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tenants' rights
Mamdani Announces Plan to Build 200K New Affordable Homes
"We are the largest city in the nation," the mayor said of the bold new proposal. "We have the resources, the talent, and the will to achieve this."
May 26, 2026
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled his long-anticipated plan on Tuesday that he said will confront the city's housing crisis "with the urgency it demands," setting out the goal of building and preserving 400,000 affordable housing units.
Aimed at driving down housing costs in one of the nation's most expensive rental markets, the mayor described his program—titled "Block by Block: The Housing Plan For A New Era"—as one that will set about meeting "two of the most ambitious housing targets in modern New York City," during a press conference in Brooklyn on Tuesday.
Using a $22 billion capital investment over the next five years, the city is set to build 200,000 new affordable and rent-stabilized homes while preserving and stabilizing another 200,000 over the next decade.
According to a press release from the mayor's office, the large investment—which makes up about a sixth of the mayor's five-year capital plan—will be paired "with an ambitious land use agenda to boost housing production across the five boroughs and innovative new financing tools to build and preserve affordable housing more quickly and efficiently."
It will also include modifications to the zoning code to create hundreds of housing co-ops.
Mamdani said on Tuesday that the construction and maintenance of these units would increase the number of homes available to New Yorkers facing homelessness by 45%.
"We are the largest city in the nation. We have the resources, the talent, and the will to achieve this," Mamdani said on Tuesday, surrounded by a coalition of housing advocates, labor union representatives, and city officials.
He said the construction boom will "kickstart" the city's economy. According to the city's Department of Housing Preservation & Development, the program will create an average of 30,000 jobs per year during construction and 12,700 permanent jobs once it's completed.
Mamdani is also directing around $5.6 billion to the New York City Housing Authority to renovate existing units and reduce long wait times. NYCHA has over 170,000 units, and many of them are decades old and badly in need of repairs.
In addition to around $5 million aimed at helping landlords to fix longstanding maintenance issues and cover missed rent, the plan also targets landlords with troubled histories with "roof-to-cellar" inspections of their properties.
"This is about putting city government in the driver's seat. This is about delivering the changes that New Yorkers have been demanding with little avail," Mamdani said. "We will prove that government can deliver on the solutions to the toughest problems, not just debate them."
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Tacoma Activists Offer a Model for Building People Power
With mainstream US politics offering at the moment only Trumpian neofascism and tepid, corporate-friendly Democratic progressivism, a group of left-wing activists in Tacoma, Washington are showing the potential for mobilizing ordinary Americans on behalf of economic justice.
Dec 27, 2025
Tacoma, Washington is a city of about 222,000 persons, 35 miles southwest of Seattle along Interstate 5. It, and the broader Pierce County of which it is the largest city, are typical of many areas of the United States: majority white but with visible communities of color—including many first generation immigrants—and a largely working class population heavily dependent on low-wage, mostly non-union, service sector employment.
As is the case with the vast majority of Americans, most Tacoma residents are only intermittently interested in politics, concentrating on the day to day struggle of living paycheck to paycheck. Politics in the city is dominated by business interests, with elected representatives running the cliched gamut from tepid centrist progressives to right-wing Republicans.
Housing Justice
Recently, the Tacoma chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 367 have successfully mobilized ordinary people to fight for greater housing security, affordability, and pro-worker politics. Several years ago, for example, both organizations launched Tacoma 4 All (T4A), an organization whose activism succeeded in securing from the city’s voters in November 2023 the passage of what has been informally called the Tenants Bill of Rights—its formal legal title is the Landlord Fairness Code (LFC). The main features of the LFC were a $10 cap on late rental fees, a moratorium on rental evictions within the city during winter months, and a limit on rent increases at 5% annually. If landlords chose to raise the rent by more than 5% per year (and the tenant did not accept the rent increase), they were required to provide the tenant with relocation assistance.
T4A’s grassroots power has been on display in recent months during Tacoma City Council meetings as the organization has mobilized Tacoma residents—in what Tacoma’s business-friendly Democratic Mayor Victoria Woodards called "unprecedented" numbers for the December 9 meeting—to speak out during the meetings in support of the LFC. At the meetings, working class person after working class person has arisen to give testimony as to how the measures' regulations—particularly the winter month eviction moratorium—have given them desperately needed breathing space when temporary financial difficulties have made it impossible for them to pay rent. Such grassroots mobilization helped keep most of the LFC intact when the Tacoma City Council voted during the December 9 meeting on Council Member Sarah Rumbaugh’s proposal to make the LFC more landlord friendly.
The situation of ordinary Tacomans is a microcosm of broader economic injustices facing Washington state (and the United States as a whole).
The popular mobilization helped defeat some of Rumbaugh’s worst proposals, but other landlord-friendly revisions made it into the final revised LFC legislation, which the council approved by a 7-2 margin. The winter eviction moratorium was reduced from five months to four months; the $10 late fee cap was replaced by a charge of 1.5% of monthly rent; residents of nonprofit-owned buildings and Tacoma Housing Authority properties were removed from LFC winter eviction moratorium protections, as were “small landlords,” those defined as owning four or fewer properties in Tacoma and implied as being mom-and-pop landlords but who, in reality, are often large corporations, including private equity firms.
Worker’s Rights
Tacoma DSA, T4A and, UFCW 367 have also sought to mobilize ordinary Tacomans to expand workers’ rights. By late June 2025, the three organizations had collected 10,000 signatures (twice the required number) for a Worker’s Bill of Rights Initiative to be put before Tacoma voters. The proposed measure would increase Tacoma’s minimum wage with relative rapidity to $20 an hour (it now sits at $16.66 an hour, equivalent to Washington state’s minimum wage); implement fair scheduling regulations (requiring Tacoma employers to give workers adequate advanced notice of shift schedule changes); and improve worker safety conditions.
Since last summer—and although the proposed ballot initiative gained the required number of validated signatures—the Tacoma city government has successfully sued in court to delay the placement of the Worker’s Bill of Rights on voters’ ballots. The majority of the Tacoma City Council has requested these delays on the grounds that more time is needed to study the measure and have expressed the fear that it could derail business investment in the city. In the meantime, the struggle continues with T4A, Tacoma DSA, and Local 367 continuing the fight in the courts and at the grassroots to finally get the Worker’s Bill of Rights before Tacoma voters.
As Tacoma city officials fret over the Workers Bill of Rights as potentially creating a less favorable investment climate in the city by raising worker wages, it is crucial to consider some important context. Tacoma residents are struggling with stagnating wages and increasingly unaffordable rent. The situation of ordinary Tacomans is a microcosm of broader economic injustices facing Washington state (and the United States as a whole). The New York Times reported in April that “between 2001 to 2023, median residential rents in Washington state rose by 43%, adjusted for inflation” while state renter income grew by only 26% during the same time period.
Empowering Ordinary People
What is remarkable about the social justice activism that I’ve outlined above is that it has featured a determination to use the push for relatively modest progressive reform as a mechanism to empower and raise the political consciousness of ordinary people in potentially more radical directions.
For example, since the passage of the Landlord Fairness Code (LFC) in 2023, T4A activists have been frequently visiting Tacoma’s apartment complexes, informing tenants of their rights under the LFC, engaging in dialogue with residents about the ownership by predatory private equity firms of rental properties, and offering pro bono legal assistance for tenants having problems with landlords. T4A structures membership meetings to have organizational policy democratically determined by the group’s paying members. Meanwhile, earlier this month, T4A helped launch Tacoma’s first tenant union at one of the city’s privately owned apartment complexes. T4A, Tacoma DSA, and Local 367 are in the beginning stages of attempting to extend their organizing model from Tacoma into the rest of Pierce County.
It is the model of groups like T4A in patiently dialoguing with ordinary people over a long period of time and seeking to slowly but surely build popular power through organizing and consciousness raising that has the best chance of eventually replacing political rule by MAGA neofacists and neoliberal Democrats with the true economic and political empowerment of ordinary people.
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A Win for Mamdani Is a Win for Renters Everywhere
Mamdani is the antidote to the corporate landlord dominance we see in cities across the US. He doesn’t just speak on behalf of rent-stabilized tenants; he is one.
Nov 12, 2025
Zohran Mamdani, a tenant who lives in a rent-stabilized apartment and made affordable rent the primary issue in his campaign, has been elected mayor of New York City.
To be clear, a win for Mamdani is a huge win for renters—not just in New York, but across the country. Mayor-elect Mamdani has shown that a populist mayoral candidate with a bullhorn can ground a winning campaign in issues that impact constituents just trying to get by and have a decent place to live.
During the campaign, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo repeatedly attacked Mamdani for living in a rent-stabilized apartment and supporting a rent freeze. It was a display of character and courage that Mamdani never backed down. Instead, he doubled down. And the attacks against him continued through the last mayoral debate, where Mamdani stated emphatically, “You’ve heard it from Andrew Cuomo that the number one crisis in this city, the housing crisis, the answer is to evict my wife and I. He thinks you address this crisis by unleashing my landlord’s ability to raise my rent. If you think that the problem in this city is that my rent is too low, vote for him. If you know the problem in this city is that your rent is too high, vote for me.”
Mamdani understands the debate comes down to a very basic question: With rents so high, where are people supposed to live? The Starbucks barista, McDonald's worker, and Lyft driver are experiencing what most candidates are afraid to talk about—that they are one rent increase away from losing their apartment.
With over 2.3 million renters in New York City, it’s about time they elected a mayor who would put affordable rents front and center.
Too often, the dialogue around rent has been dominated by investors and corporate landlords. They seemingly have a bottomless pit of money to get their message out and line the campaign coffers of candidates who offer them carte blanche to raise rents and undermine tenants. As Mamdani stated during the race, “The same landlords who said they didn’t have enough money to freeze the rent, gave Cuomo $2.5 million dollars, the single largest check in this entire race.”
Mamdani is the antidote to the corporate landlord dominance we see in cities across the US. He doesn’t just speak on behalf of rent-stabilized tenants; he is one. And that makes all the difference.
Rent control is not new. It has been around since 1919. As real estate became more corporatized, multi-family buildings became a commodity—a line on a balance sheet. It’s less about the people and more about the building as an asset whose value is based on rents. In the 1990s, Apartment Associations led a nationwide campaign to curtail or ban altogether rent control. Currently, 37 states have banned it and states like California only allow rent control in buildings built in 1996.
Cash-strapped tenant organizations have done their best to move the needle on rent stabilization efforts, but they often face a deluge of money from the real estate industry, expensive lawsuits, and elected officials willing to reverse their progress.
Mamdani’s win as mayor signals new hope for campaigns that address the need to control skyrocketing rents. It sets in motion a new model nationwide centered on the needs of constituents, rather than corporate-dominated policies that have no tangible benefit to constituents and fail to improve the quality of life for low-income people.
With over 2.3 million renters in New York City, it’s about time they elected a mayor who would put affordable rents front and center.
Leaders across the country are watching what is happening in New York. The rents are so high that even someone working two full-time jobs can still be rent-burdened, paying over 30% of their income in rent. That is not sustainable.
New Yorkers reached a tipping point and found in Mamdani a leader who provided a platform of solutions, not more excuses for why they cannot get the relief they need. And hopefully, other cities will follow suit, attracting candidates that want to solve problems rather than kowtow to rich donors.
Let’s face it: Stabilizing housing costs is a reasonable practice, which is why most homeowners pay the same amount every month in mortgage payments. Mortgages don’t go up 17% every year to line the pockets of lenders. That would be ridiculous, and it is for renters too. Giving renters stability is not just a reasonable ask; it is a necessity.
As a lifelong renter, I believe we are on the precipice of policy change in the US. Renters and low-income communities are rising up to demand that the government acts in their interest.
Mamdani serving as mayor of America’s largest city, while living in a rent-stabilized apartment, is a game changer. More of this in other cities is desperately needed.
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