Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
New Yorkers, you’ve been slacking — so the mayor wants to organize you.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani isn’t happy that only 400 people showed up to last year’s Rent Guidelines Board hearings.
In response, last Wednesday, he launched Organize NYC, a supposed volunteer effort to have New Yorkers participate in local government.
Taken straight from the Democratic Socialists of America’s community-organizing playbook, Mamdani is calling it “a long-term initiative to bring mass public participation into the work of governing.”
First stop: the RGB. The body with power to set rent adjustments for the city’s 1 million rent-stabilized units will hold four public hearings in June before voting on increases at its June 25 meeting.
Mamdani was elected on the dishonest promise to “immediately” freeze the rent on stabilized tenants for four years.
Since taking office, however, he has been forced to recognize what the law has made clear from the start: He cannot set rents himself, and overt interference with the independent RGB could expose a rent freeze to a legal challenge.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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John Ketcham is a legal policy fellow and director of Cities at the Manhattan Institute. Christian Browne is an attorney and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.