Mamdani campaigned on targeting ‘negligent’ landlords and seizing their property even as New York’s public housing remains famously decrepit
NEW YORK CITY—Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D.) highly touted “Rental Ripoff Hearing” went off the rails on Thursday as public housing advocates, who said City Hall was ignoring them, caused a scene outside the Brooklyn high school where the hearing took place.
“I don’t think that the mayor is prepared to be able to deal with [the New York City Housing Authority],” a man who identified himself as the Rev. Kevin McCall 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.”
McCall’s anger came from Mamdani’s initial decision to exclude those who live in New York public housing from offering testimony at the hearings, which are meant to allow tenants to air their grievances with their landlords. McCall, who held a sign reading “The mayor don’t care about NYCHA,” told the Free Beacon that he believes Mamdani shut out New Yorkers who live in public housing—roughly half a million people—because of his focus on the wealthy.
“He wants to be able to deal with the real estate because he has an agenda about taxing the rich,” McCall said. “So that’s on his agenda, but he don’t want to deal with his own problems. When it rains, it pours at NYCHA. When it shows, it pours at NYCHA. It’s really a slap in the face to every voter.”
McCall promised to hold his own rival NYCHA hearings in the Bronx on March 4. The proposed March 4 NYCHA hearing that McCall described to the Free Beacon would compete with the 10 remaining events the city has planned in the Bronx, Manhattan, Staten Island, and Queens.
“At these hearings, you will hear, we will visit the tenants’ apartments,” he said. “We will go to tenant apartments. We will—in the five boroughs—go to tenants’ apartments. We’re going to collect this data, this information, and we’re going to present it. We’re going to come up with our own plan.”
Mamdani ran on targeting “negligent” landlords and seizing their properties, the Free Beacon reported during the campaign, and local real estate experts said at the time that the policy would mark a significant expansion of city power. The New York City government already acts as landlord to more than 510,000 residents who live in the city’s famously decrepit public housing. The municipal government’s own NYCHA watchdog determined in December 2024 that “83% of verified mold complaints involved Large Mold Growths” and deemed NYCHA buildings “out of compliance” in waste management and pest control. The following April, it noted that “NYCHA remains substantially out of compliance with several mold and leak requirements.”
The state of NYCHA buildings came to national attention in 2016, when then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton visited an NYCHA unit and her look of horror went viral.
Cea Weaver, the controversial Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants who bemoaned “white, middle-class homeowners” and said her goal is to “undermine the institution of homeownership,” led the hearing, which took place at K605 George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School. Shortly after Weaver’s 10-minute presentation, Crackhead Barney, a progressive troll who has become well-known for her antics in New York, seized the microphone.
“NYCHA should be allowed in the motherf—ing building,” Barney thundered. “NYCHA should be allowed to speak. This is bulls—t. … It’s not fair. It’s not fair. Poor people need a voice. … I was speaking to a man from NYCHA and he was scared to come in. I told him, ‘Get your ass in here.’ … Stop the demolition of NYCHA. Save the niggas. Save the niggas.”
The outburst drew scattered cheers from the audience, while organizers attempted to calm the situation by announcing that NYCHA residents would be able to have their concerns heard at a hastily prepared table. After two minutes and a brief standoff with Weaver, organizers eventually coaxed Barney off the stage.
Weaver has in the past made headlines for claiming that homeownership is a “weapon of white supremacy” and stating that she wants to promote policies to “impoverish the *white* middle class.” She declined to walk back those statements in comments to the Free Beacon.
“There’s no question that too many people have been barred from homeownership, especially along the—on the question of their racial makeup,” Weaver said. “And so we certainly think that everyone should have safe and affordable homes.”
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