Hundreds of tenants have attended the Rental Ripoff Hearings in Brooklyn and Queens and more are preparing to testify in the Bronx today — in fact so many were ready to testify about their slumlords that sign-ups filled within 24 hours of opening. That’s not a surprise when two-thirds of New York City tenants have experienced a housing quality problem in the last three years, according to a new report from the Community Service Society.

Every New Yorker knows this — we’ve lived it. No heat during one of the worst cold snaps in recent memory. Chronic mold poisoning our children. Ceilings collapsing. The leaky sink that doesn’t get fixed. All the while rent keeps going up.

Why aren’t we getting our repairs? Because landlords are using our rent money to line their pockets instead of fixing our buildings. Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, one of the biggest landlord lobby groups, wants to blame the government, blame taxes, blame rent regulation — anyone but the slumlords.

But landlords are doing just fine. Last year, their profits went up 12%, the biggest jump since the 1990s, while their neglect continued. Landlords say they can’t afford to make repairs unless they hike our rents — but after four years of rent increases on rent stabilized tenants, we’re still waiting for basic maintenance.

Take A&E Real Estate. Douglas Eisenberg gave $125,000 to Andrew Cuomo’s super PAC last year, while his company racked up thousands of code violations across its portfolio. In January, the Mamdani administration announced a $2.1 million settlement — the largest in city history — to resolve more than 4,000 violations and tenant harassment allegations at 14 A&E buildings, where tenants had been organizing for years. In his first month in office, Mayor Mamdani has shown he is committed to working with tenants to hold our slumlords accountable.

That’s why tenants are fighting for a rent freeze and turning out in droves to the Rental Ripoff Hearings. Tenants elected a mayor who works for us, not real estate. And now his administration is giving us the opportunity to work side by side to fix our broken code enforcement system and make sure every tenant has a safe home.

From our decades of experience fighting our landlords, we know exactly what needs to change: a rent freeze so we can stay in our homes, ending the self-certification system that lets landlords claim they fixed violations without proof, imposing real penalties on slumlords instead of waiving fees, and creating pathways for tenants to take over buildings when landlords abandon them. After all, if a landlord doesn’t want to take care of their building, they should give it to the tenants who will.

Every tenant knows that if they don’t pay their rent on the first of the month, they risk losing their home. It doesn’t matter whether they just received an unexpected medical bill or lost their job. But when they hand over that rent check, there’s no guarantee that the leaky sink will get fixed, that the heat will stay on, or that the broken window will get repaired.

The landlord lobby doesn’t care if your apartment is safe. They care about their bottom line. That’s why slumlords are terrified of finally being held accountable — and they should be. Tenants are the majority in New York. We’re organized. And we’ve got City Hall on our side.

Kumar is executive director of the NYS Tenant Bloc.

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