Tenant complaints have surged 25% this 12 months in contrast to last 12 months in New York City, as critics warned socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s twisted struggle to squeeze landlords — and seize non-public property — is escalating.
There have been a staggering 573,656 complaints from renters logged with 311 so far this 12 months, in contrast to 459,519 filed at the same time in 2025, a Post evaluation of service requests across the 5 boroughs discovered.
The surge comes after the Mamdani administration has repeatedly inspired “ripped off” tenants to file grievances for the tiniest issues. Landlords informed The Post that complaints are now being made before even asking them to repair a downside.
“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 previous week alone, Mamdani’s 311 military flooded Housing Preservation and Development, the metropolis company that fields all tenant complaints, with 67 calls for clogged bogs — a 500% increase from the same time last 12 months.
“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 closely Mamdani-supporting neighborhoods such as Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Williamsburg and Greenpoint — are rising at the quickest tempo.
So far this 12 months, Brooklynites logged 169,675 complaints in contrast to 128,337 at the same time last 12 months — 32% more than the same span in 2025, information show.
Queens, where the hall extends into locations such as “The People’s Republic of Astoria,” also saw complaints rise sooner than the city-wide average, ticking up 29% year-over-year, the numbers show.
The hall has been at the coronary heart of City Hall’s efforts to provoke renters to be part of forces against landlords, who are anathema to the communist view that non-public property should be collectively owned.
“Call 311,” Mamdani’s radical tenant advocate, Cea Weaver, who once declared property possession a “weapon of white supremacy,” urged New Yorkers in February. “City Hall’s door is open,” she said, bragging that the metropolis 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 metropolis’s “rental ripoffs” hearings.
In April, Hizzoner dressed up as an HPD inspector for a social media post that bragged about discovering six violations, some as trivial as lacking data taped to the building entrance and boasted “no issue is too small.”
And it labored.
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 information show.
“They’re calling HPD non-stop day and night,” vented property proprietor Yossi Azour, who’s dealing with 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 proudly 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 season, and a renter griping about the colour of the paint on the wall, landlords have informed The Post.
In May, Mamdani unveiled his “block by block” housing plan, which elevated HPD’s price range by $2 billion.
The nonprofit NYS Tenant Bloc, which Weaver led until becoming a member of the Mamdani administration this 12 months, admitted taking landlords to court over repairs was half 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 criticism goes to HPD, who calls the landlord. If that doesn’t resolve the difficulty, the company sends an inspector to the condominium, who can difficulty a violation.
If a landlord doesn’t repair an HPD violation, it stays open, giving the metropolis company the energy to go to court, and in the most excessive circumstances, when there are a number of critical, persistent building-wide violations, take steps to switch management and possession.
This week, Mamdani announced he was fast-tracking the court course of.
“People wait weeks, if not months, for a case to be heard,” he informed reporters. “Today we take a critical step towards ending that.”
Gotham landlords informed The Post tenants are abusing the criticism system to reside 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 doorways 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 workplace.“
“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 condominium 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 harm 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 remark.