Last June, a tenant organizer named Cea Weaver wrote an article for Jacobin that bluntly opened with the line, “Real estate runs New York.” She noted that “poll after poll” showed that New Yorkers’ top concern is rent, but “disgraced mayor Eric Adams” openly declared, “I am real estate.” Former governor Andrew Cuomo, who was running to replace Adams, offered more of the same. Cuomo had “a long record of blocking tenant-protection regulations and ensuring that his real estate donors are earning huge returns on their investments.”
There was one candidate, though, who offered a different path. Where Adams and Cuomo identified with the landlords, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was campaigning on concrete material improvements for the tenants who make up the great majority of the city’s population. Instead of kowtowing to the “oligarchic real estate industry,” he was talking about going after irresponsible slumlords, freezing the rent for the nearly two million New Yorkers who live in rent-stabilized apartments, and building as many new units as possible of affordable, union-built, publicly subsidized housing.
After being sworn in as mayor, Mamdani took immediate measures to make good on that platform. He issued an executive order to comb through city records to locate city-owned or city-affiliated properties that would be appropriate for new housing construction. His first public appearance as mayor — mere hours after his inauguration, at a time when most politicians would be throwing a black-tie gala — was to personally investigate conditions at a derelict Brooklyn apartment building in Brooklyn where tenants had organized a tenant union.
In the lobby of that apartment building, he revived the withered mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants and appointed Cea Waver to head it.
Naturally, this outraged the real estate industry and their political allies. Weaver is a well-known quantity to them, given her history as an incredibly…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
