On Thursday night, the Rent Guidelines Board—the group that decides whether rents in the city's 1 million stabilized apartments will go up, down, or remain the same—held its third public hearing in Brooklyn. The hearings, which are being held citywide ahead of the RGB's final vote on June 25, have attracted hundreds of New Yorkers motivated and politicized by Mamdani's campaign pledge to "freeze the rent." Since early June, diverse and multi-generational crowds of renters wearing brightly-colored shirts and holding hand-painted signs have packed the streets in the hours leading up the events to chant, talk to the media, and march to a live brass band, all in the name of a rent freeze.
But Thursday's hearing also attracted a counterprotest from Gotham Housing Alliance, a landlord advocacy group headed by NYC real estate mogul and pro-landlord social media influencer Humberto Lopes. The problem? The approximately 50 protesters in that group were paid actors who say they were totally misled by a job listing into appearing at the rally, with some even defecting in real time as they realized what they'd been signed up to do. Now, the casting company hired to source the actors says it was "duped," and vows to never work with the Gotham Housing Alliance again.
Actors like Violet Phoenix, 29, thought she was going to be taking part in a fictional scene, acting as a zombie demonstrator. But after turning up in ragged and torn clothes and being made up as a zombie, she and the other actors were led by an operations coordinator into a very real protest, she said, where it dawned on them that they were rallying against Mamdani and a rent freeze.