Housing Battles in New York & The Tenant Unions Behind Zohran Mamdani
Written by Azzy O’Connor
With the election of Catherine Connolly, it’s official: Zohranmentum has made its way across the Atlantic. However, behind Zohran Mamdani’s New York Mayoral primary win is a number of tenant unions and community groups who have built the city’s Rent Freeze movement and planted his grassroots base.
During a recent Dublin visit, I caught up with two housing activists and Mamdani supporters, NY City Councillor, Sandy Nurse, and organiser, L.J. Amsterdam, who shared some tactics and news from the situation on the ground.
Privatisation & Vouchers
“Public housing right now in New York City is all falling apart,” the Brooklyn representative said, “it needs billions of dollars for renovations [and] repairs that can only really come from the federal government. The city has really stopped allowing us to invest in public housing because they’re being moved to private management, who can borrow the money for repairs – the city doesn’t have jurisdiction over it.”
Like recent CATU public housing battles over dated lease agreements and “lost housing”, New York tenants face uncertainty whether they will ever be able to return to their homes once regeneration projects have been completed. “The federal government essentially abandoned public housing.”
Amsterdam added, “In my example, I moved in and thought, ‘this seems like a rent-controlled apartment’, because there’s a particular architectural style. So I went up to the state office and got my rent history of this unit, and it was a rent-controlled apartment. The landlord was over-charging me. So it’s up to the tenant to find out, and then the tenant has to sue. The burden is consistently on the tenant.” Though there is some legal representation available for renters under a certain wage-bracket, most of the tenant/landlord disputes are formally addressed through costly, complex and demoralising legal battles through the New York Housing Court.
Behind an exceptionally long waiting list, NY tenants can also get a Section 8 Voucher, similar to our own HAP and RAS, where the federal or state government transfers public funds into the pockets of private landlords to subsidise unaffordable rents throughout the city. And much like our own schemes, which are illegal to reject, discrimination by landlords is prevalent. Councillors like Nurse are trying to improve this Section 8 system, but are being blocked by legislative judges.
Multinationals
In the meantime, NY tenant unions have seen more success focusing on private entities. “We’re seeing really interesting organising around multinational corporations, because we’re living in an authoritarian state, and we don’t have very many political levers on which to pull. And so as we’re actually thinking about what we can and cannot affect, many things on the federal legislative level feel completely out of reach… Tenant Unions are one of the bright spots of US organising right now when there’s a lot of darkness.”
The multinationals have been fighting back in more manipulative ways than ever before. When NY tenant unions and city councillors took on Airbnb, they were faced with a counter ‘astroturf’ group. The multinational company tutored and co-ordinated over 400 ‘home-sharing clubs’, using ‘mom and pop’ landlords to campaign against anti-Airbnb messaging and any legislation that would restrict Airbnb’s business model.
The Tenant Bloc
However, the hard graft from New York’s direct-action organisations has been working, and it has resulted in one of the most successful tenant-led political moments in the Anglosphere. Their mayoral candidate, the former housing councilor and hip-hop musician, Zohran Mamdani, decisively beat the Democratic establishment-picked Andrew Cuomo and has become the next mayor of Donald Trump’s former stomping grounds.
“Now New York City has this voting bloc, the tenant bloc, which is really a recognition that we will not own our homes: we are forever-renters. Which goes counter to the American dream: ‘If you work hard enough and work enough you will then own your own home’, so there is a real psychic shift happening that’s being represented in politics… This is being incubated by the Housing Justice For All coalition in New York State, as an organised political body of renters – influencing candidates’ agendas and policies on renting.”
Even Kamala Harris proposed a “national rent cap” early into her Presidential campaign. “Which is something that fell off, a huge, missed opportunity,” notes Nurse. “A national tenant movement could really push that.”
The City Councillor talked me through the tenants’ latest political push. “Four organisations backed Mamdani right off the bat:
“New York Communities For Change, which is not just tenant organising, but is a working-class organisation that has roots from ACORN back in the day.
“CAAAV, which is a Chinese American advocacy group, which does a lot of stuff around housing in Chinatown [Chinatown Tenants Union] because of the gentrification and displacement there.
“DRUM Beats – Desis Rising Up & Moving, which is mostly South Asian tenants, who are a smaller member base but have a growing political base. A lot of homeowners, but then a lot of folks who cannot afford. And they’re specifically on a leftist bent.
“And then of course, DSA [Democratic Socialists of America, the big tent of democratic socialists in the Democratic Party].
“These organisations are very very working poor, working class, not that big of a membership – DSA is the biggest – from the margins but they’ve been around for a while. They backed this guy [Mamdani] and he’s now ascended and so they are his base that brought him up.”
“It’s the first time we’ve had a mayor that is explicitly being backed right off the bat by this type of grassroots. It’s almost exclusively tenant-based movements that have been fighting for affordability and rent and all these things for a long time. So it’ll be interesting to see what’s delivered, that accountability, and how far it goes.”
What Mamdani does remains to be seen but it is clear that the tenant movement across the ocean will certainly provide vital lessons about the kind of political change organised tenants are capable of in the 21st century.
And as Nurse stressed, “Mamdani has ingratiated himself with that movement and that movement has put him forward, so he is on the fucking hook to deliver.”