Will NYC's Long-Suffering Tenants Carry Zohran Mamdani to Victory?

Both Dufour — and now the woman she just recruited to the cause — are among a group of more than 20,000 New York City tenants pledging to vote for Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary on Tuesday, June 24, in large part because he is the only mayoral candidate unequivocally backing the call for a four-year freeze on increases in rent-stabilized apartments. 

This call is coming from New York State Tenant Bloc, a 501(c)(4) launched by housing justice groups this year to champion renters’ electoral interests. 

Since the group rolled out its ​“Freeze the Rent” campaign in February, New York’s Democratic mayoral primary has effectively narrowed to a two-person race between former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, bankrolled heavily by real estate interests, and Mamdani, who pledged to freeze rent in the video that launched his campaign.

“Every politician says New York is the greatest city in the world,” Mamadani says in the video. ​“But what good is that if no one can afford to live here?

Tenant Bloc officially endorsed Mamdani in May, and with just three days left, the group is hoping to deliver a decisive margin in a razor-tight race.

A few short months ago, rent freeze door-knockers visited Dufour, hoping to get her signature. It wasn’t a tough sell; Darfour lives in a rent-stabilized building where she fears the landlord wants to displace longtime residents. Now, she’s running canvasses in Brooklyn as a field lead for the campaign. Her rapid evolution from fed-up tenant to dedicated organizer is proof of concept for the ​“Freeze the Rent” campaign’s larger goal: to turn renters into an electoral force powerful enough to strike fear in the hearts of the state’s entrenched, landlord-friendly political establishment.

“If we can get this done, it is going to change the landscape of politics in New York City,” Joanne Grell, a co-chair of the rent freeze campaign, told me when I met her in March. ​“So we are guns blazing.”

When I spoke with her again in early June, a historic Mamdani upset looked more and more possible each day.

“It absolutely feels like a reckoning,” Grell says. She paused, then corrected herself. ​“It is absolutely going to be a reckoning.”

While the New York City mayor doesn’t directly control rents in stabilized units, he or she makes appointments to the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, which votes annually on whether to allow increases. Every year, housing justice groups turn members out in droves to public meetings discussing whether rent adjustments are warranted based on economic conditions. Under this sustained pressure from tenant groups, former mayor Bill de Blasio’s board froze rents three times and never raised them more than 1.5% in any year. Current Mayor Eric Adam’s board, however, has already increased them by 9%.

The next mayor could appoint as many as eight people to join the nine-member Rent Guidelines Board, a complete overhaul. Therefore, a rent freeze is a tangible, ​“commonsense” (according to economists) campaign promise that could save millions of tenants anywhere from $212 to $590 a month by 2030, according to the Community Service Society.

To accomplish this, Tenant Bloc coalesced last year around a three-part plan of attack. First, collect pledges from primary voters in rent-stabilized apartments to only support candidates who endorse a four-year rent freeze. Second, issue endorsements to any candidates who fully back the demand and turn out tenants to vote. The campaign surpassed its initial goal, collecting nearly 20,300 pledges— nearly three times the margin of victory that put Adams in office.

And third, most critically, Tenant Bloc hopes to use the momentum generated by the campaign to cohere tenants into a permanent political constituency.

The backdrop for the rent freeze campaign comes from a 2019 victory that set the bar for what’s possible. That year, the state legislature passed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which permanently closed legal loopholes that had led to the loss of more than 310,000 stabilized New York City apartments since 1994.

It was one of the most sweeping state-level victories for New York tenants in decades. And it was made possible by the electoral drubbing that real-estate-backed candidates had taken the year before, according to Cea Weaver, who serves as director of Tenant Bloc after leading its 501©3 counterpart, Housing Justice for All. In 2018, a group of six progressive Democratic primary challengers, most of whom had sworn off real estate donations, toppled a caucus of eight centrist Democrats in the state Senate, sending shockwaves through Albany.

Weaver believes the stunning upset at the voting booth cleared the way for legislative victory. But in 2024, when the housing movement went to bat for ​“good cause” eviction protections, the victory was more muted. Without a similar electoral show of force fresh in the minds of legislators, the landlord lobby managed to water down the measures substantially.

“Absent big electoral victories with the wind behind us, absent a big crisis, our power was only relational,” says Weaver. ​“We didn’t want to go back to Albany until they knew they should give us what we want because we represent a decisive voting block.”

Russell Weaver (no relation to Cea), a director of research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, echoes this point in a recent analysis of ​“the untapped potential of the tenant electorate,” co-published with the tenants’ rights lobbying group Tenants PAC. In his breakdown of results from New York’s statewide elections in 2022, widely cited in Tenant Bloc circles, Weaver found that homeowners were nearly twice as likely to vote as renters. But tenants turned out in demonstrably greater numbers when they had the chance to vote for candidates running on renter-friendly platforms, Weaver found, cutting the turnout gap between homeowners and renters nearly in half in such races. 

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

Armed with the message and the tech, longstanding housing justice organizations under the Tenant Bloc banner have fanned out across the city. Community Action for Safe Apartments (CASA) — the group that recruited Grell into tenant organizing and one of four groups co-chairing the rent freeze campaign — has garnered thousands of signatures from community colleges alone. Delsenia Glover, former executive director of Tenants & Neighbors, a statewide tenant advocacy group and another co-chair organization, is helping lead canvasses of rent-stabilized units throughout her own 1,716-unit complex in Harlem, a historic Black neighborhood on the frontlines of gentrification. Where Black people made up more than three-quarters of the neighborhood’s population 25 years ago, they now represent half.

“The people who are part of the movement are mainly people who live in affordable housing,” says Glover. ​“They want to protect where they live.”

CAAAV Voice, the city’s only working-class Asian tenant organization and another campaign co-chair, runs canvasses three times a week; by May, they surpassed their organizational goal of 5,000 signatures. The group has made deep inroads in neighborhoods where roughly half of the apartments are rent-stabilized such as Astoria, Queens — which Mamdani represents in the state legislature — and Manhattan’s Chinatown.

In these areas, longstanding Asian-American and Asian immigrant communities are steadily being priced out of unregulated units. Alina Shen, the group’s organizing director, cites rent stabilization as the only reason her grandmother still lives in Chinatown.

But as Shen and other organizers began meeting with mayoral candidates last year to talk about a rent freeze, most of them ​“ignored us or thought this was a ridiculous concept,” she says. 

By making a rent freeze one of the centerpieces of his campaign, Mamdani has helped set the terms of debate in the race. Aside from Cuomo, all the leading candidates have agreed at least a one-year rent freeze was necessary, but none other than Mamdani has embraced a full four-year pause. Yet this growing support has also often been carefully dampened or outright reneged. City comptroller Brad Lander, which Tenant Block is encouraging renters to rank second, said he would back a four-year rent freeze if the data supports it and didn’t mention the issue at either debate. State Senator Jessica Ramos did but has since thrown her support behind Andrew Cuomo in what progressives widely regarded as a betrayal.

It’s patterns like these that, for Shen, emphasize the importance of the rent freeze campaign’s issue-first approach to mobilizing voters. ​“You should vote for [Mamdani], but actually, you need to be in an organization,” Shen says. ​“That’s the only way that we’re going to get what we want. And I think that there’s real potential for us to emerge [from the rent freeze campaign] with a shared analysis of who we’re up against and what we’re fighting for.”

But, in the interim of that organizational rise, the rent freeze campaign still needed a mayor.

As Mamdani stepped up to the podium that night, the crowd leapt to their feet.

“We know in this city, a rent freeze is not given,” Mamdani said in his speech, his voice ricocheting off the church’s far-away ceiling. ​“It has to be won. And on June 24, that rent freeze is on the ballot.”

Tenant Bloc had bestowed an official endorsement on Mamdani a week prior.

Since then, the group worked with Mamdani’s campaign on a viral rent freeze video that dropped in late May, garnering over 13 million views on X. It features several tenant organizers, including Grell, who opened up her rent-stabilized building in the Bronx for a day of filming.

Rent freeze canvassers have also begun distributing glossy leaflets with instructions to rank Mamdani first, Lander, who also spoke at the rally, second, and, in bold, not to rank Andrew Cuomo. (During the Crown Heights canvass, many needed no such instruction — multiple people responded with a hearty ​“hell no!” when asked if they planned to rank Cuomo).

It’s a point the campaign has been hammering home for months — the Riverside Church endorsement rally ended with organizers leading the crowd in a thunderous anti-Cuomo tune for over five minutes:

“Oh the rent! Oh the rent! Oh the rent is too damn high!

Because of Cuomo! Because of Cuomo! Oh the rent is too damn high!”

In many ways, Cuomo is an ideal opponent for Mamdani and target for the burgeoning tenant movement. At the beginning of June, the New York Apartment Association’s (NYAA) super PAC flooded the Cuomo campaign with $2.5 million, then the largest donation in the race. Kenny Burgos, NYAA’s CEO, is calling for at least a 6% rent increase in rent-stabilized apartments this year — and incidentally, Cuomo is the only leading candidate to not promise any form of rent freeze, calling it ​“politically convenient”.

As for how Cuomo plans to address the housing crisis, the former governor caught flak when he published his ideas earlier this year because it quickly became apparent, as the New York Times reported, that ChatGPT helped write them.

“I know how to get things done,” Cuomo said when asked about housing at the first debate. ​“That’s what this election is all about. Not plans, plans, plans, [but] who can get something done.”

What has Cuomo done on housing? As Tracy Rosenthal recently reported in The Nation, during Cuomo’s first two terms, he cut funding for the state agency that oversees NYC’s rent stabilization laws by 62%. Rents went up 33%. He cut contributions to homelessness services in the city and had overseen a 35% increase in the city’s shelter population by the end of his first term, along with a 50% increase in overall city homelessness over his tenure.

“The crisis we have in New York right now with the housing system is a crisis that Andrew Cuomo created,” says Weaver. ​“We live in Cuomo’s world.”

As governor, Cuomo’s most pro-tenant act was agreeing to sign the 2019 tenant protections into law, and he did so against the stated wishes of the real estate lobby. But he expressed regret for signing the bill, according to Politico, during a private meeting in March with the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY).

When voters go to the polls in 72 hours, it is likely that either Cuomo or Mamdani will ultimately emerge as the favorite to run the country’s largest metropolis. In the meantime, though, it seems Tenant Bloc will, at the very least, be able to walk away from this electoral fight with growing proof that they can, as Weaver puts it, ​“activate a tenant identity.”

In a February poll, Emerson asked likely NYC Democratic primary voters what the most important issue facing the city was. The top two answers were housing affordability, at 23%, and crime, barely behind at 22.3%. But when Emerson conducted the same poll in May, the gap had skyrocketed to 11 points — housing affordability was now the definitive top issue at 30%, while the importance of crime sank by three points.

And as early voting continues, turnout in Brooklyn, the borough with the largest sum of rent-stabilized units and in which Dufour led her canvass, is up nearly 150%.

“We have so much power, much more than we ever imagined,” Grell told me with just a few weeks left in the race. ​“Oh the rent is too damn high!” was still echoing from the halls of Riverside Church. ​“Now it’s time to wield it at the voting box.”

Disclosure: As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, In These Times does not support or oppose any candidate for public office.