{"id":805865,"date":"2026-05-18T20:34:19","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T20:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/805865\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T20:34:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T20:34:19","slug":"mamdanis-tenant-advocate-cea-weaver-finds-common-ground-with-affordable-housing-developers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/805865\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani\u2019s tenant advocate Cea Weaver finds common ground with affordable housing developers"},"content":{"rendered":"

New Yorkers tend to know a bad landlord when they see one. Now they have official criteria to go by.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

The head of the mayor\u2019s tenant office<\/a>, Cea Weaver<\/a>, defined a \u201clow-road landlord\u201d as \u201cone that is persistently unavailable to their residents, who is buying their buildings with a speculative intent\u2026and ones that are not responsive to the city or the residents when there are problems and they need to be resolved.\u201d<\/p>\n

The answer came in a recent New York Law School<\/a> housing panel around the philosophical question: \u201cWhat is rent?\u201d Weaver sat down with two executives representing rent-stabilized owners and developers at the event, which aimed to discuss how much control the city government actually has over rent in various forms of housing.<\/p>\n

And though the Mamdani administration\u2019s support for a freeze on rent-stabilized increases has rankled some affordable housing owners, the two sides agreed in the law school housing panel that there are bigger issues facing New York\u2019s affordable housing stock.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe difference between a 0% increase and a 2% increase is not moving the needle,\u201d said Rafael Cestero, the head of an affordable lender called the Community Preservation Corporation. \u201cIs it making it marginally worse for the period of the freeze? Yes, for sure, but it is not the fundamental problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"JoshuaJoshua Rodrigues shares his story with Cea Weaver during the first \u201cRental Ripoff Hearing,\u201d Downtown Brooklyn, February 26, 2026.Photo by Adam Daly<\/p>\n

Cestero blasted the cost of insurance and a broken property tax system as the real problems that are pressing down on the city\u2019s rent-stabilized housing stock, and seemed to find agreement in Weaver that much of the city\u2019s aging affordable housing, which often dates back decades, is at risk of not getting the repairs it needs to keep operating.<\/p>\n

According to his organization\u2019s data, operating expenses for rent-stabilized buildings have increased at a rate of 27% since 2020 \u2014 with insurance costs up 75% during that period of time.<\/p>\n

Citing that data, Weaver pointed out that given an increasing number of rent-stabilized tenants who are not able to pay their rent as it is now, it would be totally infeasible to try and make up those operating expenses with rents.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThat means we need to find another solution here and I think for different buildings it will look a little bit different,\u201d Weaver said, suggesting that for more distressed buildings, the city can use tax relief programs to lend them financial support.<\/p>\n

As moderator Janaki Chadha pointed out, housing stock is often in the worst shape in places like the Bronx, where the low-income tenants are perhaps the least able to absorb a rent increase.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t pretend that low-income renters can spend more and more in order to keep up with escalating costs, but we also can\u2019t pretend that the buildings they live in are going to remain in good condition if we don\u2019t find ways to support the ongoing costs of maintaining those buildings,\u201d said Howard Slatkin, executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council.<\/p>\n

In contrast to her definition of a bad landlord, Weaver also described a \u201chigh-road landlord\u201d who has serious problems in their building but is trying to work with the city to find a policy solution that can make life better for their tenants.<\/p>\n

Michelle de la Uz, the executive director of affordable housing nonprofit Fifth Avenue Committee, agreed with that definition, but pointed out that the Mamdani administration has its work cut out for it to effectively execute its housing programs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere would be more folks that would fall into the high road landlord category if they felt that the bureaucracy was working, working for them or that somehow stepping forward that there was consistency in how policies were applied,\u201d de la Uz said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New Yorkers tend to know a bad landlord when they see one. Now they have official criteria to…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":805866,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[196496,5229,327947,166784,14254,16405,327948,161336,327949,405,403,10465,5226,5225,5228,5227,327950,24672,327951,259192,24845,327952,39403,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-805865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-affordable-housing-crisis","tag-america","tag-building-maintenance","tag-community-preservation-corporation","tag-housing-costs","tag-housing-policy","tag-insurance-costs-real-estate","tag-landlord-accountability","tag-low-road-landlords","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-housing","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-government-housing","tag-pm-newsletter","tag-property-taxes-nyc","tag-rent-freeze-debate","tag-rent-stabilization","tag-tenant-protections","tag-tenant-rights","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=805865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/805866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=805865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=805865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=805865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}