New Yorkers, you’ve been slacking — so the mayor wants to organize you.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani isn’t happy that only 400 people showed up to last year’s Rent Guidelines Board hearings.
In response, last Wednesday, he launched Organize NYC, a supposed volunteer effort to have New Yorkers participate in local government.
Taken straight from the Democratic Socialists of America’s community-organizing playbook, Mamdani is calling it “a long-term initiative to bring mass public participation into the work of governing.”
First stop: the RGB. The body with power to set rent adjustments for the city’s 1 million rent-stabilized units will hold four public hearings in June before voting on increases at its June 25 meeting.
Mamdani was elected on the dishonest promise to “immediately” freeze the rent on stabilized tenants for four years.
Since taking office, however, he has been forced to recognize what the law has made clear from the start: He cannot set rents himself, and overt interference with the independent RGB could expose a rent freeze to a legal challenge.
So Mamdani has found another way.
His Office of Mass Engagement will soon recruit so-called volunteers to fan out across selected neighborhoods and encourage rent-stabilized tenants to attend the hearings.
In other words, City Hall is mobilizing the constituency most likely to support the mayor’s preferred outcome while insisting it is merely promoting civic participation.
He’s paying lip service to the RGB’s independence while directing a government office to organize a campaign ensuring the board “answers to the people it serves” — an ominous phrase that gives away Organize NYC’s actual purpose.
The mayor insists the effort aims to educate, not advocate. According to Mass Engagement Commissioner and DSA veteran Tascha Van Auken, the volunteers are “not advocating for any specific outcome or position.”
Don’t be fooled. Organize NYC is a thinly veiled, taxpayer-funded effort to embed campaign-style political organizing inside city government, dress it up as civic virtue and deliver Mamdani’s campaign promise under a veneer of official neutrality.
It raises serious policy, legal and ethical questions. Mamdani has not explained how he will fund Organize NYC or how much it will cost.
He claims the city faces a budget crisis of historic proportions, yet he has already allocated $2 million to pay the salaries of the organizers in the Mass Engagement office. Now he’s found the money to organize thousands of supposed volunteers.
Rule §1-13 of the Conflicts of Interest Board prohibits public servants from using city “letterhead, title, personnel, equipment, resources, supplies, or technology assets” for any “non-City purpose.”
It isn’t apparent that using public resources to advance Mamdani’s campaign promise qualifies as a “city purpose.”
The mayor will claim that it’s perfectly appropriate to use a branch of his office to promote New Yorkers’ participation in public affairs.
If Organize NYC were truly a neutral civic-participation effort, City Hall would have a general plan to increase attendance at City Council meetings, rezoning and procurement hearings, and the countless boards and authorities that hold public sessions across New York.
But the Mass Engagement Office has no companion plan to increase attendance at any of those.
Nor is it likely the campaign will try terribly hard to encourage landlords and their supporters to show up at the RGB meetings.
Its promotional drive is directed solely at the body that controls the fate of the mayor’s most cherished campaign promise.
If successful in obtaining a rent freeze, Organize NYC would violate the fundamental legal principle that government may not do indirectly what it is forbidden to do directly.
A group ostensibly created to promote democratic participation would, ironically, erode the rule of law.
Once City Hall has built a taxpayer-funded organizing arm for one campaign promise, Mamdani can redeploy it for the next.
MTA Boss Janno Lieber may find Organize NYC at the door of his next meeting on bus fares.
After all, the Office of Mass Engagement openly describes its function as “bringing the people-powered movement that elected Mayor Mamdani to the work of governance.”
And Organize NYC has made its mission to “build lasting power for working-class New Yorkers that outlives any one administration.”
New York has no shortage of civil society capable of telling people about public hearings: tenant and landlord groups, civic and neighborhood associations, legal-services organizations, unions, political organizations and others.
Each of these private groups is one voice among many in the democratic process.
By contrast, any event featuring Organize NYC will be understood to carry the weight and approval of City Hall, putting the government’s thumb on the scale of what should be open and free deliberations.
Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to bankroll the mayor’s political pressure campaigns.
John Ketcham, an attorney, is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at Manhattan Institute, where Christian Browne, also an attorney, is an adjunct fellow.
