Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York on a slew of socialist promises marketed under the banner of affordability.

On his first day in office, he signed three executive orders to address the housing crisis. The first revives the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, led by tenant advocate Cea Weaver, to coordinate agencies and crack down on abusive landlords. Another creates the LIFT task force to fast-track city-owned sites for housing, while the SPEED task force will cut red tape that delays construction. Days later, he picked 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx’s Morris Heights to introduce Dina Levy as the new Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) commissioner. 

Back in 2011, Levy, who will now earn a $277,605 annual salary as Mamdani’s HPD commissioner, helped flip the 102-unit building from private ownership to the nonprofit Workforce Housing Advisors. Her group, Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, teamed with HPD on a $5.6 million city loan. 

Mamdani touted that move as a win. He told the crowd that Levy organized tenants against a predatory buyer. The building stayed affordable. "Dina will no longer be petitioning HPD from the outside," Mamdani said. "She will now be leading it from the inside, delivering the kind of change that can transform lives." He painted Levy as the perfect person to implement his affordable housing agenda, which leans heavily on replacing private landlords with nonprofits. 

But what Mamdani didn’t say at the event was that this model for his housing agenda is a rat-infested slum.

According to a report from the New York Post, the building “as of Saturday had a staggering 194 open housing-code violations dating back to 2016 - including 88 ‘Class C’ violations considered ‘immediately hazardous.’”

Records show that rat and roach infestation, broken doors and refrigerators, and mold were among those violations. 

Tenants of the building say conditions were better under the building’s former private landlord and that the property has steadily deteriorated since being turned over to a nonprofit. 

“I have been here over 20 years, and I preferred it when it was under private management because they used to screen people in and out of the building,” longtime tenant Mordistine Alexander told the paper. She has been in the building since 1999.

 Today, the building is plagued by chronic heat and hot-water issues, crumbling bathrooms and kitchens, broken windows, and months-long delays in basic repairs. She said she has been without a kitchen light for months and fixed a serious rodent problem herself because she “couldn’t wait any longer” for Workforce Housing Group to act. “Since [the nonprofit] took over, the building has deteriorated. They lack porters. No one is maintaining it, and the complaints fall on deaf ears – especially if you complain a lot,” Alexander said, adding she wishes Levy had never succeeded in transferring the building to nonprofit control. Despite these complaints, Mamdani is pushing for more buildings like the Sedgwick Avenue complex, backing communist policies that restrict private property sales to allow nonprofits to take over more rent-stabilized apartments.

"You have to laugh at the hypocrisy," Councilwoman Joann Ariola (R-Queens) said. "These nonprofits are proving themselves to be little more than taxpayer-funded slumlords, and this blatant double-standard is all part of the administration’s planned attack on private ownership in New York City." 

The Sedgwick Avenue site has more open HPD violations than roughly three-quarters of the privately owned, rent-stabilized buildings in NYC — but Mamdani is “too focused” on pushing the abolition of private property, said Kenny Burgos, a former Bronx assemblyman who heads the New York Apartment Association that represents landlords of rent-stabilized units.

Nonprofit-managed housing “consistently run higher violation counts despite having government-backed loans and [being eligible to avoid] paying property taxes, so they should have a lot more freed-up cash to make these buildings run efficiently, and yet are unable to do so - even with good intentions and no goal of profit,” added Burgos.

The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development defended the rat-infested slum and Levy’s involvement in the sale of the building to Workforce Housing Group.

“When the building was at risk of being purchased by a predatory buyer, Dina Levy organized alongside the tenants and kept the building affordable,” spokesman Matt Rauschenbach said. “And now the building is undergoing an $8 million preservation renovation to improve conditions and make sure it is a safe, affordable place for the tenants who live there to call home.” 

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