It was April, and then-mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani stood outside a South Bronx apartment building where tenants had for years complained of dangerous living conditions, like broken front door locks and toxic mold, and demanded repairs from their landlord.
The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development had, days earlier, used a rare maneuver to take another Bronx property from an owner who failed to pay tens of millions of dollars in overdue taxes and fines. The agency turned the building over to a nonprofit organization and private manager, along with a loan from the city to renovate.
At the campaign event, Mamdani said he would do more. He touted his plan to aggressively target similar apartment buildings, and even put them under city control if the owner failed to pay penalties or fix problems.
“We will use every single tool at our disposal, including seizing buildings from slumlords, to ensure that each and every New Yorker is given what is their right, a safe place to call their home,” Mamdani said.
Eight months later, and on the cusp of his inauguration, Mamdani will soon be expected to fulfill that promise. But there won’t be one uniform method for acquiring buildings, according to his transition team, and public ownership remains an option in a broader effort to improve apartment conditions.
The city as property owner would mark a departure from current policy when it comes to improving and preserving affordable apartments. The idea is legally, financially and politically complicated, but Mamdani spelled out a strategy in his campaign platform.
He has pledged to re-establish a Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants that was defanged by Mayor Eric Adams and empower it to identify negligent owners and distressed buildings, negotiate with owners to acquire the properties if they fail to improve conditions or pay fines, and, at least in some cases, keep them under municipal control.
Mamdani described a goal of funding more purchases by nonprofits and tenant groups as well as directly buying properties and “retaining public ownership of the land,” while reaching long-term agreements with groups or companies to run the buildings.
Cea Weaver, Mamdani’s housing adviser, said the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants would focus on “tackling New York’s housing crisis by enhancing enforcement actions and working alongside tenants’ organizations to more nimbly intervene in distressed portfolios, including through lining up acquisition support.”
Weaver laid out how city ownership could work in an October essay for the publication Phenomenal World. She wrote that tenants would benefit from the city “holding land in a city-wide portfolio and leasing out the right to collect rents” because it could pool resources across properties to keep costs down and invest money back into buildings. The arrangement, she said, would be akin to a model known as a community land trust.
The Mamdani transition team declined to make the mayor-elect available for an interview about his plans for public ownership or the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.
In a written statement, his spokesperson Dora Pekec said Mamdani is “committed to taking a creative look at what long-term ownership of housing should look like” and will consider private managers, community land trusts, nonprofit groups and “other public models.”
Pekec said Mamdani had not yet selected a director to lead the office and added that he wants to prioritize solving problems that affect tenants, not just building new housing for the future.
Mamdani’s campaign platform also calls for consolidating enforcement of city housing rules now handled by a variety of agencies under the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants and forcing landlords to negotiate sales if they fail to pay fines after racking up violations.
The arrangement could require a reorganization of existing duties, and acquiring buildings while retaining ownership could get complicated. Multiple agencies would have to work together to purchase the properties and determine how to operate them or lease them to other management companies or organizations. Landlords would have to be willing, or otherwise compelled, to sell.
The owner of the South Bronx building where Mamdani held his April press conference, a company tied to David Tennenbaum, did not respond to messages seeking comment on whether it would sell the property. Tennenbaum was ranked as the city’s sixth “worst landlord” last year in an annual list compiled by Public Advocate Jumaane Williams.
Developers, property owners and some Mamdani allies are skeptical, or outright scornful of the idea that New York City would take over privately owned buildings, arguing it recalls an earlier era, when the city struggled to maintain tens of thousands of apartments it obtained through foreclosure after building owners abandoned them during the 1970s fiscal crisis.
“Turning back the clock and trying to have the city own and quote-unquote stabilize buildings is not something that has historically been successful,” said Karim Hutson, CEO of the affordable housing developer Genesis Companies.
But supporters of the concept say the idea is far more nuanced and feasible than its detractors might think.
The revamped Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants could become a laboratory for housing deals, trying out different strategies for buying buildings and keeping them under city ownership, or funding purchases by other groups, said Samuel Stein, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society who has written extensively about public ownership to lower rents and housing costs.
“The office will likely want to do what labor organizers call ‘stress tests’ — trying new things, then assessing whether the systems were up to the challenge before escalating further,” Stein said.
In that way, it could mirror Mamdani’s pledge to establish a few city-owned grocery stores. He has said he wants to see if a pilot program lowers food prices and scrap the idea if it doesn’t work.
“Public ownership does not have to mean the city immediately and permanently becomes the landlord,” Stein said. “It can look like a lot of things, many of which government already does.”
The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development frequently helps nonprofit and private developers preserve thousands of existing apartments at affordable rates every year through loans and funding. The New York City Housing Authority leases its campuses to for-profit developers and managers to handle operations and rent collection. By retaining ownership, NYCHA reserves the right to replace bad developers or managers. And the city has, on rare occasions, negotiated with landlords directly.
Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the Department of Social Services purchased more than 30 apartment buildings it had been leasing as temporary homeless shelters through an expensive “cluster site” program that relied on notorious landlords and dangerous apartment conditions, including a broken radiator that scalded and killed two young girls in the Bronx.
The agency handed the buildings over to nonprofit developers to renovate and rent to formerly homeless families permanently.
Given the deteriorating state of the city’s housing stock, there will be plenty of properties for the new office to choose from.
City data shows hundreds of apartment buildings with rent-stabilized units were in serious financial distress last year, with their owners reporting that expenses outpaced income from rents. Landlords cite this data to explain why they need to increase rents for rent-stabilized apartments to keep pace with costs and maintenance, in sharp contrast to Mamdani’s vow of freezing the rent for those units.
Housing safety complaints and violations have both increased by more than 200,000 over the past four years, according to an annual city report. And the same names continue to appear on the public advocate’s annual list of landlords making tenants’ lives miserable.
New York Apartment Association CEO Kenny Burgos, whose lobbying group represents owners of rent-stabilized apartments, said “thousands” of landlords would take Mamdani up on the offer to sell.
“If the city chooses to purchase these buildings, they will gladly do so,” Burgos said.
He said truly negligent property owners are rare, and that many rent-stabilized apartments are in bad shape because owners are forgoing maintenance due to rising costs for materials and insurance, and strict rules that cap rent increases.
Burgos warned that any properties the city buys or turns over to community groups will also require millions of dollars in renovation and maintenance costs.
“If he in fact creates this office and coordinates all these agencies to buy what I would imagine are the most distressed properties in New York City, he would also have to dedicate an additional budget item well into the nine-figure range to sustain them,” Burgos said.
Mamdani has said the template already exists and has pointed to a program known as Neighborhood Pillars, where the Department of Housing Preservation and Development finances purchases and construction by private and nonprofit housing groups.
At least one member of his transition team hopes he follows that path, rather than try to keep properties under city ownership.
Kathy Wylde, CEO of the influential business group Partnership for New York City, led an effort to build thousands of affordable homes on land transferred to developers by the city in the 1980s.
“We created programs that supported investment in the buildings and upgraded them, and that is a much better way to keep ownership in private or nonprofit hands,” Wylde said. “It allowed the city to get out of the slumlord business.”
Whatever direction the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants pursues, its director will need clear authority to actually convene other city agencies, said Ricardo Campos, who led the office under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“That is the key, critical piece to all of this,” Campos said. “Having one person overseeing all these efforts and having the power to bring them together to make collective solutions.”
Campos said acquiring bad apartment buildings would be complicated, but that the mission is “a no-brainer.”
