**Havana’s once stately homes crumble as their residents live in fear of an imminent collapse**

New York’s City Council and its Mayor’s rent freeze: 0% increase, with landlords forbidden to recoup increases in maintenance costs and taxes, is just the first step towards their ultimate goal of converting the city’s housing stock from private to public ownership. The second step: having ensured that buildings will deteriorate, the flood of tenant complaints will accelerate, and the city will move in to confiscate them “in the name of the people”. That plan has already begun:

Mamdani sparks tenant complaint crisis to ‘squeeze’ landlords and seize private property: critics

Tenant complaints have surged 25% this year compared to last year in New York City, as critics warned socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s twisted war to squeeze landlords — and seize private property — is escalating.
There have been a staggering 573,656 complaints from renters logged with 311 so far this year, compared to 459,519 filed at the same time in 2025, a Post analysis of service requests across the five boroughs found.
The surge comes after the Mamdani administration has repeatedly encouraged “ripped off” tenants to file grievances for the tiniest things. Landlords told The Post that complaints are now being made before even asking them to fix a problem.
“The city put us in a situation where they’re just slowly beating us to death and blaming us,” said Lincoln Eccles, who owns a 15-unit building in Crown Heights. “The apparatus of the government is geared to squeeze us.”
In the past week alone, Mamdani’s 311 army flooded Housing Preservation and Development, the city agency that fields all tenant complaints, with 67 calls for clogged toilets — a 500% increase from the same time last year.
“All of this tenant organizing is part of a long term project to take wealth away from people and redistribute it,” said Stu Smith, an investigative analyst with the Manhattan Institute. “They’re figuring out what pressure points they can act on to get their way.”
Complaints in Brooklyn — home to the “Commie Corridor,” a stretch of heavily Mamdani-supporting neighborhoods such as Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Williamsburg and Greenpoint — are rising at the quickest pace.
So far this year, Brooklynites logged 169,675 complaints compared to 128,337 at the same time last year — 32% more than the same span in 2025, data show.
Queens, where the corridor extends into places such as “The People’s Republic of Astoria,” also saw complaints rise faster than the city-wide average, ticking up 29% year-over-year, the numbers show.
The corridor has been at the heart of City Hall’s efforts to galvanize renters to join forces against landlords, who are anathema to the communist view that private property should be collectively owned.
“Call 311,” Mamdani’s radical tenant advocate, Cea Weaver, who once declared property ownership a “weapon of white supremacy,” urged New Yorkers in February. “City Hall’s door is open,” she said, bragging that the city was going to get “bold and creative” in an interview with In These Times.
Weaver, who once said “if you don’t believe in the government’s sacred right to seize private property, it’s over,” also boasted that HPD was beefing up its staffing.
“We’re expanding headcount to be able to do more housing code inspections and more targeted enforcement,” she said in July during a briefing about the city’s “rental ripoffs” hearings.
In April, Hizzoner dressed up as an HPD inspector for a social media post that bragged about finding six violations, some as trivial as missing info taped to the building entrance and boasted “no issue is too small.”
And it worked.
That week, there were 17,768 complaints filed — up 63% from the same week in 2025 when there were 10,877 tenant calls. In Brooklyn, calls that week went from 3,223 in 2025 to 5,499 in 2026 – a 70% increase, the data show.
“They’re calling HPD non-stop day and night,” vented property owner Yossi Azour, who’s facing off against the Weaver-founded Crown Heights Tenants Union at his building on Hawthorne Street.
“They’re playing the innocent victim and causing people to lose their property and suffer.”
“It’s a disaster,” he added, saying that he’d never seen this in 30 years of owning property. “That Mamdani is saying landlords are bad and housing should be free, it gives them headwind.”

The nonprofit NYS Tenant Bloc, which Weaver led until joining the Mamdani administration this year, admitted taking landlords to court over repairs was part of the plan to seize housing.

“If landlords can’t maintain their buildings, tenants will,” the NYS Tenant Block bragged in June. “The Mayor’s Housing Plan directs $2.2 billion to taking housing off their hands.”

Gotham landlords told The Post tenants are abusing the complaint system to live rent-free — and push them out.

“The tactic is to make these complaints. Make it seem like there is no interest in fixing the issue,” said Eccles.
Landlord Natalie Bonnano said tenants think that they can get away with a lot more with Mamdani in office.Fox News
Mamdani’s controversial Office of Mass Engagement has even gone canvassing with the Democratic Socialists of America to encourage tenants to “band together” against landlords, knocking on doors in Flatbush just last week.
[East Village landlord Christine Renzi]: “I actually have a tenant that feels that he does not have to pay his rent because of Mamdani. They feel like they are absolutely entitled to have a free ride,” she said.
“We even had one tenant who called me and asked why she was being charged rent. She thought that’s what the rent freeze meant,” said Natalie Bonnano, 47, of Staten Island who, with her sister, owns 300 properties in Brooklyn and Staten Island.

**Mamdani’s Tenant Advocate Cea Wever:** **property ownership a “weapon of white supremacy,” “if you don’t believe in the government’s sacred right to seize private property, it’s over,” also boasted that HPD was beefing up its staffing.**

Here’s one of the leading “free housing” groups: The Crown Heights Tenant Union.

They boast of their “achievements” on their website:

Helped launch the largest rent strike in NYC history (2020)
Won the strongest tenant protections in a generation with a slate of rent laws (2019)
Won multiple extensions of the pandemic eviction moratorium, protecting tenants from eviction for 22 months (2020 - 2022)
Successful eviction defenses on Dean St (2020) and Park Place (2021, 2022) in collaboration with Equality 4 Flatbush, Brooklyn Eviction Defense, and the Crown Heights Care Collective
Secured the first collective bargaining agreement with a landlord (2022)

And in line with their stated intention to end all evictions, there’s this:

No active member of CHTU has EVER been evicted (2013-2023)

The DSA (Daddy’s Savings Account) flock seem to genuinely believe that they can live rent free in beautiful, peaceful (no police) peoples’ housing that will be maintained by an attentive army of dedicated public servants who will respond immediately to any and all reports of , say, burned out lightbulbs and leading roofs. How’s that working in the existing public housing? Not so well:

🏢 NYCHA Public Housing in Disrepair

The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is the city's largest landlord, housing roughly 1 in 17 New Yorkers. Decades of federal disinvestment and deferred maintenance have left its aging building portfolio in critical condition. [1, 2, 3]

The $78 Billion Backlog: NYCHA's physical needs assessment reveals that the agency requires $78.3 billion to fix its deteriorating developments. This includes repairing structural facades, replacing hundreds of failing boilers, and overhauling broken plumbing. [1, 3, 4]
Common Infestations & Violations: Residents across thousands of buildings frequently deal with toxic mold, lead paint hazards, collapsed ceilings, and persistent vermin infestations. [1, 2]
The PACT/RAD Initiative: To tackle this multi-billion-dollar backlog, the city has increasingly relied on the Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT) program. This model shifts properties to private management to fund major overhauls while keeping units under Section 8 protections. However, tenant groups and investigations note that even private managers have struggled to keep up with immediate repair deadlines.

But this time will be different, beacuse our intentions are noble and good.