HOW WOULD YOU GRADE ZOHRAN MAMDANI’S TENURE AS NYC MAYOR SO FAR?
A Nonprofit Affordable Housing Provider Says NYC Mandates Are Becoming Unsustainable - But the Fight Is Over What Tenant Protections Really Cost
MHANY's Ismene Speliotis supports affordable housing and worker protections. Now she says the cumulative cost of safety rules, insurance, court cases and supportive-housing problems is straining the model itself.
New York City's affordable-housing debate usually divides the people who write housing rules from the landlords who say those rules cost too much.
Ismene Speliotis does not fit neatly into that divide.
She is the executive director of the Mutual Housing Association of New York, or MHANY, a nonprofit organization focused on affordable housing for low-income New Yorkers.
She has spent more than three decades working in affordable housing and has supported policies intended to raise labor standards on city-assisted housing projects.
But Speliotis now says the accumulation of regulatory requirements, rising insurance costs, housing-court problems and difficult tenant situations is putting growing pressure on the same nonprofit model that progressive housing advocates often hold up as an alternative to traditional private landlords.
"These unfunded mandates are absolutely killing me," Speliotis said. "They're killing me."
That complaint matters because it comes from someone whose mission is not to maximize market-rate rent.
It comes from an affordable-housing operator arguing that even organizations designed to keep rents low still have to absorb the cost of complying with building, safety and tenant-protection rules.
The larger question is not whether those rules serve legitimate purposes.
Many of them do.
The question is who ultimately pays for them - and what happens when a nonprofit housing provider says the costs are becoming difficult to carry.
One of Speliotis's examples involves New York City's lead-paint requirements.
She described a building that MHANY renovated extensively with city assistance in the mid-1990s.
"There were no walls," she said, describing how thoroughly the interior had been stripped during the rehabilitation.
Yet because the building is old, it still falls within New York City's lead-paint compliance framework.
The underlying city rule is more specific than simply requiring every old apartment to be tested over and over.
Under Local Law 31, owners of many rental buildings constructed before 1960 were required to complete a one-time XRF test of painted surfaces in dwelling units and common areas by August 2025. Buildings constructed from 1960 through 1978 are also covered in certain circumstances when the owner has actual knowledge of lead-based paint.
Separate annual notice and inspection duties can also apply, particularly where a child under six lives in or regularly spends significant time in a pre-1960 apartment.
Owners can seek an exemption from some lead-law requirements if testing shows that the relevant areas are free of lead-based paint or if qualifying abatement work has been completed.
That nuance does not eliminate the cost Speliotis is describing.
Her complaint is that an extensively renovated building can still require the testing and documentation needed to establish compliance or obtain an exemption.
"It doesn't matter," she said. "Any building before X date gets tested for lead - $150 to $200 per unit."
The city requirement is based heavily on a building's age because pre-1960 housing is presumed to present a greater lead-paint risk until testing shows otherwise.
From a public-health perspective, that approach is intended to prevent children from being exposed to a toxin that can cause serious and lasting harm.
From Speliotis's perspective, it is also another bill that has to be paid by a housing organization whose rents are deliberately constrained.
Fire protection creates a similar tension.
Speliotis said some of MHANY's smaller properties are required to maintain sprinkler systems and centralized fire monitoring.
She estimated the annual cost at roughly $7,000 to $10,000 per building.
Those figures are Speliotis's estimates for her properties, not a universal citywide price for every small residential building; fire-code requirements vary by building type, occupancy, age and system design.
But she argues that the operational consequences are real.
"When you burn toast, the Fire Department comes," Speliotis said. "When you burn toast a second time, the Fire Department comes again. If they come three times, it's a $1,000 fine. It's not fightable."
The point of monitored fire systems is obvious: early detection can save lives.
The problem she describes is that a system designed for safety can also generate recurring monitoring expenses, false-alarm responses and potential penalties that become significant across a portfolio of affordable properties.
Smoke alarms have created another recurring management problem.
Federal and local housing standards require functioning smoke alarms in covered residential properties.
Speliotis said some residents remove detectors after becoming frustrated with alarms, leaving the property owner responsible for replacing missing equipment and correcting violations.
With a federal housing inspection approaching, she said MHANY recently purchased another 500 detectors.
"I have 9 million smoke detectors," she joked, "and a fire escape."
The exaggeration makes the frustration clear.
A safety device may cost relatively little on its own.
Replacing it repeatedly across many apartments does not.
Sometimes the cost is far larger.
Speliotis recalled an incident in which a seventh-floor tenant hung laundry from a sprinkler head.
The sprinkler activated and released water through the property.
"Ruins the entire building," she said. "Four hundred thousand dollars in damage."
MHANY filed an insurance claim, but Speliotis said insurance premiums were already increasing.
That example illustrates another pressure facing affordable-housing operators.
A property may comply with safety requirements and still face major losses when equipment is damaged, misused or accidentally triggered.
Insurance can cover part of the immediate loss.
The longer-term cost can return through higher premiums.
The most complicated part of Speliotis's account may involve supportive housing.
Supportive housing combines permanent affordable housing with services intended to help residents who may have histories of homelessness, mental illness, substance-use disorders or other significant needs.
New York City explicitly describes participation in supportive services as voluntary.
That principle is important because supportive housing is still housing: residents retain rights and cannot simply be forced into medical or social-service treatment because a provider believes it would help.
But Speliotis argues that the voluntary-services model can leave housing operators in a difficult position when a resident's condition contributes to serious tenancy problems.
"Even though you have an entire program funded to support them, they don't have to answer their door," Speliotis said.
She described tenants with serious mental-health problems who end up in housing court while the service provider says it cannot compel them to engage.
"I call the service provider: 'Why aren't you helping Mrs. Smith?' They say, 'We can't make her.'"
Speliotis believes residents placed in supportive-housing programs should be required to participate in the services connected to those programs.
That proposal would represent a meaningful change from the city's current approach, where supportive services are voluntary.
And it exposes a genuine policy conflict.
Requiring treatment or service participation could make it easier for providers to intervene before a tenancy reaches crisis.
It could also undermine the principle that supportive-housing residents retain autonomy over whether they participate in services.
Speliotis's political profile makes the criticism harder to dismiss as a conventional landlord complaint.
In 2024, she testified in favor of New York City legislation establishing community-hiring and compensation standards for certain city-assisted housing projects, arguing that living-wage jobs and benefits could coexist with affordable-housing development.
New York City's current mayor, Zohran Mamdani, took office on January 1, 2026 and identifies with the democratic-socialist wing of city politics.
Speliotis's record therefore places her closer to the mission-driven housing model embraced by many progressives than to the image of a large speculative landlord fighting regulation on principle.
That is what gives her warning political significance.
Her argument is not that lead protection, fire systems, smoke detectors or supportive services should disappear.
It is that each requirement has a cost, and those costs do not disappear simply because the owner is a nonprofit.
Someone still has to pay for testing.
Someone still pays the monitoring contract.
Someone buys the replacement detectors.
Someone pays the insurance premium after a major claim.
And someone bears the legal and operational cost when a troubled tenancy reaches housing court.
For a market-rate landlord, some of those costs may eventually be reflected in rents, asset values or operating decisions.
Affordable housing is different.
Rents are often restricted by regulatory agreements, subsidy programs or tenant-income limits.
That can leave nonprofit operators with less room to pass through unexpected costs.
The result is the contradiction at the center of Speliotis's complaint.
New York wants affordable-housing providers to keep rents low, maintain aging buildings, meet increasingly detailed safety and documentation requirements, manage vulnerable populations and absorb rising insurance and operating costs at the same time.
Each goal can be defended individually.
The cumulative price is harder to ignore.
That does not mean every cost Speliotis cites is caused by government regulation.
Insurance markets, tenant behavior, property-specific design and ordinary maintenance also shape what MHANY spends.
Nor does one nonprofit's experience prove that tenant-protection laws are broadly unsustainable.
What her account does show is that the policy debate cannot be reduced to a simple contest between tenants who need protection and landlords who resist it.
Nonprofit affordable-housing providers sit in the middle.
They are expected to serve the tenants the rules are designed to protect while also paying the cost of complying with those rules.
The better policy question is therefore narrower.
If New York wants mission-driven organizations to preserve and expand affordable housing, how should the city account for regulatory costs that those organizations cannot easily recover through rent?
That could mean debating funding, reimbursement, exemptions, better coordination among agencies, or whether some requirements can be administered more efficiently without weakening their underlying protections.
Speliotis's comments do not settle which answer is right.
They do make the tradeoff harder to avoid.
New York City's housing rules are designed to reduce risks that are real: lead exposure, fire, unsafe apartments and the destabilization of vulnerable residents.
Speliotis is arguing that another risk deserves attention too.
If the cost of operating regulated affordable housing keeps rising faster than the resources available to maintain it, even nonprofit providers may eventually struggle to keep the model financially workable.
So her complaint settles one point: the financial pressure created by housing regulation is not limited to conventional private landlords.
What it does not settle is where New York should draw the line between imposing protections and paying for the cost of making those protections work.
May you like
For organizations whose entire mission is to keep housing affordable, that distinction may determine how much affordable housing they can continue to provide.
