NYC NOW - Luxury Renters Across New York City Are Organizing Against Landlords

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

Inspired in part by Mayor Mamdani's Rental Ripoff Hearings, tenants are fed up by broken elevators, heat outages, and flooding in "luxury" buildings charging $4,000 to $6,000 a month. WNYC housing reporter David Brand joins us to talk about the new class of tenant associations fighting back. Photo: David Brand -Got any questions, comments or story ideas? Send us a message at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From WNYC, this is NYC now. I'm Jene Pierre. These issues have been happening ever since the building was constructed. I emailed management for two years about the elevators, radio silence, and then it just came to a point where everybody was just complaining on Facebook about it. Rinter is paying premium prices for New York City rentals are organizing with neighbors to get their money's worth. On today's episode, we meet some unlikely organizers who are starting tenant associations. But first, here's what's happening in our region.

Applications for New York City's free preschool program for two-year-olds are officially open. The program known as 2K is part of Mayor Zohramam Dani's plan to make child care more affordable. The mayor was in Rockaway this week. That's one of the neighborhoods getting the program. Some of the places that we're so excited to introduce free child care for two-year-olds to are the very places that are often last on the list. And so we want to make sure that parents know that those days are over, that now we are here in the Rockways to begin a transformative program, not to end it.

2K will launch in five school districts this September for about $2,000. The program will expand next year to 12,000 toddlers. Parents can apply at my schools.n.YC. They'll be notified on their placements in August. A group of transgender New Yorkers is asking a federal judge to block NYU Langone from sharing their health information with the Trump administration. The class action lawsuit was filed this week against NYU Langone and the Justice Department. It's a response to a federal subpoena NYU Langone received last month,

requesting information on children who had been treated for gender dysphoria over the past six years. The Trump administration gave NYU Langone until June 10th to produce patient communications and some other documents. NYU Langone has not yet said whether it will comply. Major fires are on the rise in the Bronx. and city officials are putting the blame on electrical problems in older buildings. City data shows more than 27 multi-alarm fires in the borough as of last month. That's up from 12 over the same period just two years ago. Councilmember Pirona Sanchez compared the increase to the fires that hit the borough during the 70s.

It does feel like the Bronx is burning. It feels like the Bronx is burning again. At least 46 people have died in fatal fires across the five boroughs this state. year. The city's housing agency says it's investigating why these fires are on the rise in the first place. You know what else is on the rise? The number of tenant associations in New York City. After the break, we look into who's behind some of the newer renter groups and the issues plaguing their apartment buildings. Stay close. Welcome back. Earlier this year, Mayor Zoram Mandani held a series of hearings across the city called Rental Rip-Off hearings.

tenants from around the five boroughs were invited to air out their bad landlord experiences. But something that emerged from those hearings that people might not expect, tenants in luxury buildings. They're organizing, too. WNYC housing reporter David Brand has been speaking with some of those unexpected organizers about what motivated them to unite with their neighbors. Hey, David, welcome to the show. Hey, E, JN, A, thanks for having me. I'm so happy to have you because I kind of knew that this was brewing, right? A couple months ago, you reported on some big problems at luxury buildings.

So tell us where that stands now. Yeah, so I'd always heard from people moving into these new luxury buildings that they were dealing with problems they wouldn't have expected. Some relatively small peeling paint or cabinets falling off in their kitchens, some pretty big flooding, heat outages in buildings that were constructed not that long ago and that they're paying $5,000, $6,000 a month for. So I wanted to see if there was data to back up some of those anecdotes. And I reviewed all of these buildings that were constructed over the past 10 years. It was about 1,500, 1,600 buildings to see the number of housing code complaints that they were receiving. Complaints and violations. I found there was actually a significant number of buildings that do have a lot of problems.

So we published that story that got some attention. And people started reaching out to me all over this city saying, you think that's bad. Check out what we're dealing with. or here's how we are responding. And what I found was a lot of people in these buildings are forming their own tenant associations and organizing with their neighbors to try to demand better conditions and repairs, whether they're big, they're small, or just to get their money's worth. Right.

And I think a lot of people tend to associate tenant organizing with low-income renters. You see that a lot in some of these older, crappy rent-stabilized buildings where people are protesting their landlord and trying to get repairs. And so they come together, sometimes with support from nonprofit organizations. But what I found here was a lot of wealthier, upper middle class tenants who just had had enough. And they got together to work together for repairs. Yeah. And you met with some of those tenants.

I want to talk about someone you met at a Long Island City high rise. Yeah, I met up with Matt Aaron. He runs the tenant organization at his building in Long Island City. I met my roommate at business school, and he invited me to be his roommate. I thought I won the lottery there, but it turns out I didn't. His building is 37 stories tall. It's overlooking the East River right there in Long Island City. Oh, nice.

Yeah, it is nice. It looks really nice, but there's a big problem. He and his neighbors say the elevators are constantly breaking, and this has been going on for years. Matt pays about $4,000 for his apartment, and he says he started the Tenant Association so that he and his neighbors could collectively press for repairs for something, they say, is pretty basic. I actually thought, oh, I'll just contact management, because these issues have been happening ever since the building was constructed. I emailed management for two years about the elevators, radio silence. And then it just came to a point where everybody was just complaining on Facebook about it. And someone made a comment that complaining on Facebook won't do anything.

You need to organize an action. And I said, okay, I'm going to spearhead that effort, because this is ridiculous. So when I visited a couple months ago, there was already a line of tenants forming to use the loan functioning elevator. in the building. That's ridiculous. So you saw this line of people. Yeah, by the time I left the building around like 5.36 p.m. there was already a few dozen people just waiting for the to get onto the elevator. So what do they do? They wait. They just wait. Yeah, I mean, I talked to one woman, Chris Zellis. She lives in the building with her daughter and her husband. And she said that the elevator outage is just basically shape her routine. I plan in the morning that I walk my dog,

so I'm back in time to take the elevator up. Before I go up, I call my daughter and say, I'm coming up so she can get on the elevator to go to work because you press the button and it doesn't, it turns off. It will skip your floor for like a half an hour. The only way you're going to get it is if someone gets off the elevator on your floor and you can get on. So tell me about the other tenant she spoke to. Well, I went to a lot of buildings and one that really stood out was a building in downtown Brooklyn called the Brooklyner. It was at one point the tallest residential building in Brooklyn. It was the first residential high rise to go up after the big downtown Brooklyn. So you think of the skyline there that has come up in the past decade or so.

The very first installment there was this building, the Brooklyner. And this one tenant, McKenzie Chambers, has lived there since the building opened about 16 years ago. And she says conditions have gotten progressively worse. It kind of came to a head this past winter. The heat would go out. The water would totally go out. Another instance of elevators breaking down. And this is even taller building than the one in Long Island City.

So she said she got fed up. She printed a bunch of pieces of paper and cut out strips. And each one said, are you like me fed up about what's going on in our building? Do you want to organize? Here's my phone number. And she said she went to all 51 floors of the building and slipped them under the door in the door frame of her neighbors. And she started getting a lot of responses. And that was back in January, February.

And a new tenant association was born. So it's true, McKenzie's neighbors were indeed fed up. they had to organize. Yeah. So a spokesperson for the building management company, it's called Equity Apartments, said that they have repaired the problems that led to the water outages, and they blamed a lot of those problems on the extreme cold temperatures over the winter. They have issued rent credits to some tenants to make up for some of the problems.

And they said equity is fixing the broken elevators and communicating regularly with tenants about the repairs that they're doing. So as I mentioned at the top, the Mimdani administration started these rental rip-off hearings. What effect has that had on organizing? Well, a lot of tenants said that it's kind of like in the zeitgeist now. It's kind of in the atmosphere, this idea that tenant organizing could help to get repairs. And people at multiple buildings I talked to said either they were partially inspired by that message or in the case of tenants in that building in downtown Brooklyn. they went to the first rental rip-off hearing, which was only a few blocks away. And one woman, her name was Randy Song.

She told me her main takeaway from that was the importance of organizing with your neighbors. Mayor Mandani had the New Yorkers versus bad landlords, that whatever, I actually went. And just to see what our rights were, if there are any resources available to us. And what the first thing that I got out of that was, you have to have a strong tenant association. And, you know, so I came back reconfirming what she had started. How much backing do these tenants actually have from City Hall? Well, Momdani did center tenants in the heart of his campaign. You know, remember the famous viral slogan, Freeze the Rent.

That was for tenants and rent-stabilized apartments. Solely, you know, it doesn't apply to a lot of the renters living in these luxury buildings. But it was kind of like the message of we have tenants' backs. And they've continued to do that and holding these rental ripoffs. hearings and he says they're going to put out a new report on what they heard from renters and they were trying to find out about problems they didn't really previously know about or know we're such a problem for a lot of tenants and try to focus on those. So it does seem like there is a commitment to supporting tenants and to supporting tenant organizing. Okay, there's a commitment,

but are they getting any response? Well, you know, it's still early and I guess time will tell. And if they put their money where their mouth is, they released their housing plan recently, Mamdani and city housing officials. There was a big focus on assisting tenants there. So we'll see if they follow through. You know, there's going to come down to money and institutional support and see if they do it. Yeah. So, David, you mentioned that the Mamdani administration is committed, but are these tenants getting a response from them?

In both cases I focused on in this story, they were starting to get responses. So McKenzie Chambers at the Brooklyner in downtown Brooklyn, she said she got a rent credit for about $7,500 to make up for the problems she was experiencing. So maybe a squeaky wheel does get the grease in that instance. And then Matt Aaron in Long Island City said that related, appointed a new manager for the building who he met with and said that he had a positive experience and that he doesn't want to take the company and the person at their word just yet. but he sounded optimistic that things were going to get better in the building. Earlier, you talked about how low-income tenants are usually the ones who have to organize in order to get some type of change in their buildings. What does it say about housing in New York City that it's not just low-income tenants?

It's also folks in luxury buildings, too. Well, I think it says New York City is really a city of tenants. About 70% of residents rent and don't own their homes. people who probably elsewhere in the country would probably purchase a place that's just not what happens as much in New York City, mostly because the costs are so high for housing here. So a lot of people who make fairly decent incomes are still renters, and they want their money's worth. So they're working together to get it. Does anything surprise you about the new organizing that's going on?

I don't think it surprises me. I think a lot of what I've covered and a lot of my reporting has tended to focus on what's happening at the lower end of the housing market and how lower income tenants are working together to try to get repairs. And it's not surprising that so many, you know, upper middle class or people making decent incomes are working together. But it's just not something I focused on so much. And my reporting here, especially with that first crappy luxury story and following up with so many people who have reached out to me to share their own experiences is just how extensive the tenant organizing is in New York City and all types of buildings. That's WMYC's Housing Revenue.

reporter David Brand. Thanks a lot, David. Thanks, Janae. And thank you for listening to NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre. See you next time.