The Real Estate Pity Party

If Mamdani represents an existential threat to the real estate industry, that threat stems less from the particular policies he’s proposed to date than from the sweeping renter-organizing drive that helped power his primary performance. By focusing on the issue of affordability, Mamdani’s campaign provided narrative and organizing space to a growing tenants movement looking to test its political muscle in a city where real estate is king — or so it fancies.

All told, real estate donors poured more than $6 million into the campaign of former governor Andrew Cuomo (now running as an independent) — and were roundly rebuffed by voters. ​“We won the narrative and the election,” says Ritti Singh, communications director for the group Tenants Bloc, a 501(c)(4) launched by housing justice groups this year to champion renters’ electoral interests. Working parallel to the Mamdani campaign, the group set up its own citywide operation to mobilize voters for whom a rent freeze would be a lifeline, not a death penalty.

Since Mamdani’s win, prominent developers have deserted Cuomo to regroup around Eric Adams — the scandal-plagued incumbent mayor (also running as an independent) who at least knows to kiss the ring. (“I am real estate,” said Adams, himself a small-time landlord, at the 2020 forum where he refused to reject the industry’s campaign contributions.) In the two and a half weeks following Mamdani’s victory, Adams raised nearly $1.5 million, topping both Cuomo and Mamdani’s totals. At least $290,000 of that haul came from real estate industry donors, according to In These Times’ analysis. Industry cash is expected to continue pouring in, as developers of Manhattan office towers and luxury buildings line up to fete Adams.

If tenant groups help carry Mamdani to victory in November, it will lend credence to a seemingly simple theory: renters can act as a powerful voting bloc when candidates give them something to vote for. And should candidates in New York and beyond take note, that might give the real estate lobby something very real to worry about: the beginning of the end of its stranglehold on our politics. 

It’s not difficult to understand why Mamdani’s call for a rent freeze resonated. About a quarter of New Yorkers, some 2.4 million, live in rent-stabilized apartments. By 2030, the policy could save them anywhere from $212 to $590 a month, according to Community Service Society, a research and advocacy group.

Beyond freezing rents, Mamdani’s campaign proposed building at least 200,000 additional stabilized units, an approach that ​“pairs immediate relief with structural problem-solving,” according to a June open letter signed by more than two dozen economists.

If elected, Mamdani will have the power to appoint members to the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, which votes annually on rent adjustments. Adams’ board has opted to raise rents each year—most recently in June, over the objection of tenant advocates pointing to a record increase in apartment owners’ net operating incomes.

That was just the latest in a decades-long tug-of-war over New York rent stabilization, a chief target of the real estate lobby’s ire. Three decades ago, landlords won new loopholes allowing them to convert hundreds of thousands of stabilized apartments to market rate. In 2019, tenant organizers and their allies finally won legislation to staunch the bleeding. That victory was made possible, in part, by an electoral earthquake the year prior, when six real estate-backed incumbent Democrats lost their state Senate seats to progressive challengers. Spooked centrists then supported the bill, handing an embarrassing — and unusual — loss to an industry used to getting its way in Albany. But when advocates next campaigned for sweeping statewide eviction protections, the real estate lobby regrouped with a multi-million-dollar lobbying campaign, resulting in a watered-down law in 2024.

This year, longtime housing justice groups launched Tenant Bloc, which hopes to counter real estate’s influence by recruiting 250,000 renters statewide as reliable voters.

“Housing is the number one thing that is causing the cost-of-living crisis in New York,” says Cea Weaver, Tenant Bloc director. That crisis is driving working-class voters into the arms of the Right — but Weaver believes progressives who offer concrete relief can win them back.

To test that theory, Tenant Bloc rolled out an ambitious plan for its debut in the mayor’s race. First, canvass tenants and collect pledges to only support primary candidates who endorse a four-year rent freeze.

Next, turn those voters out. Mamdani formally won the group’s backing in May, as the only candidate to fully back their demand, and Tenant Bloc instructed voters to rank city comptroller Brad Lander second.

Finally, use the momentum to cohere tenants into a permanent political constituency.

While homeowners traditionally vote at much higher rates than renters, an analysis of 2022 statewide election results found the turnout gap was cut in half in races featuring candidates with pro-renter platforms.

In other words, tenants are ​“a sleeping giant,” Weaver says. ​“If you could wake up the tenant vote, that would be an unstoppable force in New York politics.”

In June’s primary results, tenant organizers see evidence that the giant is stirring. While majority-homeowner areas backed Cuomo, Mamdani trounced him in most of the city’s 52 majority-rental districts, where turnout rose an average of 7.5%, as tenant organizer Charlie Dulik noted in New York Focus.

Critically, Mamdani won seven of the 10 districts with the highest number of rent-stabilized units. Those districts encompass progressive strongholds in Brooklyn and Queens but also areas that appeared far less primed to back a left challenger; voters in five of the seven heavily rent-stabilized districts Mamdani won had favored Adams over progressive mayoral candidates in the 2021 primary. Some of those districts also swung toward Donald Trump in 2024.

During the primary, Tenant Bloc focused its outreach on rent-stabilized tenants by cross-referencing voter registration records with data on regulated apartments. Nearly 20,300 of those tenants signed rent-freeze voter pledges, surpassing the campaign’s initial goal. Organizers are now drilling deeper into the election results to analyze whether signing the pledge made someone more likely to get to the ballot box, and whether their efforts increased turnout among rent-stabilized tenants overall.

Initial signs point to the success of Tenant Bloc’s strategy — and a promising start to its longer-term project.

Take the predominantly Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights in upper Manhattan. To most observers, it wouldn’t have looked like fertile ground for Mamdani; in the fall of 2024, the area drew national attention as emblematic of Trump’s inroads among Latinos. But Washington Heights also has more rent-stabilized units than anywhere else in the city, and Tenant Bloc ran regular canvasses in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. On election day, it proved a surprise source of strength for Mamdani, who led Cuomo by 18 points as voters’ top pick in the city’s ranked-choice voting process.

For Elisa Martinez, a volunteer Tenant Bloc canvasser born and raised in Washington Heights, one conversation with an elderly Dominican man living in rent-stabilized housing crystallizes the appeal of the campaign. The man voted Trump in 2024, but ​“he was so over the political scene,” recalls Martinez, herself a rent-stabilized tenant. As she shared her own frustration with status quo politics — emphasizing the campaign was about more than a particular candidate — the tone of the conversation shifted, and ​“he went and got his wife to sign” the pledge too, before “[telling] me exactly which neighbors in the building would also want to sign.”

Mamdani also overperformed in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where roughly half of units are rent-stabilized. The area broke for mayoral candidate Andrew Yang in 2021, and some pundits speculated that Cuomo would carry East Asian voters in this year’s race. But Mamdani won handily, buoyed by relentless organizing by CAAAV Voice, the city’s only working-class Asian tenant organization and a co-chair of Tenant Bloc’s rent freeze campaign. While CAAAV Voice is still analyzing how many of its contacts ultimately voted, the 2,900 voter pledges the group collected across Chinatown and the Lower East Side amounted to nearly 60% of Mamdani’s 23-point margin over Cuomo in the assembly district encompassing most of those neighborhoods.

Mamdani’s Chinatown supporters included Xue Liang Ming, a renter in his 70s who has lived in the same rent-stabilized apartment for two decades. Over the past four years, rent has increased by 12%, a strain on Xue’s fixed income of roughly $400 a week. His family now pools money to help him afford essentials. Xue had helped advocate for a rent freeze in the past, and he jumped at the chance to vote for one. After gaining citizenship in 2024, he cast his first-ever vote — for Mamdani.

Ryan Lum, a 21-year-old CUNY student, was also among the thousands of new voters who helped put Mamdani over the top. Lum sat out of the presidential election because of an overriding sense that the powerful can ​“weigh things in their favor,” he says. That changed when organizers from CAAAV visited his campus. Learning about the push for a rent freeze provided the ​“initial spark” to get to the polls.

In the coming months, real estate is all-but-certain to accelerate its attacks, says Tenant Bloc’s Singh. To fend them off, campaigners will need to turn their canvassing recruits ​“into an organized group of people able to act in unity.” Heading into the general election, the group plans to mobilize signers — as tenant union members, canvassers or block captains.

Lum has already signed up to help. ​“I think I’m here to stay,” he says.