"The city's worst landlords will have a new sheriff to fear," Mayor Bill de Blasio told New Yorkers in 2019 when he announced the creation of the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants.
De Blasio promised that this new office would ensure that the myriad City agencies that handle housing code enforcement would all work together to force slumlords to fix shoddy apartments, and in the worst cases, seize the properties and hand them off to nonprofits and tenant associations.
But then the pandemic hit, and evictions were paused. In 2022, Mayor Eric Adams took office, and by mid-2023, the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants had been "hollowed out."
Meanwhile, housing code violations jumped by 24 percent during the 2024 fiscal year, according to City Limits, and per the Mayor's Management Report, even when landlords were forced by the City to make repairs, they made less than half of them.
Queens State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani insists that he can do better. In a new policy proposal first shared with Hell Gate, the mayoral candidate is promising to "rebuild the Mayor's Office of Tenant Protection," increase the fines on bad landlords, and restore the $25 million that has been cut from the City's budget that previously went to legal assistance for tenants who are trying to force their landlords to make repairs.
"What New Yorkers deserve is a safe and affordable roof over their heads," Mamdani told Hell Gate. "Not someone who panders to real estate donors and landlords."
Mamdani's plan involves streamlining housing code enforcement by having the MOPT coordinate the resolution of housing and building violations that are currently issued by five separate City agencies, changing the City code to require landlords keep their buildings cool during the summer months, and creating a system for tenants to schedule and track appointments with HPD inspectors after reporting a violation via 311.
"If you can track the delivery of your food across this City with an app, there's no reason we can't have an inspector show up when you're actually home," Mamdani said. "I've had so many constituents say they don't even call 311 anymore because they have no idea when an inspector is actually going to show up."
Mamdani, whose platform includes a pledge to freeze rents for rent-stabilized tenants, is seeking to contrast himself with Adams, who has raised rents on those same tenants three years in a row. The mayor is seemingly only focused on building new housing—in his most recent 2025 State of the City speech, he didn't mention "tenants" or "landlords" once. Mayor Adams is himself a landlord who can't seem to mitigate the rat problem at the Bed-Stuy townhouse he owns—Adams has been hit with at least five fines for the issue since he took office. "I am real estate," Adams famously declared during his run for mayor. (The Mayor's Office has not yet responded to a request for comment on Mamdani's plan.)
Mamdani's campaign conceded that some of these changes they are seeking would require approval from the City Council, and also, crucially, money. Mamdani said that he would pay for a good portion of his initiative by forcing landlords to cough up the hundreds of millions of unpaid fines they currently owe. Recently, the City Council did allocate money for Neighborhood Pillars, a program that funds efforts to purchase buildings from delinquent landlords, and Mamdani says he'll move quickly to take advantage of it.
"We talk about a lot of political figures that we need to stand up to, whether it's Eric Adams or Donald Trump, and we ignore the fact that part of the lack of accountability that political figures like this have faced is one that they have lived through as landlords," Mamdani said. "What New Yorkers are hungry for is consistency. They're hungry for someone to stand up and fight for basic decency."
Mamdani will be at City Hall Park at 11 a.m. to roll out his plan and take questions from the media.