A view from the pavement
On a hot summer night, I stood among 10 volunteers on a Flatbush sidewalk. With their tote bags and matching “Organize NYC” T-shirts, the group, almost all white and none appearing to be over the age of 35, stood out among the mostly elderlyCaribbean men gathered on the neighborhood’s front stoops.
“An organized tenant is a protected tenant,” a woman from the Mayor’s Office, also wearing an “Organize NYC” t-shirt, told the volunteers.
We were there for a “Talk to Tenants” canvassing event, arranged by Organize NYC, an initiative of the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement. The events, which have been going on since July, organize doorknocking at buildings with high rates of housing violations to encourage residents to form tenant associations. I was attending as a reporter, to see what this unique initiative actually did on the ground.
Before they dispersed to doorknock, a young woman — blond, enthusiastic, wearing rainbow-flower earrings — asked if she could say something. She explained how she’d been to several canvasses before, which had all been excellent experiences.
“Have fun,” she said. “This is an administration of hope!”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has officially brought Democratic Socialists of America-style organizing to City Hall. On his second day in office, he established a new entity called the Office of Mass Engagement by executive order, saying it would create “a deeper connection between City Hall and community organizations, faith-based groups, and everyday New Yorkers looking to make their voices heard.”
At first, OME didn’t change much. It consolidated preexisting City outreach functions and gave them a name more in line with the DSA ethos.
The real change came this April, when Mamdani established a new branch under OME called Organize NYC. According to its website, Organize NYC “is bringing the people-powered movement that elected Mayor Mamdani to the work of governance.” This isn’t a metaphor: Key DSA operatives who helped elect Mamdani, such as OME head Tascha Van Auken and Office to Protect Tenants Director Cea Weaver, lead the initiative.
Now, instead of organizing volunteers to campaign for Mamdani, they and others are organizing them to doorknock for the city government. One campaign encouraged tenants to testify in front of the Rent Guidelines Board as it considered freezing rents on stabilized units. Currently, the initiative is focused on tenant associations.
Critics worry that Organize NYC is flouting the law, alleging the office is using taxpayer funds to advance narrow political purposes.
At one OME town hall for bus riders, the DSA had a table sitting alongside transportation nonprofits and the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities. The DSA’s presence drew opprobrium from Citizens Union, a group dedicated to government accountability. City Council Speaker Julie Menin and landlords have questioned whether OME has any guardrails ensuring it doesn’t drift into political advocacy.
Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute has a different critique, accusing Organize NYC of violating the First Amendment. She claims that in supporting ideological canvassers, Mamdani’s administration is privileging one type of speech over another.
Is that what’s happening? The truth is, the administration is very careful not to cross the line into political speech. Canvassers are extremely careful to only inform people of their rights to organize. The problem lies elsewhere: It’s unclear whether this is an effective use of City resources — if the goal is to protect tenants. What is clear is that it does seem to be effective in inspiring Mamdani’s supporters.
I went to see Organize NYC’s operations up close, attending two Talk to Tenants events and one NYC 101 session.
My second Talk to Tenants event was in Washington Heights. “Canvassing with [the] Mayor’s Office is different than other canvassing you will do because you’re representing the city government,” said the Organize NYC volunteer who led our training that July. He was a sociology Ph.D. candidate, and this was his sixth time at a Talk to Tenants campaign.
He gave the other volunteers instructions, handing out scripts that detailed what they should say while doorknocking. “Hi! My name is [VOLUNTEER’S NAME], and I’m a volunteer at the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement,” the script read. “Being part of an active tenant association is one of the most effective ways that you and your neighbors can advocate for better living conditions in your homes.”
The volunteers were then supposed to launch into a survey, which asked about the building’s living conditions and whether the tenant was currently part of a union. After that, they were to invite tenants to an NYC 101 event.
The volunteer told us that we shouldn’t go off the script, even if people started asking for advice. We were only there to inform people of their rights to organize and collect information about the state of their buildings.
I headed to a nearby building with my group of canvassers: two Mayor’s Office employees who seemed to be on official duty, one of whom carried a bag saying “Poder, Poder, Poder” (the Spanish word for “power”). We waited by the locked front door until some people walked out and then walked in behind them. In the lobby was a sign reading “Tenants and their Guests Only.”
The elevator of the building, a six-story prewar, was broken (a regular occurrence, we learned from tenants), so we walked up the stairs to the sixth floor. A handful of the doors had stickers plastered on the front, reading “Aquí somos Católicos” (“Here we are Catholics”).
My first Talk to Tenants campaign proceeded similarly, except that when we spoke to tenants, we realized City Hall had already visited the building. Weaver, head of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, had come months earlier to celebrate the building’s existing union. The building’s union was a member of the Union of Pinnacle Tenants, a partner of Organize NYC.
The NYC 101 event I attended took place in a Prospect Heights public high school lunchroom. There were around 60 people, of varied age and socioeconomic background. The whole thing felt like a high school orientation event. There were little place markers on each table so we could sit grouped by borough, and baskets with bags of popcorn and chewy granola bars.
At the start of the meeting, an OME employee named Justin Freeman led us through a breathing exercise and exhorted us to “make space [and] take space” when engaging in conversations with tablemates. Before beginning a presentation, he engaged the group in a call and response: “When I say tenant, you say power!”
During his presentation, Freeman discussed the history of tenant organizing in New York, culminating in OME. He explained that Mamdani was the only mayor who cared about tenants.
“Do you feel powerful?” he asked. About Mamdani, he said, “He cares about us building power together. What we’re doing tonight [is] building tenant power.”
Freeman spent time talking about what tenant unions are and how tenants can form them in their own buildings. We did a group activity in which each table went through a scenario describing a bad landlord and considered what the tenants should do.
At one point, leaders from the union of the building I visited in Flatbush spoke about their experience. The screen showed a clip from a City Hall-produced short film about their union, and they discussed how they had started a party planning committee to get more people involved.
“Find the joy in the organizing,” one of the union leaders said to the audience. “Find yourself in the organizing.”
I told Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law professor specializing in local government law, about what I saw in my interactions with the Office of Mass Engagement. Did any of it cross a line, as public funding for explicitly partisan activities would? His assessment: The events I went to seemed primarily aimed at informing citizens of their rights, not at pushing election results.
“Government doesn’t have to always be impartial if they think there’s one side that needs help,” he said. “If they think there are laws out there that are under-enforced or rights out there that are under-exercised, I think it’s legitimate to inform people of their rights.”
“If the City wants to organize tenants to move in a certain direction, that’s policy,” he said. “It’s a fine line because, of course, an elected official benefits when his policies are advanced.”
“There is a public purpose to this. Now not all members of the public will agree with this purpose,” Briffault said. “But that’s what elections are for: to decide who is in power to make these decisions.”
Briffault’s appraisal makes sense. Indeed, there are countless examples of politicians across the ideological spectrum hosting events to inform citizens of their rights relating to contentious issues. In Pennsylvania, state Rep. Andrew Kuzma hosted events to help citizens obtain concealed carry permits. In Vermont and New Jersey, officials have held events to help people get their criminal records expunged. New York mayors and governors routinely inform people of their rights to get abortions.
But legalities aside, there’s this question: Is the group succeeding at doing what it intends to accomplish?
My OME experiences left me uncertain about the organization’s efficacy. Doorknocking at a building that Weaver herself had very publicly visited seemed like a potential waste of resources.
I was left with many questions. What were tenant unions actually supposed to do to leverage power against landlords? The words “rent strike” were mentioned by one NYC 101 participant, but no one from Organize NYC uttered them. I also wondered: What is Organize NYC’s theory of change regarding this program — how many people do they see this impacting, and what would their ideal outcome be? Was the claim that “an organized tenant is a protected tenant” based on any empirical evidence, or was it just vibes?
I tried to get someone from the Office of Mass Engagement on the phone with me to answer these questions and others. After weeks of emailing, I realized that though they may want to engage with the masses, they didn’t seem to want to do so with this journalist.
OME’s website states one goal that I do believe it’s achieving: “building an unprecedented mass engagement campaign.” But who are the masses it’s engaging? The tenants in high-violation buildings or the droves of volunteers coming to doorknock?
At the end of the night in Washington Heights, the volunteers gathered for a “social” at some picnic tables outside a local supermarket, drinking Gatorade and eating empanadas that they’d bought inside. I chatted with John Anthony Louis and Maria Mata, two volunteers in their early 20s.
Louis spoke of how inspired he felt, getting to address the concerns of these tenants.
“They’re not used to the Mayor’s Office being so proactive to literally come to their door,” Louis said. “It’s exactly what we’re doing — just having someone actually take the time and come and talk to them and ask them things.”
Mata admired how organizing could “change things so quickly.”
“I’m just trying to do my part in the movement,” she said.
