Renters Made Mamdani Mayor. Can He Remake the City for Them?

Five days after the mayor’s news conference in Jackson Heights, the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, announced the release of his annual “worst landlord” list outside another one of A&E’s buildings in Brooklyn: Two of the company’s executives — its president and chief operating officer — took the top two spots. According to Williams, those two executives were cited for a record 8,761 violations in 2025. On top of all this, A&E is facing at least a dozen lawsuits from tenants who have accused it of overcharging renters, failing to deal with a host of problems in its buildings — rampant infestations, black mold, broken elevators, chronic leaks and more — and harassing tenants in an effort to push them out of their apartments. And Eisenberg says he is still in the process of trying to renegotiate the terms of a $506 million loan for a group of properties that he defaulted on last year.

Eisenberg, who is 55, grew up in Manhattan, attending the Trinity School and then Cornell University. He spent two college summers in the early 1990s working for Mayor Dinkins, but when he graduated from college in 1995, he joined his father’s real estate company. Sixteen years later, he struck out on his own, forming A&E on the kitchen table of his Upper East Side apartment. He and his co-founder had a simple business plan, one that they believed would be both profitable and socially redeeming: They would buy neglected rental buildings, fix them up and raise the rents.

At the time, New York State’s rent-stabilization laws were designed to incentivize owners to invest in their properties. For example, if Eisenberg spent $40,000 on a given unit, he would be entitled to raise the rent $1,000. Upgrades to buildings — like replacing a boiler or a roof — could also be passed along to tenants in the form of individual rent increases. There were vacancy bonuses too: Whenever a rent-stabilized apartment became empty, he could increase the rent by up to 20 percent. In addition, there were the incremental annual increases typically approved by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, which regulates the pricing for stabilized housing. Once the price of an apartment crossed a certain threshold — the number varied from year to year, based on a variety of factors — it was removed from the rent-stabilization system, and he could charge whatever he thought the market would bear.

But in 2019, the state’s rent-stabilization laws abruptly changed, and A&E’s business model soon collapsed. That year, a newly elected slate of progressive legislators led the passage of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act. Under the new law, Eisenberg could no longer raise rents when apartments were vacated, and strict caps were placed on his ability to pass along a percentage of his expenditures to tenants. Rather than adding 1/60th of what he spent on apartment improvements to the rent, he could now add only 1/180th. And instead of adding 6 percent of what he spent on building upgrades to individual rents, he could add only 2 percent. It also became much more difficult for him to take action against tenants who failed to pay their rent; the new law significantly slowed the eviction process and empowered housing courts to postpone evictions for up to a year.

Even as Eisenberg’s ability to generate income from these buildings was being squeezed, his expenses were soaring. Since 2019, he says, the taxes on his rent-stabilized portfolio have gone up 109 percent. The water and sewer costs in these buildings have risen 50 percent. And his insurance premiums have gone up a staggering 239 percent — a stark reflection of insurers’ declining faith in the health of the city’s rent-stabilized housing stock. During this same period, the average rent in his rent-stabilized portfolio rose only 15 percent.