Outside El Museo del Barrio in Upper Manhattan, tenant advocates were jubilant.
They had done it. The rent freeze they had organized and canvassed for was finally here.
“Up, up with tenant power,” they chanted. “Down, down with real estate.”
New York’s tenant organizations and advocacy groups, long foes of the real estate industry, have seen their power swell. They have allies in influential positions at city agencies, City Council, and, of course, Gracie Mansion, not to mention among the slate of June primary winners for state and federal positions. These groups are now a major part of the progressive coalition that is running New York and setting policy for the real estate industry.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made tenant organizers a key part of an overall housing strategy that has been chilling for landlords. His housing plan explains how organizing tenants, targeting buildings and searching for housing code violations is the legwork that would allow some buildings to be transferred to nonprofits or other “responsible stewards,” as Mamdani put it at the release of his housing plan.
But, like any broad coalition that comes to power, the groups are also navigating internal decisions about where they stand, both in relation to City Hall and each other.
Constellation of organizations
In this city of renters, the tenant movement is broad, varied and deeply rooted.
Groups include city and statewide organizations, like Housing Justice 4 All and the Metropolitan Council on Housing, as well as those tied to specific ethnicities or geographies: Desis Rising Up & Moving focuses on South Asian tenants in Queens, CAAAV has a base of support with immigrants in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
New York Communities for Change and Democratic Socialists of America are both larger and advocate and organize around housing as well as other progressive issues, like environmentalism and labor.
Tenant associations and unions are active at the building, portfolio and neighborhood levels. For example, the Union of Pinnacle Tenants includes tenants organized at buildings in the former Pinnacle Group portfolio; they have a direct line to the mayor’s office.
Organizing and rhetorical styles vary by group. DSA is explicitly socialist, while Pinnacle Tenants models itself off a labor union, borrowing terms like “collective bargaining agreement.”
Legal services groups provide support, especially in more dire situations.
“When teams like ours file a lawsuit, we rarely lose,” said Catherine Barreda, director of Brooklyn Legal Services’ tenant rights coalition.
“For the hatred of landlords and the love of the game.”
In addition to private donations, some of these groups get city funding for tenant organizing. A city initiative called Partners in Preservation funds organizers at 20 different tenant groups, including the Met Council on Housing. The program, piloted in 2018, has $15 million over three years.
The Anti-Harassment Tenant Protection Program funds legal services and organizing support for tenants and tenant associations. The program, housed in the city’s Department of Social Services, has supported organizations like the Legal Aid Society, Legal Services NYC and the Urban Justice Center, according to city data.
Still, many small-time organizers are putting in hours unpaid, “for the hatred of landlords and the love of the game,” as one said.
The renters in the movement are often lower- and middle-income people of color who have lived in the city long-term and downwardly mobile college grads who have an interest in left-wing politics more generally. Covid, which pushed people into their apartments and brought on previously unthinkable housing policies like an eviction moratorium, galvanized their movement.
Most activists share the frustration that the rental housing they rely on is an investment opportunity for someone else.
“It’s a politics of anger,” said Eli Weiss of Joy Construction, who worked for the state’s housing finance corporation during the Bloomberg administration.
Weiss said he believes tenant advocates have the wrong policy prescriptions. But he understands what’s motivating them.
“Wealth in this country has predominantly been created by the stock market and owning a home. Tenants don’t own a home and generally are not the people who are investing in the stock market,” he said. “They’re not participating in this economic growth that many people are.”
Mamdani taps into that. New Yorkers are feeling a “bitter expectancy,” he said, quoting James Baldwin about the sense that nothing will ever get better or more affordable.
That bitterness is a catalyst, one that landlords are heeding.
Two-way street
While it’s easy to conclude that the mayor’s rise to power emboldened and empowered tenant groups that had been sidelined during four years of Eric Adams, the tenant movement sees it differently: The mayor was empowered by them. He signed on to their popular ideas, like a rent freeze, and got an army of door-knockers in return. During the 2025 primary, Tenant Bloc, HJ4A’s political arm, collected 20,000 signatures from renters who pledged to vote for a mayor who would freeze stabilized rents.
The left’s power of organizing was on display in the June Democratic primaries, where a slate of congressional candidates endorsed by Mamdani and the DSA won their races.
Critics, especially in the real estate industry, say that appealing to tenants is an easy way to score votes in a city where seven in 10 residents rent.
But for Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, and others, that’s a feature, not a bug.
“We’ve been included in talks about the housing plan. For the first time ever I’ve been at a meeting in City Hall, which I hadn’t for the last 10 years.”
“I don’t think that there’s anything cynical about an elected official seeing themselves as accountable to a democratic majority in a democracy,” Weaver said. “That’s sort of the point.”
For the most part, Mamdani is touting his connection to tenant movements and delivering them some nominal wins.
“We’ve been included in talks about the housing plan and meetings,” said Andrea Shapiro, of the Met Council on Housing. “For the first time ever I’ve been at a meeting in City Hall, which I hadn’t for the last 10 years.”
Some groups have even been brought closer inside. Mamdani meets regularly with his “day one endorsers.” Those groups include Housing Justice 4 All (HJ4A, which Weaver once directed), New York Communities for Change, DSA, CAAAV and Desis Rising Up & Moving.
Moving in tandem
A close partnership with the mayor leaves tenant groups with decisions to make. Is it better to be seen as fighting or better to be seen as winning?
Take the issue of a rent freeze, one of Mamdani’s marquee campaign promises. Most tenant groups have rallied around that call, turning out supporters at Rent Guidelines Board meetings and the June 25 vote.
However, others have pushed further, going as far as demanding the board set negative increases and “roll back” rents.
That created an awkward situation at a May RGB meeting, as some of Mamdani’s handpicked members faced a wave of boos as they sheepishly voted against a rollback.
If groups are not pushing the administration beyond its promises, they’re leaving power on the table, some believe.
“We want to support our mayor as the first socialist mayor of the city. We want to support him because he’s obviously going to be facing a lot of right-wing pressure,” said Chi Anunwa, co-chair of DSA’s rent-freeze campaign. But, part of their job as socialists is to also push Mamdani to the left, Anunwa added.
Tenant advocates and organizers aren’t eager to speak negatively of the mayor in public. But privately, they have their disagreements. Some tenant-side advocates will express dismay that Mamdani is, for example, fighting the expansion of CityFHEPS, a housing voucher program, endorsing a federal program to bring private developers in to fix NYCHA buildings, or aligning himself with YIMBY wonks, who favor rezonings and new development. On-the-ground organizers say they’re still waiting to see if the mayor is truly a believer in their movement or a politician looking for his flowers.
“Yes, we believe we played a huge role in electing this mayor. We also don’t think that means we’re going to get everything that we want,” said Sasha Wijeyeratne, executive director of CAAAV. “We are actually trying to figure out how we win, what we need to win.”
What strategy is best for the movement is something activists are still discussing, sometimes heatedly, with each other. Some feel the stakes are higher now that the left has more power.
“If we win any of it, then we’re in a better place than we were at before,” said Samuel Stein, a housing policy analyst at Community Service Society. “But in the meantime, people are at each other’s throats, because that’s just how people are.”
End game
For landlords, the tenant movement stands to be a major force affecting their business.
Current tenant advocacy leans on the wins of the past decade, namely Good Cause Eviction and the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019. The latter closed avenues to increase revenue in rent-stabilized buildings, cratering their values. That drop, along with attendant physical and financial distress, has given the city the justification to help transfer buildings from current owners, along with an easier path to doing so.
The enforcement section of Mamdani’s housing plan, called “Fix the City,” highlights working with tenant groups to “target” certain buildings and landlords. Those buildings then are subject to increased enforcement and scrutiny from the city, with the eventual aim of transferring ownership to a nonprofit or other group.
The city has already been exploring how to provide financing to nonprofits and other mission-driven buyers who want to purchase distressed portfolios at foreclosure auctions. The 7A program, referenced in the mayor’s housing plan, allows a housing court judge to appoint an outside administrator to operate a building. The Mamdani administration has also supported the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, which would give nonprofits the first shot at buying up buildings with a high number of housing code violations.
The message is clear: Someone else could run your buildings better.
It’s unlikely that this was all, from HSTPA to the transfer of properties, planned out. But it was, at least by some, predicted.
“We started saying this really in the depths of Covid, that there was probably going to be a mortgage crisis of some kind, and that we can either let private equity buy up these buildings, or we can try to convert them into some form of social housing,” Stein said. “It hasn’t happened quickly, but it is trending in that direction.”
Kenny Burgos, who leads the New York Apartment Association, which represents rent-stabilized landlords, said he believes tenant organizing can help create constructive conversations.
But the focus on landlords obscures the role that housing policy and expense growth plays in housing conditions, he said.
“The mayor has to be honest with renters,” Burgos said. “It doesn’t matter who owns the housing. If the math doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.”
The best tenant protection is an abundant housing supply, he added.
Although some have embraced supply-side tools, tenant groups largely have a different vision of how to protect their interests. In the end, several groups share the goal of divorcing housing from profit entirely.
“The stakes are really high right now,” said Sumathy Kumar, who directs Housing Justice 4 All. “We could usher in this golden age of tenant power.”