Socialist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdanibuilt his political campaign by relentlessly attacking Americaand, most importantly, portraying capitalism as the root cause of nearly every social problem, from affordability pressures to soaring rents.
Voters were sold the idea that his administration could deliver an instant utopian transformation built on free bus rides, government-run grocery stores, and cheap housing.
However, like every Marxist before him, Mamdani's vision of utopia is not grounded in economic reality. The dream pitched to millions across the metropolitan area is now colliding with market reality: a continuing nightmare for renters. Even with Mamdani's rent freeze and threat of a pied-à-terre tax, rents are still rising.
Delving into the granular data, a report from theNew York Post, citing data from Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, shows that Manhattan's average monthly rent jumped to a record $6,655 in July, up 10% from a year earlier.
The median rent reached $5,295, a 6% increase from the same month one year ago, according to the data. Average rents rose across every apartment category, including 8% for studios to $4,088, 7% for one-bedroom apartments to $5,486 and 13% for two-bedroom apartments to $8,054. Three-bedroom apartments averaged $12,228, up 12%.
NYC's rental vacancy rate has fallen to 1.49%, the lowest since 1968 and well below the 5% threshold typically associated with a landlord's market. Separately, state data show that roughly 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments sat vacant in 2025
A severe housing shortage, elevated mortgage rates, and new rental regulations have intensified competition for available apartments. Let's not forget that a recent Center for Migration Studies report showed that more than 500,000 illegal aliens live in NYC.
Via Pew Research
Yet the socialists in City Hall have no interest in deporting illegal aliens - that because that's their imported voter bloc. These illegals add pressure to the housing supply and force rental prices higher. Even the Dallas Federal Reserve recently confirmed that the illegal alien invasion under the Biden-Harris regime led to pressure on rents and housing prices on a national level.
To begin the week, a New York judge temporarily halted Mamdani's socialist tax experiment on second homes. The far-left in City Hall also published a controversial list doxing more than 900,000 homeowners, exposing them to targeting by radical activists, including Luigi-worshipping far-left activists.Maybe the socialists' game is not affordability but more about seizing private property.
President Trump commented on Truth Social yesterday about Mamdani's dangerous tax "experiment" before it "destroys what was once a great City and State." He said the federal government is looking for ways to challenge the tax scheme.
Beyond tax schemes, doxing wealthy, and attempted rent freezes, Mamdani and the radical left are trying to build more housing, but that takes time, something they do not have if they hope to prove that their utopian vision works. These policies may work in the short run if implemented, but over the long term, such fundamentally flawed policies have repeatedly failed around the world.
Nothing is more natural when buying a house than looking into how safe the neighborhood is — and, if you have or plan to have children, whether the local public schools are any good.
Yet the last Democratic presidential administration tried to prevent real-estate agents from answering those kinds of questions, because it prioritized “diversity” over safety and education.
President Donald Trump’s administration revoked the de facto gag rule this year, but the damage that Joe Biden’s apparatchiks inflicted is still being felt.
What’s worse, state regulations in New York and elsewhere still prevent real-estate agents from speaking freely to homebuyers about crime and schools.
Interfering with homebuying was a first-week priority for Biden’s administration.
Six days after he was sworn into office, Biden issued his directive establishing enforcement priorities for the Department of Housing and Urban Development aimed atscaring real-estate agents into remaining silent on two of the subjects most important to their clients.
“Diverse and inclusive communities strengthen our democracy,” the executive memorandum began.
What mom or dad wants their community to be “inclusive” of failing schools?
Who wants “diversity” to mean mixing criminals with innocent people?
Black families don’t want to live in dangerous or educationally dead-end neighborhoods any more than people of any other color do.
Yet too many progressives believe racial equality is best achieved by demolishing standards for everyone.
That was the effect of Biden’s memo, which made clear that racial politics and the doctrine of “disparate impact” would guide HUD’s enforcement of federal housing laws.
The major online real-estate companies understood immediately what was being demanded of them.
Realtor.com and Zillow stopped providing crime data, while Redfin — going out of its way to embrace the party line — posted a blog proclaiming, “Neighborhood crime data doesn’t belong on real estate sites.”
The National Association of Realtors put up a webpage in early 2023 titled “How to handle client questions about schools and neighborhoods,” which told realtors to point homebuyers to other sources of information rather than providing the facts themselves.
The page is larded with the jargon of diversity, equity and inclusion — but it also testifies to the association’s worry that fair-housing laws would be interpreted aggressively, and that realtors who did tell their clients too much would run the risk of punishment.
In April, Trump’s HUD announced that realtors and other real-estate agents should not feel intimidated: “The Fair Housing Act does not require withholding useful information on school quality and crime statistics,” the department proclaimed.
The “Dear Colleague” letter from Assistant Secretary Craig Trainor went into considerable detail to “strongly urge” the real-estate industry “to revisit ethics training materials and reconsider public statements that stifle real estate agent speech.”
But the New York Association of Realtors, for one, says it can’t do that — because its members “may be subject to liability under (New York state) law” if they speak frankly to homebuyers about schools and crime.
How many voters know some state governments — and, under the last Democratic administration, the federal government — are muzzling real-estate agents in this way?
How many know how easily the industry rolled over when Biden decided to put homebuyers’ safety and their children’ s education at risk?
What the Biden administration did was unethical, and the industry did a disservice to its clients by giving in — though perhaps the prospect of selling more homes in bad neighborhoods appealed to the least scrupulous members of the profession.
Buying a home is a trust-intensive process: It’s not only expensive, it ranks alongside marriage as one the most consequential decisions anyone can make, holding the potential for decades of happiness or misery.
Buying a home is buying a future.
It isn’t right to withhold any information a family needs about a prospective neighborhood, and state laws as well as federal ones must put homebuyers — of all races — first, above any political commitment to abstractions like diversity and inclusion.
The point of shielding information about crime and schools is to get more people to buy homes where they otherwise wouldn’t want to live.
What could be more wicked, more destructive, than that?
The intrepid journalist Helen Andrews, who’s never afraid of a controversy, deserves credit for calling attention to this corruption of the real-estate industry in a recent essay for the web magazine Compact.
It’s a big story, one that ought to be on voters’ minds as they consider the state and local elections, as well as federal ones, coming up in November.
If Americans don’t want their real-estate providers gagged, they must speak up themselves — at the ballot box.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
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.
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.
Rosenthal appears in the “A Short History of NYC Housing” mini doc released by the Mayor’s office on Aug. 4.NYC Mayor's office/YouTube
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.
Rosenthal at the Grammy’s in 2011 with her dad and stepmom.WireImage
“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.
Rosenthal posed next to Mamdani at a “hold bad landlords accountable” photo op at City Hall in May.
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 also attended the Grammy’s in 2023 with her father.
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.
Rosenthal has been a leading tenant activist in both NYC and LA.Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal/Facebook
“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.
Rosenthal strategized with the Pinnacle tenants to form a union — a battle that’s the subject of Mamdani’s housing film.NYC Mayor's office/YouTube
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.
Rosenthal was once arrested for interrupting a homeless sweep in LA.
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.
Steven Rosenthal stopped by the Bed-Stuy pad Friday and checked out a lockbox attached to the stair railing.NYPJ for NY Post
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.
A city notice was slapped on the building’s front door saying it was being discharged from its enforcement program.NYPJ for NY Post Tracy Rosenthal did not return The Post’s calls and messages.
