The night time earlier than the New York Metropolis municipal main, the air was sticky with warmth and Ferdousi Begum was too tense to sleep. For the previous six months, Begum—a sixty-nine-year-old Bengali immigrant dwelling in a rent-stabilized twenty-unit condominium constructing in Astoria—had been canvasing in help of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral marketing campaign along with her seventy-one-year-old husband, Parveg Hasan. They’d been visiting small companies, mosques, subway stations, and faculties of their neighborhood. “Whenever we found another Bengali, we would engage in conversation,” Hasan instructed me. “We would start with Salaam. What is your name? Are you a tenant?”
Begum and Hasan have lived in Astoria for seven years. He works late nights promoting meals from halal carts, principally in midtown Manhattan; she runs the family they share with their forty-year-old son. They acquired concerned in tenant organizing 4 years in the past, after Begum got here throughout a gathering of the Astoria Tenants Union in a close-by park. She quickly joined the group that had convened the assembly, the Committee In opposition to Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV), based in 1986 to carry collectively working-class Asian immigrant communities in Manhattan and western Queens to arrange for racial and financial justice.
A while later she invited Hasan to affix. At first he was skeptical, involved concerning the work’s potential repercussions, however after a number of months he “saw it was worth the risk.” Since then the 2 have been lively within the tenant union collectively, bringing in neighbors one after the other. “I tell everyone about organizing. I speak to my friends, family, neighbors about the importance of growing our power,” Begum instructed me through an interpreter. “Many people come because of me.”
The couple spent months targeted on serving to Mamdani win. “For us it’s about being able to live in this city,” Begum defined. “The reality is we stay in this city even though we struggle to live here. There’s easy transportation, Bengali groceries. It’s possible to find work…but it’s not possible to make ends meet. Rent is the number one killer. The whole community is suffering.”
On election day Begum acquired away from bed at 5 AM. By 7 she and Hasan had arrived on the workplaces of CAAAV Voice, the group’s political sibling group and a member of the New York State Tenant Bloc, a coalition working to channel tenants’ political energy. The members divvied up doorways to knock, cellphone numbers to name, and polling stations to look at. Begum and Hasan acquired out on the doorways themselves, knocked till it acquired too scorching, went house to bathe, and returned to the workplace to phonebank. At 6 PM they joined their neighbors for a final push: three hours of outreach within the park and on the streets, working individuals to the polls in the event that they hadn’t voted. Hasan acquired somebody there with two minutes to spare.
Simply over an hour after polls closed, and a few week earlier than anybody anticipated actual outcomes, Andrew Cuomo, New York’s embattled ex-governor, conceded. Mamdani—a thirty-three-year-old Democratic Socialist assemblymember representing elements of Astoria, Astoria Heights, and Ditmars-Steinway in Queens—took the stage after midnight at his watch celebration in Lengthy Island Metropolis and declared victory. Begum and Hasan had simply left the CAAAV Voice workplace; they have been at house, refreshing their telephones, after they noticed the outcomes. They each slept effectively that night time.
To grasp how Zohran Mamdani gained the mayoral main by a full 12 factors final month, stunning the political institution within the metropolis and throughout the nation, it helps to grasp how tenants like Begum and Hasan determined to go on the offensive in opposition to actual property.
There are a selection of locations the place the story might begin. Over the past a number of many years a historic quantity of capital has flowed into investments in residential and industrial properties all over the world. A posh system of establishments emerged to guard and enhance that movement, from actual property trusts to personal fairness corporations.
New York is that system’s international middle. As Michael Greenberg has documented in these pages, between 2000 and 2016 survival turned practically inconceivable for town’s poorest tenants. Throughout these years, he wrote, New York Metropolis builders “contributed $83 million to state assembly and senate campaigns, more than any other economic group.” In Albany legislators routinely blocked pro-tenant payments from reaching the ground. At Metropolis Corridor Michael Bloomberg’s twelve-year tenure initiated an period of glitzy tasks and subsidies, which have been billed as incentives for the creation of inexpensive housing however have been in follow sweeteners for builders.
Bloomberg’s successor, Invoice de Blasio, criticized him for increasing an underclass, what he referred to as “the other New York.” Throughout his time period he oversaw three lease freezes for tenants within the metropolis’s a million rent-stabilized items, however in any other case he adopted a playbook on housing that too usually resembled Bloomberg’s. Catastrophic tax exemptions and neighborhood-by-neighborhood rezoning led to a hypothesis increase and skyrocketing rents.
One inflection level got here in late 2018, when then-governor Cuomo championed a deal that will have introduced Amazon’s second headquarters—a billion-dollar improvement venture—to Lengthy Island Metropolis. “HQ2,” because it turned recognized, was to incorporate a waterfront esplanade and sufficient workplace area to fill three Empire State Buildings. It was additionally set to obtain practically $3 billion in subsidies.
After the bid went public, a coalition of grassroots teams—a lot of which I do know in my capability as an organizer with the nationwide Tenant Union Federation—rallied to oppose the venture. The central query was lease. On the time Queens was already the location of the steepest lease hikes within the nation, and plenty of tenants feared that the HQ2 venture would supercharge gentrification throughout the borough.
“Our members saw the writing on the wall,” Sasha Wijeyeratne, the chief director of CAAAV and CAAAV Voice, instructed me. “They knew that an influx of wealthy Amazon employees would raise rents, and the cost of everything else around them, and that the local bodegas, restaurants, and laundromats would be priced out.” Responding to public stress, politicians like Corey Johnson—then speaker of town council—and councilmember Jimmy van Bramer got here out in opposition to the deal. “Why do you need our money? We have 63,000 people who are sleeping in homeless shelters,” Johnson requested. “Don’t you think there is a better way for us to spend $3 billion?” Group members booed Amazon representatives out of a metropolis council assembly.
The stress proved an excessive amount of. In February 2019, three months after saying the event, Amazon backed out. Organizers declared victory, however they have been sober concerning the probability of the motion’s ongoing success: if it wasn’t HQ2 it could be one other megadevelopment. Throughout that point, Wijeyrante instructed me, tenant organizations started to have extra sustained conversations about escape these reactive fights.
Ways are what organizers do; technique is why we do them. The tenant leaders, Wijeyrante instructed, felt a have to sharpen their long-term technique. A method was to make clear exactly what they have been up in opposition to—not simply particular person landlords or administration corporations however the system of actual property and monetary establishments that collaborate to set the phrases of the market and affect coverage of their favor. “We began zeroing in on real estate capital as the enemy,” Wijeyrante mentioned. “We needed to make that money toxic.”
In New York, landlords and actual property capitalists train energy by a lobbying group referred to as the Actual Property Board of New York. “REBNY exerts vast influence over the New York institutions that shape public policy,” the longtime tenant organizer Cea Weaver instructed me, “from the City Council to the Rent Guidelines Board to the state legislature—all in service of their bottom line.”
Weaver leads Housing Justice for All, a statewide coalition based in 2017 that brings collectively over eighty tenant organizations, together with CAAAV. In 2019, when she signed on because the coalition’s first full-time workers member, she drove throughout the state to recruit organizations from Buffalo to the Mohawk Valley and arranged busloads of tenants to go to the state capitol. They have been campaigning for the passage of the Housing Stability and Tenant Safety Act, which might make lease protections a everlasting characteristic in New York’s housing legislation, develop lease management, and limit landlords’ capability to take advantage of loopholes to flee regulation. That June the legislation handed—a landmark victory.
The win wouldn’t have been attainable with no new crop of legislators. In 2018 a coalition of seven candidates, one in all them put up by a resurgent Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and 6 by the Working Households Social gathering (WFP), had primaried and defeated members of the Unbiased Democratic Caucus—a gaggle of Democrats who had began caucusing with their Republican colleagues, usually in opposition to the pursuits of the working class, together with opposing lease stabilization. (Among the many profitable challengers have been two candidates on this yr’s mayoral election, Jessica Ramos and Zellnor Myrie.) The DSA candidate, Julia Salazar, pledged to not take marketing campaign contributions from builders and landlords and ran on a platform that pressured her help for lease management. This inflow of recent lawmakers produced “not just a functional Democratic majority in the state senate,” the author and concrete planner Samuel Stein wrote on the time, “but a group of reformers in office with strong allegiances to tenants and the tenant movement.”
Even so, the organizers felt outpaced by the actual property business and underprepared to maintain their achievements. “As long as I’ve been a tenant organizer, I’ve been told real estate in New York is like oil in Texas,” Sumathy Kumar, the marketing campaign director at Housing Justice for All, instructed me. “This is how power works in this state. They just throw their money around everywhere. It’s not just that so many politicians are taking their money, it’s also that they think they might start funding against them if they do anything pro-tenant. Electeds are terrified.”
In 2022 one other proposed improvement drew the motion’s consideration. That spring Silverstein Properties, BedRock Actual Property Companions, and Kaufman Astoria Studios petitioned the Metropolis Council’s Land Use Committee to approve a improvement venture referred to as Innovation QNS. It concerned rezoning a five-block manufacturing district to construct 3,200 housing items in Astoria, a neighborhood in Mamdani’s district the place 87 p.c of the residents have been then tenants, practically 70 p.c of them both lease burdened or severely lease burdened (which is to say, spending over half their incomes on lease). The proposal barely met the authorized minimal requirement that 25 p.c of its items be inexpensive—a normal that not often creates actually inexpensive housing in any case, having extra to do with what a developer can afford to construct than with what a tenant can afford to pay.
CAAAV, Desis Rising Up and Shifting (DRUM), and Queensbridge Homes residents collaborated with the DSA, Queens Neighborhood Union, and different organizations to defeat the proposal. Amongst their supporters was Mamdani, then two years into his time period as a state assemblymember in Albany and a gradual ally of the tenant motion. (The earlier yr he had gotten arrested throughout a protest at Cadman Plaza calling for a pandemic eviction moratorium.) Now he spoke at protests and gave feedback to the press, flanked by indicators with slogans like OUR NEIGHBORHOOD ≠ YOUR PIGGY BANK. “I am in firm opposition to this proposal,” he tweeted that June. “My opposition does not stem from its proposed density…. It is entirely because of the absolute paucity of affordable housing within this proposal. To build 2,120 market rate units with a set aside of only the legal minimum of 25 percent affordability is not an answer to this housing crisis—it is a cause.”
Finally the tenant-led coalition, with sustained help from Mamdani, pressured the developer to deepen the venture’s affordability necessities. Of the entire Innovation QNS items, 1,100 would now be income-restricted; of these, 5 hundred could be rented at 30 p.c of the world median earnings, which might make them obtainable to people incomes round $28,020 a yr or households of 4 making $40,020 a yr. It was a big concession. If tenants have been to go on the offensive within the coming years, it appeared, Mamdani was a promising early draft choose.
Final yr CAAAV Voice convened a workforce of tenants from throughout town to develop a proposal for a marketing campaign to win a citywide lease freeze for rent-stabilized items, which they noticed as a step on the trail to common lease management. They weren’t alone. Different organizations concerned with Housing Justice for All—together with Group Motion for Protected Flats (CASA), Housing Conservation Coordinators, Tenants & Neighbors, the Metropolitan Council on Housing, and New York Communities for Change (NYCC)—have been contemplating comparable choices.
It was an indication of a broader strategic shift. In Albany, a mighty backlash in opposition to the Covid-era eviction moratorium had helped REBNY regain floor after the tenants’ 2019 victory. In April 2024 “good cause” eviction protections, which Housing Justice for All had spent years preventing to codify, lastly handed, however the coalition was pressured to simply accept main compromises—together with exemptions that left hundreds of thousands of tenants unprotected. Discovering themselves on the again foot on the state legislature, they knew they wanted to attempt one thing new. Throughout the motion, leaders began speaking extra significantly about an electoral technique that will put organized tenants face-to-face with organized capital.
On the metropolis stage, in the meantime, the Lease Tips Board—a nine-member physique appointed by the mayor and charged with setting rents for town’s rent-stabilized items—had grow to be more and more hostile to low-income tenants over the course of Eric Adams’s tenure, elevating rents twice in as a few years. When the board voted by a 3rd increase that June, a gaggle of 100 tenants, organized by the Lease Justice Coalition, protested the choice at Cooper Union and acquired arrested. Mamdani was amongst them.
Protesters calling for an extension to New York Metropolis’s pandemic eviction moratorium, Brooklyn, New York, 2021
Three months later he reached out to CAAAV Voice and requested them to be among the many teams that will endorse his candidacy on the day he introduced his run for mayor. Quickly thereafter, as CAAAV Voice’s organizing director Alina Shen recounted to me, she discovered herself in an elevator on the CUNY Labor Middle with Fahd Ahmed, the chief director of DRUM Beats, the political sibling to DRUM. She requested, “Hey, are you going to endorse? We need to make a call.” By the tip of the day they have been in a gaggle chat with organizers at NYCC. The following week they determined to run a joint endorsement course of.
On October 21 over 2 hundred individuals affiliated with the trio of teams gathered on the NYCC workplaces with interpreters in 4 languages to pose inquiries to Ramos, Mamdani, and, over Zoom, Brad Lander. Mamdani may need appeared the clear selection: on the time he was the one candidate keen to decide to a lease freeze. However endorsing him was neither apparent nor risk-free: he had just about no title recognition, and the crowded subject included some longer-running and extra skilled progressive champions, like Lander, who had deep relationships with establishments just like the WFP.
Nor have been tenants keen to line up behind Mamdani uncritically. When Mr. Chen, an elder with the Chinatown Tenant Union, questioned Mamdani, Shen recounted to me, the candidate greeted him with a pleasant “Ni hao.” Chen, uncharmed, held eye contact and instructed him, “We need reassurance you are not going to leave us behind as you ascend. You need to see how we live.” After the assembly Mr. Chen adopted Mamdani out of the room and made certain they scheduled a day for him to go to the neighborhood.
However ultimately Mamdani’s dedication to a lease freeze gained out: every group agreed to endorse him on day one. “Every politician says New York is the greatest city on the globe,” Mamdani mentioned in his launch video on October 23. “But what good is that if no one can afford to live here?… This is New York. We can afford to dream.”
In January the Housing Justice for All coalition launched a statewide electoral arm referred to as the Tenant Bloc, which counts CAAAV Voice, DRUM Beats, and NYCC as members. It was an experiment in activating what the Cornell geographer Russell Weaver—no relation to Cea—has referred to as the “sleeping giant” in New York politics: tenants as a political class. “Tenants are half the state,” the group declared. They could possibly be a dominant political power—in the event that they organized themselves “from the buildings to the ballot box.”
The group’s first main endeavor was a marketing campaign to construct help for a citywide lease freeze. The mayoral race was a pure event: organizers began knocking doorways throughout town, asking tenants to signal a pledge that they might vote for a candidate who supported the coverage. Somewhat than again Mamdani from the get-go, as a number of of their members had, they hoped to construct a base they may route towards whichever candidate they finally endorsed, making use of stress to the entire subject within the course of.
Among the many marketing campaign’s co-chairs was Joanne Grell, a Puerto Rican single mom of two who lives in a rent-stabilized condominium within the Pelham Bay part of the Bronx, the place she serves as president of the tenant affiliation. She discovered the condominium on Craigslist twenty-four years in the past, when her youngsters have been two and 5 and he or she was freshly separated from her husband. It’s a spacious two-bedroom in a thirty-two-unit prewar constructing, with an enormous kitchen and one tiny lavatory. She raised her youngsters there and put them each by faculty; now one is in medical faculty and the opposite simply had a movie premiere at Sundance. “None of this could have been accomplished,” she instructed me, “without stabilized rent.”
In 2020 Grell went again to school, attending lessons at night time whereas working her job as an govt authorized assistant at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital by day. One in every of her assignments, for a category on neighborhood organizing, was to look at a corporation’s assembly; she selected one hosted by CASA, primarily based on the opposite facet of the Bronx. When she went to the assembly, she felt that it was “home for me,” she mentioned. “I thought, you know what? My building does need repairs, we have common complaints, let me start a tenant association.” Earlier than lengthy she had recruited all of her constructing’s residents. “I read a story that said one in twenty-four New Yorkers was a millionaire and I was like wait—this is becoming the land of the rich,” she instructed me. “We have to hold on with both hands.”
This previous January REBNY held its annual fundraiser, a $2,500-per-plate affair at a waterfront venue in Hell’s Kitchen. Kathy Hochul gave remarks; among the many honorees was Scott Rechler, CEO of the agency RXR Realty, which owns 1000’s of residential items in New York. Outdoors the venue the newly fashioned Tenant Bloc organized a picket they referred to as the Folks’s Gala—Grell wore pearls and borrowed a full-length fur coat from her neighbor to look the half. To the rhythm of a bucket drum, the group chanted “UP, UP WITH TENANT POWER/DOWN, DOWN WITH REAL ESTATE,” greeting landlords on their manner right into a banquet funded by their tenants’ lease checks.
The Tenant Bloc’s technique concerned extra than simply this sort of confrontation. It constructed a subject operation that included over seven hundred volunteers and twenty-five subject leads who knocked doorways in each a part of town, gathering 20,646 pledges from rent-stabilized tenants to help a mayor who backed a lease freeze. In Might the bloc formally endorsed Mamdani. Every week later they gathered greater than a thousand tenants for a rally at Riverside Church. Between the endorsement and the first they despatched tens of 1000’s of texts and positioned tens of 1000’s of calls to get out the vote.
The part organizations of the Tenant Bloc ran their very own operations. On the peak of their exercise CAAAV Voice was in 5 neighborhoods—Sunnyside, Astoria, Jamaica, Sundown Park, and Chinatown—9 occasions per week. Tenants like Parveg Hasan went to mosques each Friday to recruit voters. Elisa Martinez, a younger tenant who grew up in Washington Heights, canvased her neighborhood with a deal with the Dominican neighborhood, which accounts for 15 p.c of town’s rent-stabilized tenants. Delsenia Glover, the president of the historic Lenox Terrace Tenant Affiliation in Harlem, organized her constructing to signal on to the marketing campaign. Grell instructed me a few tenant named Mercedes, a retired social employee, who constructed a crew to take the petitions to school campuses. The bloc’s name for a lease freeze—and to rank Zohran first on the poll—broke into Whatsapp group chats and ethnic media, together with El Diario, Bangla TV, and the World Journal, the biggest Chinese language newspaper within the US.
Predictably, actual property energy gamers discovered their very own methods to have interaction within the mayoral race. Final yr two long-standing landlord lobbying teams merged to type the New York Condominium Affiliation. (Its inaugural CEO, Kenny Burgos, is a thirty-one-year-old former assemblymember who makes landlord-friendly TikToks and attended highschool with Mamdani.) In June, as Mamdani rose within the polls, the NYAA introduced that it could spend $2.5 million to help Cuomo through a Tremendous PAC referred to as Housing for All—on the time the one largest donation within the mayoral election cycle.
The election was alleged to be about crime. Eric Adams had gained the workplace in 2021 on a law-and-order agenda, and when Andrew Cuomo entered the race it was with a platform to “make New York safer and more respectful of others.” (He dedicated, amongst different issues, to rising the police power by 15 p.c.) However over the course of the marketing campaign it turned clear that Mamdani’s deal with the price of dwelling was resonating—and that the one greatest risk to town’s affordability, the largest line-item in working-class New Yorkers’ month-to-month budgets, was lease. When the day-one endorsers acquired behind Mamdani, he was the one candidate supporting a lease freeze. By the final weeks of the first the Tenant Bloc, together with the stress of Mamdani’s skyrocketing success within the polls, had moved six extra candidates—Brad Lander, Adrienne Adams, Zellnor Myrie, Jessica Ramos, Michael Blake, and Scott Stringer—to affix him.
Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Pictures
Zohran Mamdani on the brink of maintain his rally at Brooklyn Metal, Might 4, 2025
For his half, Mamdani did a chic dance on housing. “I’ve already told you about my commitment to freeze the rent for every single rent-stabilized tenant,” he instructed the digital camera, standing on Atlantic Avenue in a February video, tall residential buildings looming behind him. “But what about the other half?” For them, he went on, “we need more housing—a lot more.” In his platform he promised to “triple the amount of housing built with City capital funds,” together with by considerably increasing town’s Senior Reasonably priced Rental Flats and Extraordinarily Low and Low-Earnings Affordability packages, which subsidize the development of inexpensive housing for seniors and low-income households, respectively. On the identical time, he additionally threw his help behind such measures as upzoning rich neighborhoods, eliminating parking zone necessities, and inspiring housing progress “around subway stations and other public transit hubs,” insurance policies that many builders may favor greater than they do his slate of tenant protections.
In a metropolis fraught with smug and unproductive housing discourse—together with loads of bad-faith on-line screaming by YIMBYs and NIMBYs alike—Mamdani instructed that we would not have to decide on between help for tenant protections on the one hand and zoning reform on the opposite. In an “ask me anything” session on Reddit this previous April, one participant requested him whether or not he agreed or disagreed that “market-rate development is helpful and good, and we should encourage more of it.” His response was deft:
Agree that we’d like a LOT extra housing of every kind, and in my housing plan, I name for elevated zoning capability round transit hubs, upzoning rich neighborhoods, and totally eliminating the parking mandate citywide…. I led with metropolis capital–funded inexpensive housing…for 2 causes: 1) I wish to be held accountable to outcomes, however that’s arduous to do in terms of piecemeal rezonings which are primarily simply an invite to personal builders 2) we’re a protracted methods off from for-profit builders constructing deeply inexpensive housing at scale. That’s the place the best emergency is, and it requires a public-sector strategy. Mine will likely be a pro-housing administration, and will probably be one which understands the significance of every kind of housing progress in order that we are able to meet the size of this disaster.
The highest-line merchandise, nonetheless, by no means modified. In Might the marketing campaign launched a thirty-second spot that ran for ten days as their essential commercial each on digital platforms and tv, together with throughout Knicks video games throughout the workforce’s playoff bid. It begins with Mamdani jogging down a residential block. Wanting straight into the digital camera, he declares: “I’m running for mayor to freeze the rent for every rent-stabilized tenant.” Block letters seem on the face of a constructing: FREEZE THE RENT. Reduce to the constructing—it’s Grell’s. She walks out in a jean jacket. “Yes,” she says, “this guy’s gonna freeze the rent.”
Mamdani’s win wasn’t marginal—it was a mandate. When the New York Metropolis Board of Elections launched the first’s ranked-choice voting outcomes, they confirmed him defeating Andrew Cuomo by 56 to 44 p.c. Mamdani swept elements of town that will be affected by the lease freeze. As Charlie Dulik has proven in a current article for NY Focus, he gained extra first-round votes than Cuomo in seven of the ten meeting districts with the biggest share of rent-stabilized items—districts that embrace a lot of Astoria, Lengthy Island Metropolis, Inwood, Washington Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, central Harlem, and Chelsea, in addition to elements of Flatbush and Midtown. In comparison with the final municipal election, turnout in tenant-majority areas rose by 7.5 p.c.
Actual property will not be used to shedding in New York. On the Wednesday after the first, in an indication of investor panic over the Mamdani impact, publicly traded landlords with portfolios concentrated within the metropolis sustained hits to their inventory costs: SL Inexperienced’s dropped by 5.7 p.c, Vornado Realty Belief’s by 6.7 p.c, and Empire State Realty Belief’s by over 7.5 p.c. The business, which had invested hundreds of thousands into Cuomo’s marketing campaign immediately and thru varied Tremendous PACs, needed to reassess its strategy.
Some vital gamers are threatening to maneuver their enterprise dealings to Florida. Others have lined up behind Eric Adams, who as soon as proclaimed, “I am real estate.” Two weeks after the election Marc Holliday, the CEO of SL Inexperienced, hosted a fundraiser for Adams at One Madison Avenue, one in all his workplace towers. Rechler, the RXR CEO, who additionally sits on REBNY’s board, took a jab: “New York is the capital of capitalism, and it seems inappropriate to have a socialist mayor in a city like ours.”
On June 30, in the meantime, the Lease Tips Board met for his or her annual listening to and voted by their fourth consecutive lease hike underneath Adams. Grell was among the many tenants who gathered to protest. “This is nothing but a political payback from real estate mayor Eric Adams,” she instructed the group. “He’s mad we…helped Zohran win just one week ago. And now his RGB is trying to use their power to punish us, working class tenants. Why? Because we’re building something that they cannot control: tenant power.”
Mamdani’s victory within the main was so decisive that it may now appear preordained. However as not too long ago as six months in the past he was an unknown and the lease, as a political matter, was a 3rd rail. Tenants and Mamdani took a wager on one another. Mamdani’s gamble, uncommon in politics, was to face for a controversial coverage proposal—a lease freeze—and make an early, unwavering dedication to his chosen workforce: working-class tenants. Tenants, for his or her half, have been taking an opportunity on a brand new type of energy, funneling time and assets into electoral campaigning quite than the acquainted terrain of legislative advocacy. Each these selections carried dangers, and neither was assured of success upfront.
For now the tenants nonetheless have a metropolis to win. Everybody I spoke to felt that the offensive had simply begun, that the motion might afford neither to let up on the surface stress nor abdicate its duty to manipulate. After the win Hasan deflected questions on his response to the outcomes. As a substitute he targeted on what comes subsequent. “There’s a big fight ahead, now through November,” he instructed me. “And the election is not the end. We must be disciplined. We must remember our enemy. We must build our power. We need to fight until we win a rent freeze. And then we need to fight more.”
