The results are in from the city’s crackdown on office-to-residential conversion projects, following a partial collapse at the former Pfizer headquarters, The RealDeal reported. The first phase of a New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) safety check uncovered violations at 19 construction sites, though inspectors found no hazardous structural issues posing an “imminent danger to public safety,” Gothamist reported. The investigation focused on 180 work sites linked to the developer and contractors behind the structural failure at the former Pfizer headquarters, namely MetroLoft, Barone Steel Fabricators, Domani Inspection Services, and Northeast Specialist Group. In total, the inspections yielded 65 violations across 38 work sites, 18 partial stop-work orders, and one full halt at a Williamsburg project. Twenty-four of the 180 inspected sites were office-to-residential conversions. The DOB concluded that there was no evidence of systemic danger inherent to the office-to-resi projects. Over 40 office-to-housing projects account for more than 14,000 new apartments and condos currently underway in New York City, according to the Department of City Planning. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said he considers the conversions to be a key way to address New York City’s housing shortage. On July 27, New York City officials issued a stop-work order at GLP’s office-to-residential conversion at 222 Broadway after contractors and engineers failed to report cracks in concrete beams on the building’s top floor. Developer GFP Real Estate maintains the building remains stable and that the shutdown is due to a reporting discrepancy rather than safety issues, though the Department of Buildings is still reviewing the site.
Sunday, August 9, 2026
Saturday, August 8, 2026
Anti-rent radical and Mamdani pal who is ‘squatting’ in Brooklyn is Grammy nepo baby
She’s unplugged from reality.
A rent-striking, rising-star radical orchestrating the Mamdani administration’s socialist housing agenda is the daughter of a famed music studio owner who recorded rock legends like David Bowie, the Ramones, Blondie, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, the Foo Fighters and Coldplay, The Post has learned.
While framing herself as a champion of the proletariat, Tracy Rosenthal grew up in a trendy $1.7 million NoMad pad with elite access to the music industry — attending the Grammys at least twice with her dad, four-time winner Steven Rosenthal.
Her father recorded hit albums by some of the world’s biggest artists at the Magic Shop, the SoHo studio he founded in 1988, including Coldplay’s 2008 “Viva la Vida,” which sold more than 10 million copies worldwide; the Foo Fighters’ 2014 “Sonic Highways,” for which he was interviewed in the band’s HBO docuseries; and Bowie’s final album, 2016’s “Blackstar.”
Yet despite her first-class upbringing, she’s been on a four-year “rent strike” since moving back to New York City after a stint in Los Angeles — because the Bolshevik bugged out after spotting a cockroach in her hip $2,300 a month Bed-Stuy apartment.
At a North Carolina Democratic Socialists of America meeting where she spoke last August, Rosenthal, 39 — who pridefully posed for a snap on Karl Marx’s grave during a trip to London — sang the blues about what she claimed were horrendous conditions she had to endure in 2021.
“As soon as I moved in, I realized that we had roaches . . . and I lost my mind,” she said of the two-bedroom pad that occupies the top floor of a brownstone. “I was very angry. . . . it’s really gross.”
She said the landlord refused to hire an exterminator, and after finding out the building had more rental units than were legally approved and was facing foreclosure, she organized with the other tenants to eventually stop paying rent, stiffing the owner of at least $108,000 on her unit alone.
“We’ve been on rent strike ever since,” she said proudly.
Her Bed-Stuy landlord, Adetunji Akinboboye, eventually lost the building to foreclosure in 2023.
US Bank, the new owner, is now suing Rosenthal, along with four other tenants, for eviction, saying they have “squatted upon the premises,” according to records filed in housing court in November. The cases are still before the courts.
Earlier this year, the building on quiet tree-lined Hancock Street was placed under the Housing Preservation Department’s Alternative Enforcement Program — meaning the landlord had a few months to address tenants’ complaints. It was removed from the program on July 14 after resolving the issues, according to a city notice taped to the front door this week.
This is the same program the Mamdani administration wants to use to “seize housing,” a previous Post analysis found — and which received a $2 billion budget boost. It can lead to the city dragging the landlord to court if it doesn’t do the repairs, and a housing court judge appointing a non-profit to take over the management of the building.
“They feel entitled to these properties,” said Stu Smith, investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute, who has been studying Rosenthal and the “rent abolitionist” movement.
“I consider her to be a saboteur, I consider her to be a gaslighter. And the fact that the Mamdani administration wants to highlight her as a hero speaks to the ethics and morality of the mayor’s office.”
Rosenthal’s 2024 book “Abolish Rent” lays out the playbook of escalating tactics she used herself — starting with talking to neighbors to identify shared grievances and making collective demands all the way to rent strikes — with the broader goal of shifting control of housing away from landlords.
It’s helped popularize a confrontational model of tenant activism and become a foundational tome for the DSA, which had her to speak to chapters across the nation for the past two years.
“We pay rent at the peril of our need and at the barrel of a gun,” she said at a meeting in 2024 in Midtown.
“It’s a ransom,” she raged. “We know that if we don’t make this payment, our landlords can call on agents of state violence who can use physical force to throw us outdoors.”
The more inflammatory techniques she pushes include camping outside a landlord’s home; shaming them in front of their neighbors, friends and family; leaving “really bad Yelp reviews;” and even crashing their children’s weddings — something she brazenly did with a tenant union in Beverly Hills in 2023.
Rosenthal — who posted “death to America” the night Mamdani clinched the Democratic primary last year and is a visiting scholar at the woke CUNY — put some of these tactics into practice as a strategist in a high-profile battle involving renters across 93 New York City buildings owned by Pinnacle Group, the focus of Mamdani’s taxpayer-funded “mini doc” released this week.
She helped tenants organize into a union that secured repairs and had millions of dollars in back rent forgiven, after the bankrupt landlord sold its 5,200-unit portfolio in the Bronx and Brooklyn.
“Really just everyone should feel so proud of the work that they did advocating for themselves and their neighbors,” Rosenthal says in the City Hall film, where she’s seen celebrating with tenants.
On the day the doc launched, Aug. 4, Mamdani also signed a “Right to Organize” letter — reminding renters of their right to knock on their neighbors’ doors and form tenant associations — echoing Rosenthal’s very techniques.
She proudly shared pictures posing alongside Hizzoner on social media, like at a “Hold Bad Landlords Accountable” photo op at City Hall in May and of the two strategizing during a recent Zoom meeting, according to her now-private Instagram account.
“Absolute banner year for tenant power . . . so much is possible when we organize,” she gloated in an Instagram post in June after the NYC rent freeze was passed.
Rosenthal has been likened to Mamdani tenant czar Cea Weaver — who also hails from an affluent family. The pair regularly speak alongside each other at events and were even featured together in a 2020 Teen Vogue article that framed them as tenant leaders, during the magazine’s activist era under uber woke editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner.
Rosenthal’s dad, who did not return The Post’s request for comment, has also battled landlords.
The Magic Shop was forced to shut down in 2016 after a years-long dispute with the landlord.
Her father, with the financial backing of the Foo Fighter’s Dave Grohl, tried to buy the space as a last-ditch effort, but the building’s co-op board rejected his bid.
Tracy Rosenthal did not return The Post’s calls and messages.
Friday, August 7, 2026
NYC homeowners sue Mamdani over bungled pied-à-terre tax rollout
A trio of Big Apple homeowners has filed suit to delay the state’s controversial new tax on luxury second homes — claiming Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration bungled the rollout.
The disgruntled owners charge that City Hall is unfairly burdening them by forcing them to prove they are full-time New Yorkers if they do not want to pay the pied-à-terre tax, according to the suit filed Friday in Staten Island Supreme Court.
The city Department of Finance “has arbitrarily and capriciously foisted onto New York City residents the burden of proving they are not subject to the Surcharge,” the filing states.
It also calls out the DOF’s move to publish a tax roll of nearly 1 million properties that may be subject to the new surcharge and the 17,000 notices it mailed to homeowners warning them they would be hit with five-figure bills unless they file for an exemption.
The city ignored its statutory obligation to do its homework first “to diligently assess and determine, using the vast resources at its disposal, the properties that are actually subject to the Surcharge,” the suit claims.
While the lawsuit does not challenge the law itself, it demands that a judge order the immediate scrubbing the 900,000-name list from the DOF website, claiming its publication “set off a panic among New York City homeowners.”
The city has already “furiously backpedaled” to later state that the list was “meaningless,” according to the suit.
The list “should never have been posted in the first place” and “has caused mass confusion as a result, and should therefore be immediately removed from DOF’s website,” the lawsuit says.
The suit also requests an emergency injunction to void the 17,000 mailed notices and relieve homeowners from having to respond. The Mamdani administration last weekend extended the deadline to file for an exemption to Sept. 18, from the end of August.
The plaintiffs are represented by lawyer Randy Mastro, who served as first deputy mayor under Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams.
Two of the suing homeowners are the wife and father of City Councilman Frank Morano, Rachel O’Brien and Carmine Morano both Staten Island residents; the third is a Chelsea resident, Simon Hedley. All claim they either received a notice letter that referred to their longtime primary residence, or that it was listed on the published tax roll.
“City Hall did this backwards,” the Republican pol told The Post. “This lawsuit is about forcing the administration to follow the law, clean up a botched rollout and stop making New Yorkers prove facts the government may already have at its fingertips.”
The law, approved by the state Legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul, is meant to apply to one- to three -family homes worth at least $5 million and co-ops and condominiums valued at $1 million or more that are unoccupied, non-primary residences.
Ahead of the notices being sent out, Mamdani last month released a taunting video telling owners of second homes worth more than $5 million to “check your mailbox.”
But the warning letters sent out by DOF roughly tripled the number of homes that would be subject to the law, said the department’s former commissioner, Martha Stark.
According to the city’s own published data, fewer than 3% of the 960,000 properties on the tax roll — roughly 24,000 — “meet the statutory value threshold” of $5 million for one- to three-family homes and $1 million for co-ops and condos, Stark said in an expert affirmation filed alongside the suit.
Stark, who has also been involved in a decade-long lawsuit over the city’s property tax system, claimed that the 17,000 letters were “strikingly over inclusive” and estimated that the true number of subject properties was between 5,000 and 6,000.
State law permitted the city to gain access to a far larger set of records — such as state income-tax data — to aid in assessing the properties subject to the new levy, “yet it published a list untethered to that information,” Stark claimed about the DOF.
Mastro himself said he received one of the notorious notices at his Upper East Side home, a massive six-bedroom townhouse he purchased for $14.3 million in 2016 and has lived in since.
“Given my recent employment by the city — in a high level role requiring that I reside in New York City no less, it is inconceivable that the City’s Department of Finance did not have records available to it demonstrating that my primary residence is at the property to which it sent me this notice,” Mastro wrote in a court filing.
The suit names the city, Mamdani in his official role as mayor, the DOF and its commissioner, Richard Lee, as the plaintiffs.
Mamdani spokesman Matt Rauschenbach said the Department of Finance “has been working around the clock” to provide information to people who may be subject to the new tax.
“As the mayor has said, we also know that whenever government asks something new of New Yorkers, we have a responsibility to make the process clear, transparent and accessible.”
Rauschenbach said the city Law Department will fight the suit in court.
Mastro has emerged as a legal foil to many of Mamdani’s initiatives, already facing off in court over a controversial relocation of the Bellevue’s men’s shelter to the East Village and the city’s rent-freeze on stabilized units.