I was at Mamdani's 'Rental Ripoff' event, where New Yorkers vented about rats and 'bad landlords'

Plenty of civic events take place in public school gyms. Few, if any, are advertised with the bravado of a Don King-like boxing promoter. The first of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's "Rental Ripoff Hearings," held Thursday night at George Westinghouse High School in downtown Brooklyn, was one of those rare exceptions. The event, billed in bold, Rumble-in-the-Jungle-esque lettering as "New Yorkers vs. Bad Landlords," drew hundreds of tenants — plus a media gaggle worthy of a marquee bout — to share their mounting frustrations with the junk fees, shoddy upkeep, and eye-watering rents that plague some of the city's more than 2.3 million rental units.

In one-on-one conversations with city officials and in messages scrawled on poster boards scattered across the hardwood, renters described the ignored repair requests, fruitless calls to the city, and the byzantine web of legal hurdles they'd been forced to navigate in search of better living conditions.

"We're already paying too much," said Hadassah, a Brooklyn resident who came to the event after spending nearly a year fighting her landlord over a garbage room leaking odors into her apartment. "Can the homes that we're paying too much for be safe?"

This was no mere vent session: Mamdani established the hearings via executive order soon after taking office in January, hoping to gather feedback before debuting his own in-depth housing plan. In a press conference a couple of days before the filled-to-the-brim event, he described the hearings, which will take place in each of the five boroughs over the next month, as an opportunity for New Yorkers to "inform what city policy will look like going forward."

For all its advertising as a prize fight, the event struck a calmer tone than I'd expected: more casual spar than cage match. "We know that not every landlord is a bad landlord," said Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants, speaking from a podium inside the gym, "but we want to be able to find the ones that are." And though RSVPs for the event had quickly filled up, there were times when it felt like more journalists were roaming the halls than actual attendees. Mamdani didn't make an appearance — he was, it turned out, busy meeting with President Donald Trump to pursue a different leg of his housing strategy — but that didn't seem to dim the media circus.

Nevertheless, the hearing offered a revelatory look at how the new mayor will approach landlords over the next four years — and a hint of the battles to come in cities across the US as the country heads toward an apartment crunch.

So what might those housing policies look like, exactly? Mamdani's most famous rallying cry on the campaign trail — and the one that set the city's landlords most on edge — was a promise to "freeze the rent," which would mean halting annual rent hikes on the city's roughly 1 million rent-stabilized units, including many newer units that were built with the help of tax breaks. (In the four years under former mayor Eric Adams, the Rent Guidelines Board voted to allow increases totaling 12% for one-year leases.) Renter groups such as the New York State Tenant Bloc and Churches United For Fair Housing repeated this cry outside the high school's entrance Thursday evening, brandishing signs that read "Rent Freeze Now!" and chanting "Fight, fight, housing is a human right!"

Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, says the focus on rent-freezing distracts from the bigger issue: Landlords won't invest in units if they don't have the money coming in to cover their costs. Some economists have also expressed concerns that a rent freeze could discourage future housing construction, though the supply variable remains a question mark.

"No one denies that some renters are dealing with serious problems," Burgos said in a statement. "But when buildings don't bring in enough income to cover property taxes, utilities, maintenance, and basic operating costs, decline becomes inevitable, no matter who owns them."

While the rent freeze is shaping up as the title bout, Mamdani's housing platform includes other ideas that New York's landlord groups may find more palatable: namely, building a lot more units. On this front, he appears to have already won a key endorsement from the country's most famous — and powerful — real estate mogul. Hours before the event on Thursday, Mamdani and Trump posed in the Oval Office with a mock-up of the New York Daily News that read, "Trump to City: Let's Build," a play on the infamous "Ford to City: Drop Dead" front page from the 1970s, when the then-president refused to extend additional federal aid to an essentially broke New York City. The photo op, in which Trump appeared positively delighted by the faux-newspaper spread, was part of a previously undisclosed visit in which Mamdani pitched the president on a massive 12,000-home development at Sunnyside Yard in Queens. The mayor hoped to secure more than $21 billion in federal grants for the project. "The president was very enthusiastic about this idea," a spokesperson for the mayor told reporters afterward, adding that it had the potential to be "one of the biggest federal investments in housing of the past 50 years."

Back in Mamdani's New York, tenants were more focused on the woes of the city's existing housing stock. There were no fiery speeches from a podium; instead, attendees signed up for three-minute sit-downs with a city official and a notetaker, where they shared their monthslong, and often yearslong, battles with intransigent landlords, messy bureaucracy, and, of course, rat infestations. Some came prepared with typed or handwritten statements — one woman raised her hands in celebration when a city official brightly informed her that she'd finished with 45 seconds to spare.

I caught up with Jean Folkes, an 84-year-old resident of Brooklyn's Flatbush neighborhood, as she walked out of the small room that had been filled with school desks for testimony. She told me about the cracks in her ceiling and the cheap, leaky windows her landlord installed after buying the building a few years ago. When she moved to the building in the 1970s, "It wasn't 20 years old," she told me. "It was so nice."

"But after it sold, it started to go down," Folkes said. "And now it's become worse."

Marcela Mitaynes, a New York state assemblymember representing parts of southwest Brooklyn, told me her constituents face all kinds of maintenance shortfalls as landlords look to cut costs. Renters, she said, are also wary of making a fuss.

"Everyone feels very nervous," Mitaynes told me. "They don't want to do anything to rock the boat, and they're concerned about losing their home, because they know if you lose whatever home you have that's affordable, good luck trying to find something."

These concerns aren't limited to the country's largest rental market. Tenants across the US have been on a roller coaster over the past few years. Asking rents soared in 2021 and 2022 as hordes of disgruntled roommates struck out on their own, creating new households and more competition for a place to call home. In cities like Austin, Raleigh, Tucson, and Las Vegas, rents climbed by more than 20% in a single year. Apartment developers responded by starting construction on tens of thousands of new rental units, allowing renters to gain an edge in 2024 and 2025 as those new one- and two-bedrooms hit the market. As new apartment deliveries reached a 50-year high, landlords began handing out incentives, showering prospective renters with gift cards or a couple of months of free rent. In some cases, they even slashed asking prices in hopes of getting tenants through the door. In February, rent prices nationwide were down 1.5% from a year ago, per the latest Apartment List data.

Now the word of the day is "balance" — for most of the country, neither landlords nor tenants have much of an advantage. Developers will deliver fewer new rental units this year, but demand is lower, too, thanks to a middling job market and fewer roommate breakups (these days, it's too expensive to get a place of your own).

"In order to get back to a very landlord-friendly market, I think you'd have to see some significant shift on the demand side," says Chris Nebenzahl, vice president of rental research at John Burns Research and Consulting. "We just don't see that right now."

That may sound encouraging for renters, but it's probably cold comfort to those who have seen nationwide rents rise 35% since the start of the pandemic, per Zillow. Rents in New York City are up about 32% in that same timeframe. The metro's typical rent is $3,232, according to Zillow — among the country's 100 largest metros, only San Jose, California, comes in higher at $3,406.

Apartment operators have long made a good business of buying a building, adding new flooring, cabinets, and maybe some amenities, then charging higher rents to get a return on their investment. With rent growth lagging, though, Nebenzahl says some of these operators are turning to ancillary fees to earn a buck — think monthly charges for amenity packages, trash collection, paying rent online, or owning pets. New Yorkers in attendance on Thursday were all too familiar with this sort of nickel-and-diming. Pet fees earned plenty of scorn. One renter bemoaned an annual lease renewal fee, while others decried "excessive" late fees.

In her prepared remarks, Weaver, head of the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants, highlighted the administration's interest in encouraging tenant organizing, in which renters band together to demand better conditions from their landlords. Noelle Porter, director of government affairs at the National Housing Law Project, says this kind of emphasis is "absolutely not" common among city leaders around the country. But she added that it could become even more necessary to cut through the noise as landlords turn to artificial intelligence bots to field maintenance requests or other building issues.

"When it affects poor people, you've got a small group of advocates focused on it," Porter told me. "When it starts to squeeze the middle class, we see this proliferation of, like, 'What the hell is happening here?' And that's the phase I feel like we're really in."

James Rodriguez is a correspondent on Business Insider's Discourse team.