Last week, New York State passed a sweeping package of rent reforms that dramatically strengthens tenants’ rights for millions of New Yorkers in rent regulated apartments. The new legislation also opens up an ambitious new front of struggle that could fuel the spread of tenant organizing, socialist political campaigns, and the expansion of rent control all across the state.

For decades, tenants have been fighting a war of attrition — trying to protect the state’s dwindling regulated housing stock against a sustained assault from the real estate industry and their allies in Albany. The rent law package passed last week took meaningful steps to reverse landlord influence over housing policy in New York — influence that has led to the deregulation of hundreds of thousands of apartments and a homelessness crisis of epic proportions.

The reaction of the industry and the business press tells us what we need to know about the significance of the legislation. One landlord who owns nine rent stabilized buildings told the Financial Times, “I feel like someone just dropped a nuclear bomb on my business and my family.” The stock prices for the banks that provide loans to speculators fell precipitously, and the titans of real estate were reduced to pitifully whining to their ally Governor Andrew Cuomo, to no effect.