Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani has made housing and tenant protection the throughline of his first months in office, moving in early 2026 to tighten enforcement against the city’s worst landlords, open the city’s first-ever public hearings on rental abuses, speed up affordable construction on city-owned land and sue a landlord accused of running illegal short-term rentals in rent-stabilized buildings. The push has unfolded alongside separate tenant fights playing out in the courts and on the streets, from a stayed plan to demolish public housing in Chelsea to a City Council campaign against deed theft.
On February 8, Mamdani and Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Dina Levy released an updated list of the 250 buildings with the most severe housing code violations citywide, placing them under heightened oversight through the city’s Alternative Enforcement Program, according to the mayor’s office. The administration said the program, now in its 19th year, lets the city closely monitor repeat offenders, conduct more frequent inspections, issue Orders to Correct and step in to make repairs when owners fail to act, billing landlords for the cost. The 250 buildings selected this year account for nearly 55,000 open violations and owe the city nearly $4.5 million for emergency repairs already performed, the office said. The mayor’s office added that the list builds on a $2.1 million settlement announced the prior month with A&E Real Estate Holdings covering 14 buildings, which it described as the largest ever won by HPD’s Anti-Harassment Unit and which required extensive repairs, compliance with Orders to Correct and injunctions barring tenant harassment.
“In our first month in office, we’ve been clear: New York will no longer look the other way while bad landlords put tenants at risk,” Mamdani said in the announcement. “The Alternative Enforcement Program gives us the power to closely monitor repeat offenders and step in to fix conditions when landlords refuse to do their jobs.” The mayor’s office said that during the winter’s cold emergency, HPD treated heat-and-hot-water failures as an all-hands-on-deck effort, responding to roughly 37,000 complaints in January and closing 98 percent of them as of February 4. The scale of the cold-weather crisis was steep: City Limits reported that the city received nearly 80,000 calls about a lack of residential heat and hot water in January, more than in any other month on record, with some tenants saying their buildings were falling through the cracks.
