Real estate runs New York. Disgraced mayor Eric Adams says “I am real estate,” while homelessness levels and rents hit record highs month after month. Landlord profits are up 12 percent over the last year, but our living conditions are not improving.

Andrew Cuomo is landlords’ favorite candidate and the only serious contender running against a rent freeze. He has a long record of blocking tenant-protection regulations and ensuring that his real estate donors are earning huge returns on their investments. This election season, the real estate industry is pouring money into a campaign to elect the disgraced former governor, with the industry group New York Apartment Association dropping more than $2.5 million into a Cuomo-aligned Super PAC in the final weeks of the race.

Other high-profile real estate donors include Douglas Durst of the Durst Organization, whose family is worth $8 billion, and Douglas Eisenberg of A&E Real Estate, who’s currently being sued by the city for hundreds of open code violations. Former mayor Michael Bloomberg — who raised rent 33 percent on rent-stabilized apartments while in office — just dumped $8.3 million into Cuomo’s campaign.

The industry is panicking because tenants are getting organized, and we are the majority of New York City. Despite his money and dynastic name recognition, Cuomo is sweating at the unexpected success of Zohran Mamdani, a young, democratic socialist state assemblymember who has put tenants at the center of his campaign with a pledge to freeze the rent. As Mamdani has surged in popularity, the industry has taken out full-page anti-rent-freeze ads in the New York Times, with a dubious claim that raising rents will actually make housing more affordable. Real estate’s unprecedented spending has ensured that New York City voters see as many as three pro-Cuomo ads a minute while watching the nightly news.

That’s what this election is about: a tenant majority, versus an oligarchic real estate industry, which, like Cuomo, thinks New York City belongs to it.

Poll after poll shows that New York voters’ top concern is rent. A united tenant voting bloc in the New York City Democratic primary could not only win this race but transform New York’s housing system: a rent freeze; public investment in 200,000 new, affordable, publicly stewarded homes. According to some polls, Mamdani is in striking distance of victory; his strategy is working because in viral video after viral video, in an unprecedented million-door-canvas program, and in electric rallies with thousands of attendees, he is giving tenants something to believe in.

Every year our neighborhoods become less recognizable to the tenants who have made them home. A 2023 study found that half a million people have left New York City in the previous year in search of somewhere more affordable. Those who’ve stayed are cutting back on basics — food, health care, childcare — just to keep up with rent. Many are taking second and third jobs to hold on. Meanwhile the city’s millionaire population has grown by 48 percent over the past decade.

Zohran’s vision for New York City — a rent freeze, 200,000 affordable homes, and a pledge to hold slumlords accountable — is not made up of symbolic demands. Former mayor Bill de Blasio froze the rent three times and New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, just upheld a 15 percent rent reduction in Kingston. From public housing to Co-op City, New York has a long history of investing in public-led affordable housing production.

Real estate’s answer to the rent crisis: more tax breaks, more rent hikes, and dismantling the rent stabilization program that is a key bulwark between working-class tenants and a New York City that is a playground for the rich.

In the past week, elite media outlets like the New York Times and the Atlantic have dismissed Mamdani’s campaign as fringe and, ignoring decades of municipal progressive history, his platform unviable. The timing of elite skepticism is designed to seed doubt and obscure their very real fear: that a Mamdani administration and an organized, emboldened tenant class could upend the status quo. While the media obfuscates, some landlords are just saying the quiet part out loud: they’re voting for Cuomo because he’ll let them raise rents.

Tenants are the majority in New York City and half the population across the state. Millions of working-class voters in the city and around the country have checked out of politics all together because no one in the Democratic Party is offering them something tangible to vote for. Kamala Harris, for example, dropped Joe Biden’s proposal for national rent caps from her platform within a month of becoming the nominee.

Mamdani’s campaign offers a different path, one that Democrats should take seriously heading into the 2026 midterms. Tenants are overwhelmingly Democrat but will not vote without something real to vote for. Mamdani has proven what’s possible when you offer a clear, material platform that speaks to our top concern.

Party elites may resist, as we’re seeing right now. They’ll tell the public these ideas are unviable. But their fear isn’t that the ideas are unrealistic — it’s that they’re catching on.

The real estate industry wants to control our lives, our cities, and our democracy. But tenants have sheer power in numbers — numbers that, in New York City, could elect a mayor who will freeze the rent.