we look to freeze rents and hold bad landlords accountable, the tenant movement couldn’t have a more powerful champion. I’m proud to partner with Sumathy in the fight for every New Yorker to have a safe, stable, and affordable place to call home.”

Kumar spoke with City Limits this week to answer five questions about their plans for leading the largest tenant organization in the state.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity

Your group led a “freeze the rent” campaign for rent stabilized tenants in the city that helped catapult Mayor Mamdani to City Hall. Do you think he will freeze the rent this year, and what did you learn from that campaign that you will bring to leading HJ4A in the Mamdani era?

I do think we will win a rent freeze this year. 20,000 tenants over the last year organized to fight for a rent freeze. They voted for Zohran Mamdani and now he’s in City Hall. Those tenants aren’t going anywhere. They’re gonna keep fighting for a rent freeze and making sure it happens.

In addition to winning a rent freeze, we also have to be holding landlords accountable, making sure that people are living in decent conditions, making sure that rent stabilization is strong and supported and expanded, and working with the new mayor—who is the most tenant-friendly mayor we’ve had in generations—to carve out a new partnership between the tenant movement, tenants in their buildings, and City Hall. That’s going to be about the rent freeze, it’s going to be about code enforcement, it’s going to be about holding landlords accountable for lease issues. It’s going to be really exciting.

I think what was so powerful about the rent freeze campaign is that we reached scale in New York City. It was everywhere by the end of the primary: anyone who thought about the mayor’s race thought about a rent freeze. We’re going to build off of that to keep tenant power at the top of people’s minds around the city. When they’re thinking about City Hall, my hope is that they’re thinking about what they’re doing for tenants.

In the same way that we had a massive field operation where tenants across the city were knocking on their neighbors’ doors, talking to people about a rent freeze, now that same operation gets to be mobilized to talk about holding landlords accountable, driving landlords to the bargaining table with tenants, organizing our buildings, and winning even more.

Mayor Mamdani, in one of his first actions as mayor, pledged to reinvigorate the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, and appointed your predecessor Cea Weaver to lead it. Weaver has come under scrutiny for past social media posts about changing the relationship New Yorkers, particularly white New Yorkers, have with homeownership. What do you make of that criticism? And do you have any message for Weaver as she leads this new office, in terms of what it can do to better serve tenants?

Cea has an amazing record of protecting tenants, fighting for tenants, and building this incredibly powerful movement that has got us to this point. So now I’m really excited to work with her in her new role, to bring the tenant movement into the halls of power, to work with City Hall in a new and exciting way. 

Cea, with all her experience on the outside coming into City Hall, I can’t think of a better champion and a better person to lead that work at the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

I think that the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants can really work alongside tenants who are organizing in their buildings. We’re going to be going after big portfolios of landlords, we’re going to be talking to tenants across the city, and the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants can be talking in those same buildings, working on the same landlords to get them to actually negotiate with tenants around big things like repairs, like lease issues.

In her State of the State address this week, Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed stiffer criminal penalties for landlords who engage in systematic harassment of rent regulated tenants across multiple buildings, as well as repeat serious offenders of existing anti-harassment laws. How should she go about doing that? In your mind, is there anything missing from the governor’s agenda this year?

So often when we’re talking about tenant harassment, we’re leaning on the tenants themselves to be reporting that to the state, to be doing that proactive enforcement. Tenants do that when they have baseline protections from retaliation. And so what was missing from Kathy Hochul’s State of the State is support to expand rent stabilization to people who don’t have it right now. We are currently fighting for the REST Act at the state level, which would make it easier for upstate cities and towns to actually get rent stabilization so that they can have that baseline protection to be able to organize, to be able to hold their landlords accountable [for] harassment and to a lack of repairs.

Rent stabilization laws, including 2019’s Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which Housing Justice For All was critical in passing, have come under attack in the recent mayoral campaign and by some lawmakers and advocates. Some of them have suggested the rent stabilization rules are too restrictive as to make buildings unable to support themselves financially. How would you respond to those complaints? And are there any changes to the rent stabilization laws that you would be open to?

Rent stabilization is one of the biggest ways that people are currently staying in New York City right now … even while things have gotten so much more expensive. [We need to] expand it so that more tenants have access to it and can stay in their homes, can put down roots, can have a basic level of stability. That is what we are focused on in our 2026 legislative session. In a moment where we are facing a huge housing crisis, we should absolutely be keeping that system intact and expanding it as much as possible.

Landlords tried to make these arguments [against rent stabilization] during the mayoral race, and they failed. New Yorkers didn’t buy it. I think they’re going to keep trying to make those arguments, trying to say that in the face of a housing crisis, the thing to do is to raise people’s rents. And I think people know that that’s just not a good solution.

They’re trying to take power—rent money—and instead of putting it towards repairs, put it towards lobbying and try to convince people that the answer to our housing crisis is more rent hikes. We are going to be organizing people to stop that. All of the power that we built in New York City and across the state over the last years, we are going to keep wielding it in Albany this year to make sure that rent stabilization is whole, is intact, and is expanded so that more people can use it across the state.

You’ve been working in housing and organizing in New York for a number of years now. What do you think that you bring to this role that’s unique?

I’ve organized people in their buildings trying to hold their landlords accountable. I’ve organized people to take action at the state legislature. I’ve worked with people to do incredible direct actions, to do massive electoral field campaigns, and I’m excited to be able to bring all of those different experiences together so that tenants get to use every tool in our toolbox to wield power and win. 

I was one of the co-chairs of New York City DSA from 2020 to 2022 where I helped found the Socialists in Office Committee, alongside newly elected Assembly members and other DSA leaders. That forged a new type of partnership between elected officials and regular people trying to win big, bold things in Albany. That’s exactly the kind of energy I’m hoping to bring into this role too.

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