“I love real estate”
— Donald Trump
One of the campaign issues that Mamdani championed was the protecting of rent-stabilized and rent-regulated apartments in New York City. It is a worthy cause. Of the roughly 2.3 million apartments 960,000 are rent-stabilized and 16,000 are rent-controlled (down from over one million) apartments. About 229,000 are subsidized due to disability. NYCHA (Section 8) subsidizes about 90,000 families. Mitchell-Lama has about 46,000 families and there are about 174,000 public housing low income units. Affordable Housing is a rotating list of apartments that mostly is negotiated by Community Boards and politicians when developers are looking for city gifts in the form of regulation waivers (see NYCHDC). Buried among all of these numbers the value of the rental real estate is approximately $1.3 Trillion in Manhattan alone.
Think about these numbers and values when you think about Housing Court. Of the 10,000 evictions in 2025, 3000 were in Manhattan. There are 50 Judges handling 200,000 cases a year. There are dozens of law firms specializing in representing landlords. While only ten percent of tenants can afford representation. The “Right to Counsel” law is supposed to correct that. It’s bullshit. The judges rule for landlords and shit on tenants.
Your landlord starts a lawsuit against you for any of a number of real or trumped-up claims and, guess what? You’re on your own, baby! You are fucked even if you are a rent-stabilized tenant with so-called rights. They kept me in court for seven years and then got the case transferred to Supreme Court so it could continue with motions and legal maneuvers.
Now we get to the good part. I contacted Mamdani’s Deputy Mayor. The criminals operating my building basically emptied the place by doing the old TWO-STEP — Start an eviction for any reason; hire a law firm to harass the shit out of tenants; deprive the tenant of legally required work (good luck with HPD, Buildings Corruption Department, Community Board 2) and collect RENT while suing the poor fucker who also has to PAY AN ATTORNEY up to $700 an hour.
So I wrote to the new mayor, who I like, with the following letter:
Leila Bozorg, Dep. Mayor
City Hall
Madam,
As a rent-stabilized tenant, D.I.D. member, former CB2 member and a resident of Manhattan for over 80 years, like Noah Cross in Chinatown, “I still have a couple of teeth in my head and a few friends in town.”
I’ve recently finished my True Crime novel about a current New York City landlord and his family that has been abusing and harassing tenants out of their apartments with the help of the City and courts for decades. You may find it enlightening. The blatant corruption makes Glenn Gary Glenross seem quaint, by comparison. I’ll send along Vol. 1 if you think you’d like to read it.
It’s a tragi-comedy that is ongoing.
Sincerely,
Donald Clark MacPherson
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I even left out the fact that my landlord had allowed a sex trafficking operation in the building, arranged for tenants to threaten each other, deprived disabled and elderly tenants from having front door keys, and recently evicted the head of the Tenant Organization as retaliatiom.
So, what was the response from the Mayor’s Office?
Zero. Nada, Nothing. Not a Nooch!
My request for walls in my apartment has been ignored– since the landlord forced me to remove any privacy owing to the fact that he (they) have successfully evicted 95 percent of the rent-stabilized apartments in my building with the help of the courts — ignore A.D.A. requirements and abuse senior and disabled tenants. I myself had to defend against a bullshit eviction case costing $750,000. I now live with plastic Legos for walls, constant drilling to repair our dilapidated structure, Zero security — and managed by a criminal enterprise collecting up to $10,000 per month from unsuspecting apartment searchers. Free rental income from this stolen real estate funds tenant abuse that has been going on for decades.
I’ve not heard anything from the City Council, the Mayor, Buildings Department, District Attorney, Department of Investigation, U.S. Attorney, or any of several law firms — all of whom realize that the current owner stole the building and can afford any litigation he and his associate wants to engage in.
This is the unchecked state of Manhattan real estate rentals.
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SoHo Journal 