Tenant complaints in New York City have climbed 25% this year, intensifying a heated fight between renters, landlords and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration over housing enforcement and property rights.
A Post analysis of 311 service requests across the five boroughs found 573,656 renter complaints have been filed so far this year, up from 459,519 during the same period in 2025.
The increase follows repeated calls from the Mamdani administration urging tenants who feel “ripped off” to report housing problems, even minor ones. Some landlords say the city’s message has changed tenant behavior, with complaints now being filed before owners are contacted about repairs.
“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.”
The volume of reports has put added pressure on the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the city agency responsible for handling tenant complaints. In the past week alone, 311 received 67 calls about clogged toilets, a 500% jump from the same period 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.”
Brooklyn is seeing the fastest rise in complaints, including in neighborhoods where Mamdani drew strong support, such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, Williamsburg and Greenpoint.
Residents in the borough have filed 169,675 complaints so far this year, compared with 128,337 at the same point in 2025 — a 32% increase, according to the data.
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.”
Some of the more head-scratching complaints have included tenants calling 311 to whine about having no heat in the summer, and a renter griping about the color of the paint on the wall, landlords have told The Post.
In May, Mamdani unveiled his “block by block” housing plan, which increased HPD’s budget by $2 billion.
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.”
When a tenant calls 311, the complaint goes to HPD, who calls the landlord. If that doesn’t resolve the issue, the agency sends an inspector to the apartment, who can issue a violation.
If a landlord doesn’t fix an HPD violation, it remains open, giving the city agency the power to go to court, and in the most extreme cases, when there are multiple serious, persistent building-wide violations, take steps to transfer management and ownership.
This week, Mamdani announced he was fast-tracking the court process.
“People wait weeks, if not months, for a case to be heard,” he told reporters. “Today we take a critical step towards ending that.”
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.
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.
“I’ve totally seen what I would describe as a weaponization of 311 complaints,” Luis Altamiranda, Esther consulting group president, who owns properties in Washington Heights. “It existed before Mamdani, but it’s gotten by far exponentialized since he’s taken office.“
“What I see a lot of is you have tenants that have massive amount of arrears, and then they use the 311 complaints to create this sort of narrative that the landlord’s not doing his job.”
“The landlords are being targeted,” said East Village landlord Christine Renzi, who owns 11 apartment buildings once owned by her father. “My father was never targeted like this. We used to get a lot of respect for being a landlord.”
“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.
Frivolous and repeated false complaints hurt tenants “with real issues,” said Ann Korchak, board president of Small Property Owners of New York.
“A fair and effective housing enforcement system should ensure that property owners are given reasonable opportunity to correct legitimate violations and weed out bogus tenant complaints. There also must be consequences for tenants who create the violations in the apartments, or report false complaints.”
Mamdani did not return a request for comment.
