The hearings ended a month ago. The report has not yet started landing in coverage. Most New Yorkers do not know it is coming.

On April 7, the City of New York concluded the last of five public hearings held in each borough since late February. The hearings were called Rental Ripoff Hearings — a branding choice the Mamdani administration used to draw attention to broker fees, hidden charges, mold, broken appliances, and unsafe construction. Tenants were given a platform: recorded testimony and one-on-one conversations with senior administration officials, including commissioners from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, the Department of Buildings, and the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants.

On January 5, 2026 — in his first week in office — Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed Executive Order 08, directing the four agencies to hold the hearings within 100 days and to publish a joint enforcement reform plan within 90 days of the final hearing. The first deadline was met. The second deadline — July 6, 2026 — is, as of May 10, 57 days away.

What the report says will shape NYC tenant enforcement for at least the next year.

What the order actually required

Most executive orders are exhortations. EO-08 has structure.

Five hearings, one per borough. They took place on Feb. 26 in Downtown Brooklyn, March 5 in Long Island City, March 11 in Fordham (Bronx), March 28 in East Harlem (Manhattan), and April 7 on the North Shore of Staten Island. The Mayor's Office published the schedule in February and invited tenants, tenant organizations, social services agencies, advocacy organizations, legal service providers, landlords, and property managers to register and testify.

Inter-agency coordination. Four separate enforcement agencies, each with its own complaint system and backlog, were required to act jointly. HPD handles housing-code violations. DOB handles building-code violations. DCWP handles consumer-facing fees and disclosures, including FARE Act enforcement. MOPT coordinates tenant-protection policy across the system.

A reform plan, not just a report. The required July 6 report must propose specific reforms — not summarize what tenants said, but recommend what the agencies will do differently as a result. The order specifically requires recommendations for faster correction of violations.

Public posting. City materials say the report will be posted publicly, including on city webpages for the participating agencies. There is no provision in the order’s public-facing materials for keeping findings internal.

What the hearings produced

The Mayor's Office and individual agencies have not yet released compiled testimony from the hearings. The order's framing, agency commissioner statements at the hearing announcement, and the focus of the subsequent administrative agenda make clear what tenants raised in volume.

Hidden fees introduced after the FARE Act took effect — administrative fees, processing fees, technology fees — totaling between $1,000 and $4,200 per lease.

Heat and hot water complaints that go unresolved for weeks despite 24-hour Class C correction deadlines.

Mold and pest infestations that landlords self-certify as resolved but tenants describe as unchanged.

Broken appliances. Unsafe construction. Unrepaired Class B and Class C violations.

Buildings cycling through ownership where each new owner declines to remediate violations the previous owner inherited.

Lease-renewal pressure on tenants in stabilized units who do not know their unit is stabilized.

DCWP Commissioner Sam Levine, on announcing the hearing schedule on February 10, framed the focus directly: "Broker fees, hidden charges, and other predatory practices are ripping off working New Yorkers and jacking up the cost of where they live." HPD Commissioner Dina Levy framed the goal as enforcement strategy refinement: "We want to hear directly from tenants as it's the most effective way to craft responsive policies, and ensure that the right enforcement strategies are included in our housing plan."

Whether the July 6 report produces operational changes that match the framing is the open question.

What this changes versus existing enforcement

NYC has had tenant-protection enforcement for decades. HPD's housing code enforcement program issues thousands of violations every week. DCWP investigates illegal fees. DOB inspects construction. MOPT was created in 2018 to coordinate tenant policy across agencies.

The historical critique of NYC tenant enforcement, made by tenant advocates and acknowledged in the order's own framing, is not that the laws are missing. It is that enforcement is fragmented. A tenant with a heat complaint, a fee dispute, and a building safety concern currently navigates three agencies, each with its own complaint system, its own backlog, and its own timeline.

EO-08 does not consolidate the agencies. It requires them to publish a coordinated reform plan with a measurable target — faster violation correction. Whether the plan delivers measurable change is the test the report will face.

What success would look like in the data

The order's stated goal is faster correction of violations. There is a measurable version of this: the median time from complaint filed to violation closed.

That number is currently uneven across agencies and across violation classes. HPD Class C violations carry a 24-hour correction deadline by law, but in practice many remain in "open" status in the public database for weeks or months — often because the landlord has self-certified correction without inspector verification, sometimes because the inspector revisit lags the actual repair.

A meaningful EO-08 outcome would be a documented reduction in that gap. If the median open-Class-C time drops from weeks to days over the next year, the order will have done something substantive. If the data does not move, the report will have produced documentation rather than enforcement.

Both outcomes have happened before in NYC tenant policy.

The parallel actions

The Rental Ripoff Hearings are not the only thing the administration has done on tenant enforcement. On Mamdani's first day in office, January 1, the city moved to intervene in the Pinnacle Group bankruptcy sale — a portfolio involving more than 5,000 rent-stabilized apartments across more than 90 buildings.

Two task forces were established the same day under Executive Orders 04 and 05. The Land Inventory Fast Track (LIFT) Task Force is identifying city-owned land for redevelopment. The Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development (SPEED) Task Force is examining housing approval timelines. City Hall has said the task forces will deliver recommendations this spring; as of May 10, they have not been posted publicly.

The Rental Ripoff report on July 6 is the next major deliverable in this opening sequence. None of the three workstreams has yet produced a final report. The Rental Ripoff plan will be the first to land if the deadline holds.

What a tenant should know about this process

For tenants who want to engage with the enforcement push directly, three things matter.

The complaint systems still exist as before. EO-08 does not change how a tenant files a complaint. HPD complaints still go through 311 or HPD Online. DCWP complaints still go through the DCWP portal. DOB complaints still go through 311 or NYC.gov. The order changes how those agencies are expected to handle the complaints internally, not the tenant-facing intake.

The report will likely produce new tools. Past inter-agency reform efforts in NYC have produced things like the Alternative Enforcement Program (severely distressed buildings list), the Worst Landlord Watchlist (Public Advocate's annual ranking), and the Pro-Active Enforcement Bureau (HPD's targeted inspection unit). The July 6 report is likely to produce one or more new mechanisms of similar kind. Tenants who want advance notice of those mechanisms should monitor the agency webpages where the report will be posted: HPD, DCWP, DOB, and MOPT.

Existing public records remain the most reliable check. Whatever the report produces, the underlying data sources — building violation history, ownership chains, complaint patterns — are public now and will remain public. Knowing what your building's record currently shows is the prerequisite for understanding any future enforcement designation.

The longer arc

Most municipal executive orders pass quietly because most of them produce limited change. EO-08 may follow that pattern. It may also be the document under which the next year's most consequential enforcement reforms are announced.

The reason to track it is timing. The July 6 deadline puts the report's release squarely in the period when several other policy decisions converge: the RGB final vote in late June, the COPA reintroduction on the Council calendar, the SPEED Task Force recommendations on housing approvals, and the federal Emergency Housing Voucher program approaching its funding cliff for thousands of NYC households.

For a tenant trying to understand what the city's enforcement environment will look like a year from now, the report due July 6 may be the most important document of the summer. It will arrive with less coverage than any of the policy fights it indirectly responds to.

The hearings ended a month ago. The clock is running.

Sources: NYC Mayor's Office Executive Order 08, "Protecting Tenants from Rental Ripoffs and Abusive Landlord Practices" (January 5, 2026); NYC Mayor's Office press release on Rental Ripoff Hearing schedule (February 10, 2026); nyc.gov/main/rental-ripoff hearing landing page; NYC311 article on Rental Ripoff Hearings; NYC Mayor's Office Executive Orders 04 and 05 establishing LIFT and SPEED task forces (January 1, 2026); The Real Deal coverage of Mamdani first-week tenant actions (January 5, 2026); Fortune and City Limits coverage of Pinnacle Group bankruptcy sale (January 2026); NYC Department of Buildings, Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, and Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants public materials.