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Mayor Zohran Mamdani was slammed by a tenants’ advocate for hosting a Halloween-themed event about scary landlords — while ignoring complaints about horrible conditions at New York City Housing Authority apartment complexes under his purview.
The Crisis Action Center group, headed by the Rev. Kevin McCall, will be spending five figures on a video ad titled “American Horror Story: NYCHA,” in a spoof of the “American Horror Story” TV series, The Post has learned.
The video shows collapsed ceilings and mold in NYCHA apartments and rattles off stats such as the city-run agency being backed up with 67,782 in mold work orders and a staggering $78 billion in needed repairs.
It also claimed that making a repair in public housing units takes a ghastly 470 days on average.
“For thousands of New Yorkers the horror is home. This is NYCHA,” the clip declares.
McCall ripped Mamdani for failing to mention NYCHA during his October 29 “Talk with the People” streaming event, where he shared spooky tenant-landlord stories, including a renter who owed $63,000 in back rent and a landlord who didn’t provide heat.
“The mayor devoted an entire Halloween event to landlord horror stories, and NYCHA wasn’t mentioned even once. That silence speaks volumes about how little attention public housing residents receive in the city’s conversation about housing conditions,” McCall said.
“Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers call NYCHA home, yet their experiences were missing from the picture.”
Mamdani was joined by Jasmin Batista, tenant outreach director of the Public Engagement Unit, during the pre-Halloween streaming event.
The unit connected the tenant in arrears with a lawyer to help pay debt and apply for housing voucher programs, and inspected the building that lacked heat, restoring it, the pair said.
Earlier this year, critics put Mamdani on blast for holding “rental ripoff” hearings that focused on tenants and landlords in privately-run buildings but not public housing tenants and their landlord, NYCHA.
Mamdani, as mayor with the authority to appoint NYCHA leadership, is now the largest landlord in North America.
NYCHA is the landlord to about 450,000 tenants in 335 housing developments containing 177,.000 apartments, a staggering public housing population larger than most American cities.
The mayor’s press office shot back that the Mamdani administration is laser focused on improving conditions at NYCHA, pointing to comments the mayor recently made at the Edenwald Houses, the largest public housing complex in The Bronx.
Mamdani said his administration has committed to spend $5.6 billion to spruce up NYCHA apartments and will hold tenant forums to field complaints, including conversions of ownership.
“We know that there is still more work to be done,” he said. “Yet these investments are not and cannot simply be financial. They also must be, and will be, investments to empowering residents along the way.”
