What’s to Come at ‘Rental Ripoff’ Hearings? Tenant Hotline Staff Hear It All

by Samantha Maldonado

This article was originally published on February 26 at 5 a.m. EST by THE CITY

The calls come in every few minutes, some at the same time.

“Hello, you’ve reached the Met Council on Housing’s Tenants’ Rights Hotline,” a friendly voice answers.

The voice belongs to one of the 40 or so volunteers who staff the hotline, some remotely and some, often, from a small, fluorescent-lit office on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn.

The questions reveal a range of tenant experiences. How can a tenant in a rent-stabilized apartment reassign his lease to someone else? Can a tenant in a building without a valid certificate of occupancy stop paying rent? An eviction notice arrived — what should the tenant do next?

“People want to know, ‘What do I do?’ The hardest part about the hotline is there is no silver bullet,” said Andrea Shapiro, the Met Council’s director of program and advocacy. “People call us, and we’re sort of the first line of defense, and we figure out what’s the best referral, what people can say and do right this second.”

The volunteers often refer callers to other organizations, private lawyers, or to the offices of elected officials. Often, they help tenants navigate the alphabet soup of government agencies they might need to reach. To find out more about the callers’ buildings and landlords, the volunteers look up records in city agency databases, peruse the website JustFix and make several Google searches per call.

On Wednesday afternoon, Shapiro, along with a volunteer named Amira and two others on Zoom, worked the hotline during one of the last two shifts ahead of the city’s first Rental Ripoff Hearing in Brooklyn on Thursday, February 26. The hearing — one of five that will take place in each borough through April — will inform a report from the Mamdani administration with recommendations due to be released this summer, as well as the city’s housing plan, a roadmap of programs and policies to address the housing crisis, expected in the spring.

Cea Weaver, a longtime tenant organizer and director of the newly revived New York City Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, said she hoped the hearings allow the city to collect information for how to improve the process for tenants to secure repairs, whether tenant associations affect renters’ ability to get those repairs done and on extra fees landlords charge tenants.

The hearings “kick off a big effort to change things,” Weaver told THE CITY. “I want next year’s heat season to be different than this year’s heat season, and not because of global warming. I just want it to go better. That’s probably my top goal right now.”

Back at the office in Brooklyn, Amira and Shapiro fielded calls about many of the things Weaver is hoping are addressed in the hearings.

Amira turned to Shapiro for guidance mid-call.

“I have somebody who — it’s a long story, but she wants to file against a former landlord in small claims court for very unnecessary charges that she was paying while she was living there,” Amira said. “She wants to know if she should send her former landlord a demand letter first before filing in court.”

The tenant’s landlord, Amira added, had kept her security deposit for some of those unpaid fees.

Shapiro said that couldn’t hurt, but also pointed out that the tenant should send an email to a new dedicated address the city set up — for tenant organizations to use, for now — to collect information about junk fees renters were paying. Amira passed the information along.

Shapiro was excited about the new email address, which the Office to Protect Tenants created because officials understood the Met Council was getting calls about questionable fees. It was a sign, she said, that the Mamdani administration was willing to listen.

“The fact that Rental Ripoff Hearings are coming before the city’s housing plan is really exciting because I feel like one of the big things is tenants want to be listened to,” Shapiro said. “The [administration’s] commitment to public excellence I think is gonna mean that we can definitely change the system of how 311 works to make it more friendly to tenants, how inspections work, how we’re communicating information.”

Dire Situations

Over the last year, when the Met Council hotline received more than 2,500 calls, the people on the other end faced more dire problems than in recent years, according to Shapiro, who’s spent a decade at the organization. Callers were more often facing looming evictions or large rent increases, or struggling with being behind on rent. In years past, callers were more likely to seek information about whether their apartments were stabilized or to better understand their rights as tenants.

And Shapiro noticed that market-rate tenants made up an increasing share of callers.

“We’re seeing just a lot more people who can’t pay their rent,” she said.

A new briefing released Thursday from the Community Service Society based on a survey of nearly 700 New York City tenants found that about 65 percent dealt with housing quality problems, like pests, leaks, mold or inadequate heat.

The survey found that tenants in rent-regulated housing were more likely to experience those problems than market-rate tenants. But low-income tenants — defined as making no more than $51,800 annually for a family of three — experienced these issues at similar rates, regardless of whether they lived in market-rate or rent-regulated apartments.

“No matter what kind of a building you live in, if you’re not making that much money, chances are you’re going to have something,” said Oksana Mironova, housing policy analyst with the Community Service Society.

The Real Estate Board of New York in a new analysis pointed out that about 10 percent of residential buildings account for the vast majority of evictions and severe housing code violations over the past two years.

“What the data shows is that a very small percentage of buildings account for the lion’s share of violations, evictions and complaints — and those buildings also tend to be the most constrained financially and operationally by government policy, with large concentrations of rent-regulated units,” REBNY president James Whalen said in a statement.

One Hundred Calls a Shift

Soon, tenants will voice their concerns in public at the Ripoff Hearings. But three days a week, renters of all stripes tell the hotline volunteers the details of woeful housing emergencies.

Shapiro answered a call from a senior citizen who said he has cancer and just $100 left to pay his bills. He had moved to an apartment with a Section 8 voucher, but couldn’t afford the rent. Shapiro referred him to a social services agency that could help him get more resources, including food stamps and medical support.

Another tenant could pay his rent now, but called about nearly $6,000 in back rent he owed. Shapiro told him to contact a Bronx-based social services group to get help to get a One Shot Deal, an emergency cash benefit offered by the city.

As the afternoon went on, a caller was in a pickle. A pipe broke in the house they were renting, and the landlord gave them $900 to move. They had been living in a hotel, but wanted to come back to the house. The landlord said the repairs were too expansive and wanted to end their lease early. A volunteer told them to get in touch with the office of a local elected representative and to consider how much money they’d need from the landlord to move.

Another caller dialed in with a complaint about a roommate who made too much noise.

“We don’t get involved with tenant-to-tenant issues, right?” Amira asked Shapiro. The answer was no, but Amira could refer the caller to a nonprofit that did mediation.

A tenant who had clearly done a lot of research called to check in about whether she’d be eligible for Good Cause protections. Her landlord was trying to raise her rent over what was allowed. The tenant lived in an older building, but it had a new certificate of occupancy and she wondered if that meant she didn’t fall into the parameters of the law, which exempted buildings constructed since 2009.

Shapiro called a lawyer from the Legal Aid Society to check and learned the tenant would not be covered by Good Cause after all.

“You have an amazing state senator, Liz Krueger. Bringing this to her attention would really help,” Shapiro told the caller. Shapiro explained the state legislature could close loopholes in the law.

Over a three-and-a-half hour period on Wednesday, more than 100 calls came into the Met Council’s hotline. Shapiro took a break. There was another three-hour shift left, this time with several more volunteers teed up to answer the calls.

Related Stories

• Public Advocate Unveils 2025 List of Worst Landlords
• Bay Ridge Landlord Must Pay Restitution to Defrauded Residents
• Private Management Promised to Fix Public Housing, Yet Violations Linger

Email tips@brownstoner.com with further comments, questions or tips. Follow Brownstoner on X and Instagram, and like us on Facebook.