The first Rental Ripoff Hearing kicked off in Brooklyn on Thursday, where over 200 tenants got a chance to speak with city officials about sky-high rent, utility costs, ongoing pest infestations, and other housing complaints that have gone unanswered.
Kelly Cook, a 31-year-old Crown Heights resident, said she was at the hearing because building management fails to listen to tenant complaints. “It’s just a completely unfair system,” she said. “Anytime you try to bring this up with management, it’s a complete stonewalling situation.”
Cook, who has lived in her two-bedroom apartment since 2023, said the management company hiked up rent when she moved into the apartment and prevented tenants from maintaining their rent-stabilized status.
Billed as “New Yorkers vs Bad Landlords,” the hearing series was announced by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani during his first days in office to provide a direct outlet for New Yorkers to share their housing experiences in hopes of changing city housing policy.
The first hearing was held at George Westinghouse High School in Downtown Brooklyn and reached capacity at 225 attendees who registered prior to the event.
The city will hold four more hearings in the coming weeks across the boroughs, and the city will release a report 90 days after the last hearing and the recommendations will direct the mayor’s future housing plan.
“Your stories inform policy decisions that our administration will be making,” Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, said at the hearing.
Instead of a traditional town hall forum, attendees browsed tables with housing resources from various city agencies and nonprofit organizations. After a brief presentation by city officials, residents were then invited to share their housing stories on poster boards set up around the gymnasium.
The posters invited tenants to share their thoughts using Post-It notes or stickers on various prompts, including: “How should the city address maintenance and repair issues?” and “How should the city address apartment listing ‘junk fees?’”
Attendees also participated in a three-minute, one-on-one listening session with city officials, where they shared their stories.
“Our housing plan will not only focus on production of affordable housing, because they often do, but it will also focus on housing quality, code enforcement and tenant day-to-day experiences,” Weaver said.
Mercy Kassa, a 33-year-old Bedford-Stuyvesant resident, was the first in line for the hearing Thursday night.
She decided to come to the hearing because of exorbitant utility bills, adding her January electric bill was $450 for her apartment. According to Kassa, her landlord has failed to explain why the cost of utilities was so high.
“We just want more transparency and enforcement of what we’re being charged, and if we are being price-gouged, that we have all the information to make that decision,” Kassa said.
Ahead of the hearing, organizations representing landlords and the real estate industry decried the hearings’ ability to effectively address the city’s housing affordability crisis.
“No one denies that some renters are dealing with serious problems,” Kenny Burgos, chief executive officer of New York Apartment Association, said in a statement. “But when buildings don’t bring in enough income to cover property taxes, utilities, maintenance and basic operating costs, decline becomes inevitable, no matter who owns them.”
The Real Estate Board of New York also released an analysis ahead of the hearing, which showed that 10% of residential buildings account for the majority of evictions and housing code violations over the last two years.
“The new mayoral administration’s theatrics notwithstanding, what the data shows is that a very small percentage of buildings account for the lion’s share of violations, evictions and complaints,” REBNY President James Whelan said in a statement. “And those buildings also tend to be the most constrained financially and operationally by government policy, with large concentrations of rent-regulated units.”
But Cook, who frequently attends tenant union meetings in her building, thinks the hearings provide an opportunity for tenants to be directly heard by city officials.
"I think there needs to be a lot more tenant representation in city government," Cook said. "Because right now, it's really working against us."
