New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani packed a ballroom with angry renters, gave them a microphone, and promised to hold negligent landlords accountable. There was just one problem: his own administration can't figure out who the landlords are.
The scene played out at the third in a series of "rental rip-off hearings" Mamdani has staged across the city, where tenants aired grievances directly to housing officials. Among the most striking testimony came from residents of a six-story, nearly century-old building at 705 Gerard Avenue in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium, a building where rats, mold, crumbling walls, and a months-long elevator outage have made daily life miserable, the Associated Press reported.
The tenants wanted answers. They couldn't get them. Not from their building manager. Not from city hall. And certainly not from the maze of limited liability companies that stand between renters and the people who collect their checks every month.
Ann Maitin, a retired Verizon technician and longtime resident who organized the building's tenant association, met personally with Mamdani at the hearing. She told the AP it felt like a basic question, who owns the building where she lives?
"It feels like such a basic question. You'd think we'd have the right to that information."
Maitin wasn't the only one struggling for answers. Gulhayo Yuldosheva, a 33-year-old tenant, said she worried that mold in her apartment had worsened her child's asthma. She pointed to a crack in a bedroom wall shared by her three children. Her downstairs neighbor, 65-year-old Marina Quiroz, showed a video of rats scurrying through her kitchen to a representative from the city's tenant protection office.
Tommy Rodriguez, a wheelchair user who grew up in the building in the 1980s, described being forced to slide down the stairs during a months-long elevator outage because calls to management went unanswered. He recalled a time when the previous landlord was friendly and responsive. That era is gone.
"This felt like a home before. Now they treat us the same as the rats."
Rodriguez told the AP he once killed a rodent with a two-by-four. Tenants banded together to visit each of the building's 72 units, logging conditions as they went. Yuldosheva said they acted out of fear.
"We didn't want to become the next news story."
The tenants' frustration is real. So is the city's inability to pierce the corporate veil that shields building owners from scrutiny. Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants, acknowledged the gap plainly.
"It'd be great to have a better sense of who owns the buildings that we are regulating and overseeing."
That admission, from the mayor's own appointee, captures the absurdity. City Hall is staging public hearings to shame landlords it cannot identify. Oksana Mironova, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society, put it more bluntly: "There are these big slumlords that everyone knows are doing predatory investment, but pinning them down is going to be difficult, for the LLC reason. That's a problem for the administration, and it's even worse for tenants."
When the AP traced the ownership of 705 Gerard Avenue, it found a tangled web. Binyomin Herzl, a building manager who shared a Brooklyn office with a man named David Kleiner, was listed as an owner on some records. Reached by phone, Herzl denied owning the properties and said he acted as a middleman.
"There's no one landlord. It's a group of investors."
Herzl declined to name the actual owners. He dismissed the tenants' complaints as "normal wear and tear" and suggested Mamdani should focus on public housing instead: "Our buildings look like five star hotels against his."
Kleiner, who had previously appeared on the city's "worst landlord" list and was featured in news stories as the owner of another troubled Bronx building, confirmed partial ownership of 705 Gerard in a brief phone call and declined further comment.
The numbers behind these two men are striking. Over the last three years, city housing inspectors ordered emergency repairs at 38 buildings listing either Herzl or Kleiner as an owner. The city billed the men $446,521 for those repairs. Lawsuits show Herzl has been ordered to pay more than $100,000 for violations across at least six Bronx buildings.
And yet the full ownership structure of 705 Gerard Avenue remains opaque.
State legislation that would have made it easier to identify the people behind LLC-owned buildings was recently vetoed by Gov. Kathy Hochul amid pressure from landlords. That veto left city officials without the transparency tool they claim they need, and left tenants like Maitin without answers to the most basic question a renter can ask.
Mamdani has proposed aggressively pursuing liens on delinquent landlords and buying up their distressed portfolios through foreclosure auctions. The city already has the authority to step in and order repairs when landlords refuse to address serious violations like heat or hot water outages, then bill the owner directly. But the lien-and-foreclose strategy requires knowing who actually holds the deed, and that, as Mamdani's own team admits, remains the stumbling block.
Mamdani told the hearing crowd that their stories would guide efforts "to actually hold landlords accountable when they don't follow the law." He vowed that owners who "repeatedly put New Yorkers at risk will not be allowed to operate in New York City, with no exceptions."
Strong words. But the gap between rhetoric and capacity is wide. Mamdani's administration has already drawn criticism for missed housing meetings as the city's rent crisis deepens, raising questions about whether the mayor's attention matches his ambition.
The landlord industry isn't sitting quietly. Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, called the hearings "show trials" taking a "tribal approach." He argued that Mamdani's tenant proposals would force landlords to cut maintenance and services.
"That's going to take away from the elevator budget, the boiler budget, the heating budget. It's a question of math: These buildings are crumbling because of policy, not because of bad landlords."
There's a reasonable debate to be had about the policy environment landlords face. But Burgos's argument lands differently when you hear Tommy Rodriguez describe sliding down stairs in a wheelchair because nobody answered the phone.
Meanwhile, Mamdani faces a separate revolt from the very constituency he claims to champion. At an earlier hearing at Fordham University, he was heckled by a woman demanding he prioritize public housing tenants. "Public housing first mayor, public housing first," she shouted, the New York Post reported. Another heckler told him: "We don't want stories. We want you to listen, mayor. Listen to public housing."
The criticism stings because it exposes a contradiction. Mamdani campaigned on targeting negligent landlords and seizing their properties, yet roughly 510,000 New Yorkers live in NYCHA public housing plagued by documented mold, leaks, waste management failures, and pest control problems. Public housing advocates protested outside a Brooklyn hearing, arguing NYCHA residents were initially excluded from testimony. The Crisis Action Center even funded a mobile billboard mocking Mamdani over the issue.
Rev. Kevin McCall, one of the critics, told the Washington Free Beacon: "I think he wants to sweep this under the rug and deal with his agenda, what he has regarding the socialist mentality. He wants to be able to deal with the real estate because he has an agenda about taxing the rich."
That is a pointed charge from within the progressive coalition. And it raises a fair question: Is Mamdani's landlord offensive a serious policy effort, or a political production designed to cast himself as a champion of the little guy while the city's own housing stock rots?
The pattern of controversy around this administration is hard to ignore. Mamdani has drawn sharp backlash over a Rikers Island visit and has faced criticism for decisions ranging from shelter closures to the composition of his own leadership team.
Back at 705 Gerard Avenue, Maitin noticed something the morning after the hearing. The superintendent was painting a staircase. Workers were removing scaffolding that had been in front of the building for years. She told the AP she suspected the attention had gotten through.
"I think they caught wind of the rental rip-off. They're scared."
But she also acknowledged a deeper uncertainty. Getting maintenance done at 705 Gerard Avenue, she said, "feels like waiting for Christmas in July." She was "glad to be heard by someone who can actually do something about the problem", but wondered "if it's all talk."
That skepticism is earned. Mamdani's administration has proposed ambitious fiscal plans only to retreat under pressure. The question for tenants at 705 Gerard and buildings like it across the five boroughs is whether this mayor can convert packed ballrooms and strong rhetoric into functioning plumbing, working elevators, and vermin-free kitchens.
The tenants of 705 Gerard deserve to know who owns their building. They deserve heat, hot water, and an elevator that works. They deserve a landlord who answers the phone. What they got instead was a hearing, a promise, and a mayor whose own office admits it can't identify the people it's trying to hold accountable.
You can't crack down on someone you can't find. And staging a public hearing to announce that fact doesn't make it any less of a failure.
