Mayor Zohran Mamdani's much-promoted "rental ripoff" hearings, set to begin Feb. 26, will focus exclusively on renters and landlords in privately owned buildings, excluding testimony from the more than 500,000 tenants who live in New York City Housing Authority public housing. The city's biggest landlord, in other words, gets a pass.

The administration quietly updated its website with a Q&A section after the exclusion drew criticism, but the concession amounted to little more than a help desk. NYCHA staff will be "on-site" at hearings so residents can submit repair requests or file complaints — not testify about the conditions they endure.

"If these hearings were truly about holding bad landlords accountable, the over 500,000 residents in NYCHA would be able to meaningfully participate. This is clearly the city trying to distract from its own failures while putting on a show, instead of having a real conversation with property owners, renters, NYCHA residents, and everyone else about how to improve housing for all."

That's Humberto Lopes, CEO of Gotham Housing Alliance, who called the hearings one example of Mamdani's misguided housing policy.

The City's Own Landlord Problem

As reported by The Post, NYCHA has been under a federal monitor since 2019 over hazardous conditions and scandals, including falsely certifying inspections. The system requires an estimated $80 billion in capital improvements. It has been featured as the city's worst landlord in reports from the city's Public Advocate's Office.

So when Mamdani stages hearings to target private landlords over "rental junk fees" and living conditions, the omission is not subtle. The city government plans to haul property owners before a panel that includes the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the Department of Buildings, and the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The entity that actually runs the most dangerous, most decrepit housing stock in the five boroughs? It gets to hand out pamphlets in the lobby.

Lopes didn't mince words about the reversal:

"The city's own tenants — those living in public housing — are demanding a real plan to improve their living conditions. It appears the Mamdani administration woke up to their own hypocrisy."

Blame Washington, Ignore City Hall

Mamdani, speaking to reporters Sunday at an unrelated event on Coney Island, framed the hearings as one piece of a broader strategy.

"So we are going to be approaching the housing crisis in a wide variety of ways. One of those are these rental ripoff hearings."

He pledged to "continue to work with NYCHA residents to ensure that they are being delivered the quality of service they've long been denied." Then came the pivot that anyone watching New York City politics could have predicted:

"And while we know that so much of the reason that NYCHA residents are living through a system that requires around $80 billion of capital improvements. By last count, is a lack of commitment from the federal government."

There it is. The city presides over a housing authority so mismanaged it had to be placed under federal oversight — for lying about inspections, among other things — and the mayor's instinct is to blame Washington. NYCHA's failures are generational and homegrown. Federal funding didn't falsify those inspection reports.

The People Behind the Policy

The ideological architecture of Mamdani's housing agenda becomes clearer when you look at who's running it. Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants, has come under fire for past statements that dispensed with the usual progressive euphemisms. Among them:

"Impoverish the white middle class. Homeownership is racist/failed public policy."

"Elect more communists."

Weaver has also been described as calling for the government to seize private property. This is the person now overseeing hearings designed to hold private landlords "accountable." The intellectual framework is not hidden — private ownership is the villain, and government housing, no matter how spectacularly it fails, escapes the dock.

Meanwhile, Mamdani's broader housing agenda includes pushing the city Rent Guidelines Board to freeze rents on nearly one million rent-regulated apartments. The pattern is consistent: squeeze private owners, expand government control, and deflect when the government's own housing crumbles.

Theater Over Substance

The updated city website promises that "in the coming months" the administration will release a housing plan addressing quality for all New Yorkers, including those in public housing. Months. Half a million NYCHA residents get a promise of a future plan while private landlords get hauled before a public tribunal next week.

The asymmetry tells you everything about the purpose of these hearings. They are not designed to improve housing. They are designed to produce a political narrative — one where private owners are predators, and government is the protector. The fact that the government's own tenants live in conditions bad enough to trigger federal intervention is an inconvenience to be managed, not a crisis to be confronted.

A Democrat socialist mayor, an office led by someone who calls homeownership racist and wants more communists in power, hearings that target the private sector while shielding the public sector from scrutiny — the internal logic is perfectly coherent once you stop pretending this is about tenants.

New York's renters deserve better than a show trial that protects the worst landlord in the city because that landlord happens to be the government.