How Mamdani Can Fix His Trust Problem With Landlords

Why would senior Mamdani aides walk into a lion’s den of 3,000 real estate junkies who hate HPD violations and the mayor’s politics?

In a bit of a surprise, the Mamdani administration made a big effort to connect with the industry at The Real Deal’s New York Forum this week, sending Deputy Mayor Leila Bozorg and Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Dina Levy to the stage.

The reason: To meet the mayor’s goals of reducing rent growth and improving conditions for tenants, they need the industry to build and repair housing like never before. And for that, they need to build trust. Below, I’ll pitch an idea that serves both goals.

Bozorg and Levy are also meeting behind the scenes with the Real Estate Board of New York, the New York Apartment Association and other industry groups and with individual landlords who manage to break through the bureaucracy. (The Small Property Owners of New York tried to meet with Bozorg but was cut off. SPONY is, however, scheduled to meet with Levy next month.)

Bozorg and Levy are spreading the word that responsible landlords should reach out to their agencies. Complicating that effort are the mayor’s videos about “bad landlords” and his tenant protection attack dog, Cea Weaver, who called A&E’s Douglas Eisenberg — a Cornell urban planning graduate, City Limits honoree and former David Dinkins aide — “a straight-up slumlord.”

The pugilistic marketing of the “rental ripoffs” events didn’t help.

“I understand why some people felt they were all being lumped into a bucket of ripping off tenants,” Levy said at TRD’s Forum. “Perhaps that could have been messaged a little bit differently.”

Levy wants landlords to see her as an honest broker and not someone out to get them, unless they are truly predatory (which, since 2019, is not a viable business strategy).

Two ways to overcome rank-and-file owners’ lack of trust are to reform HPD violations and fix housing court. The administration is working on both. It aims to reform one-shot deals so landlords don’t think they need an eviction order and tenants don’t repeatedly stop paying rent to qualify.

But the administration has yet to address the vacant unit problem or ask state lawmakers to do so. It seems to believe that landlords deliberately lose $50 million a month by warehousing 50,000 units in a giant conspiracy to pressure Albany to increase rents.

Fortunately, I have a solution for the Mamdani officials who think it only costs $20,000 to bring a rent-stabilized unit up to code and install new appliances after a long tenancy:

Issue an RFP for contractors to do this work at scale
Charge owners $20,000 per unit renovated
Guarantee units will be made legal for occupancy

Having just paid $30,000 to renovate a single bathroom, I am sure the city would lose money on most renovations. But it would bring thousands of units back online, create jobs and be much cheaper and faster than building affordable housing, which costs about $700,000 per unit.

There you have it. Build trust, house families and put the conspiracy theories to rest. See, the lion’s den isn’t so bad.