Inside Mamdani’s First Rental Ripoff Hearing

When Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced his “Rental Ripoff” hearings, he appeared to be advertising a showdown.

A poster marketed the event like a boxing match: “New Yorkers vs. Bad Landlords.”

But the inaugural event in Downtown Brooklyn on Thursday night was much more subdued than the real estate industry likely expected, or feared. The event, held at George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School, bore more similarities to a parent-teacher conference night than a show trial. New Yorkers circulated through a resource fair in a school cafeteria and met one-on-one with city officials in a side room.

A City Hall spokesperson indicated that 450 people registered to testify on Thursday, but did not have an official count of how many attended the one-on-one meetings.

The event may prove to be emblematic of Mamdani’s governing style: big, headline-grabbing proclamations — a fervor of attention — but in the end, something more nuanced.

“We know that every landlord is not a bad landlord, but we want to find the ones that are,” said Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

Weaver rang in the event with a presentation in a school gymnasium filled with reporters and TV cameras. She emphasized the city’s interest in tenants organizing with each other, forming tenant groups across a building or a landlord’s portfolio.

“The most protected tenant is an empowered tenant,” Weaver said. “Organized tenants are better able to enforce their rights.”

After Weaver’s presentation, a social media personality who goes by “Crackhead Barney” climbed onto the stage and grabbed the microphone to decry NYCHA’s exclusion from the hearings. The hearings were focused on private-sector housing, but city officials indicated that NYCHA residents weren’t barred from the event or from testifying. When Weaver and others told her she could speak to a city official, she exited the stage.

Off the gymnasium, conversations between renters and city officials were quiet and sometimes emotional. Residents discussed their personal living situations and their attempts to get issues addressed.

The meetings took place in a small room, the school’s black-box theater where tumbling mats were stacked against a small rock-climbing wall. Tenants sat down at tables with two city employees, including agency heads and deputy mayors. One person took notes on a laptop, while the other listened intently to the tenant.

Ahmed Tigani, the city’s building commissioner, said the conversations were instructive and helped him understand how city information is or is not being received by renters. Mamdani, who was in Washington, D.C., earlier in the day having an unannounced meeting with President Trump, was not in attendance.

Coming out of the hearing room, Nicole Boliaux, a member of a tenant union in Bushwick, said she spoke about landlords threatening to report tenants to credit bureaus over delinquent rent payments. She also advocated for state legislation that would limit when and how landlords can report tenant financial information to consumer reporting agencies.

She noted that it can be difficult to make connections with agencies and appreciated the opportunity to speak one-on-one with a city official. Boliaux was also relieved she didn’t need to deliver her testimony onstage.

“It’s chaotic in there, but I was worried that I’d have to stand in front of a large group of people and speak,” she said. “And so I’m much more grateful that it is a one-on-one experience.”

Despite the blustering lead-up, grandstanding anti-landlord speeches that some expected were largely absent from the event. Also absent were seemingly any landlords.

Developer Humberto Lopes, who has posted several videos on social media condemning the hearings, spoke to reporters outside the school. Lopes has called on fellow property owners to withhold property tax payments in response to the event. He declined to share the status of that effort on Thursday but insisted that it is moving forward.

Lopes asserted that the city should sit down with landlords rather than hold tenant-focused meetings and a resource fair.

“It’s creating an atmosphere of ‘fight,’ where you continue to call us the bad guy,” he said. “What’s the sense of doing this? Why don’t you put us together?”

The mayor’s office has said the testimony will inform a report due later this year and the mayor’s overall housing plan.