Summary
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani used a city hearing series for renters to directly collect complaints about conditions and enforcement—presenting the forums as a way to hold landlords accountable when they fail to follow the law, according to an Associated Press report published April 3.
At a recent weeknight gathering in the Bronx, tenants shared grievances in front of city bureaucrats during what AP described as the third event in the “rental rip-off hearings” series. Mamdani framed the meeting for the standing-room-only crowd as a dispute-resolution channel for renters, telling attendees their stories would guide efforts to enforce housing rules.
Residents of the Bronx building at 705 Gerard Avenue told city officials that repairs had stalled for long periods and that the building’s problems had become routine. Gulhayo Yuldosheva said she worried that noxious mold in her apartment had worsened her child’s asthma. Nearby, Marina Quiroz showed a video to a representative from the city’s tenant protection office depicting rats scurrying through her kitchen, AP reported.
Ann Maitin, who described herself as a longtime resident of the building, said she met with the mayor and was given time to present her grievances. She also said the residents’ difficulties went beyond day-to-day conditions—she pointed to a more basic obstacle: no one seemed to know who owned their building. Maitin said she believed tenants “we’d have the right to that information,” AP reported, describing the issue as fundamental.
Tommy Rodriguez said an elevator outage lasting months left him unable to use the building’s stairs safely. He told AP he was forced to “slide down the steps, like a kid,” and said calls to building management about a repair timeline went unanswered. Rodriguez also compared the current management unfavorably to an earlier landlord, saying, “This felt like a home before. Now they treat us the same as the rats.”
As tenants described the conditions inside their building, AP reported that residents also learned—after the partial collapse of another Bronx building—that the ownership web behind “slumlords” can be hard to untangle. Tenants traced a link from their building manager, Binyomin Herzl, to David Kleiner, who had been identified in news stories as an owner of the other building and shared a Brooklyn office with Herzl.
In the aftermath, a group of tenants visited each of the 72 units in their building, logging what they said were decrepit conditions and unusual alterations. Yuldosheva said she feared she would become “the next news story” and pointed to a crack in a bedroom wall she said she believed was connected to vibrations from the subway below their windows. AP also reported that lawsuits show Herzl had been ordered to pay more than $100,000 for violations across at least six Bronx buildings, and that a judge found several of those properties posed an imminent hazard.
Herzl, reached by phone, told AP he did not own any of those properties and said he acted as a middleman between tenants and the true owners, which he declined to list. AP reported that when tenants asked about ownership of 705 Gerard, Kleiner confirmed partial ownership in a brief phone call but declined further comment. Herzl, for his part, attributed the complaints to what he called “normal wear and tear” in a nearly century-old building and said Mamdani should focus on public housing rather than private landlords.
Beyond identifying who owns particular properties, AP said the city’s enforcement tools depend on whether landlords address serious violations such as heat and hot-water outages. The report said that when landlords refuse to fix conditions, the city can order repairs and then bill the owner. AP cited records provided by the housing department indicating inspectors ordered emergency repairs at 38 buildings listing Herzl or Kleiner as owners over the last three years, and that the men were billed $446,521 for those repairs.
Mamdani has proposed using such fines and related legal mechanisms to bring distressed properties under city stewardship, AP reported, including pursuing liens on delinquent landlords and buying up portfolios through foreclosure auctions. The mayor has said landlords that “repeatedly put New Yorkers at risk will not be allowed to operate in New York City — with no exceptions,” according to AP. But, the report said, enforcing that approach can become legally and administratively resource-intensive—especially when landlords use layered LLC structures to obscure ownership.
A housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society, Oksana Mironova, told AP that while big slumlords are widely known, pinpointing them can be difficult when ownership is spread through LLCs. AP also quoted Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, saying it would help to have a “better sense of who owns the buildings that we are regulating and overseeing.” The report added that state legislation aimed at making it easier to identify LLC owners was vetoed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul amid landlord pressure.
At the same time, landlord interests pushed back on Mamdani’s proposals. Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, told AP that rent freezes and other tenant-focused changes would force landlords to cut maintenance spending. Burgos said “That’s going to take away from the elevator budget, the boiler budget, the heating budget,” framing the issue as one of economics and building upkeep rather than a plan for tenant advocacy hearings. He also criticized the “rental rip-off hearings” as “show trials” that he said reflect a “tribal approach” to the affordable housing crisis.
After the Bronx meeting, Maitin told AP she left “glad to be heard by someone who can actually do something about the problem,” but said it was too early to tell whether the promises would translate into sustained change. The next morning, AP reported, a superintendent began applying a fresh coat of paint to a staircase and workers removed scaffolding that had been in front of the building for years, which Maitin said she believed was a response to the hearing.