ZOHRAN MAMDANI KICKS THEM OUT – RESIDENTS STUNNED… ‘HE LIED TO US!’1
NYC Affordable Housing Nonprofit Says Mandates Are 'Killing' It—But the Rules Reflect a Real Safety-and-Cost Tradeoff
New York City’s housing debate usually divides landlords and tenant advocates into opposing camps.
Ismene Speliotis does not fit neatly into either one.
For more than three decades, she has helped run a nonprofit housing organization whose mission is to develop, preserve and manage deeply affordable homes for New Yorkers.
Now she is warning that the cost of complying with the city’s housing rules is becoming increasingly difficult even for organizations built around keeping rents low.
“These unfunded mandates are absolutely killing me,” Speliotis told The Real Deal. “They’re killing me.”
The complaint is striking because Speliotis is not describing a conventional market-rate landlord trying to maximize returns.
She is executive director of MHANY Management, formerly known as the Mutual Housing Association of New York, a nonprofit that says it has developed or preserved more than 2,000 affordable homes over more than 35 years.
MHANY develops, owns and manages affordable housing, provides HUD-certified housing counseling and works with low- and moderate-income New Yorkers.
Speliotis has also supported labor standards that many private developers have argued would raise the cost of affordable-housing construction.
In 2024, she testified in favor of New York City Council legislation establishing community-hiring and compensation standards for workers on certain city-assisted housing projects.
Her testimony argued that affordable housing and better-paid construction jobs did not have to be competing goals.
That background makes her current frustration more useful than a simple ideological argument about regulation.
Speliotis is not saying that safety rules, tenant protections or supportive services have no purpose.
She is saying that when enough requirements accumulate, the cost still has to be paid by somebody—and nonprofit housing providers have fewer places to put it.
One of her examples involves lead-paint testing.
Speliotis described an older MHANY building that was extensively renovated with city assistance in the 1990s.
“There were no walls,” she said, emphasizing how thoroughly the property had been rebuilt.
Yet because of the building’s age, MHANY still had to deal with the city’s lead-testing requirements.
Speliotis estimated the testing cost at roughly $150 to $200 per unit.
The underlying rule is real, although its purpose is more specific than the anecdote can make it sound.
New York City requires owners of rental buildings constructed before 1960 to have painted surfaces in dwelling units and common areas tested for lead-based paint using an approved X-ray fluorescence analyzer.
The one-time testing deadline for those units was August 9, 2025.
The city uses the building’s age because lead-based residential paint was common before New York City banned its use in 1960, and young children are particularly vulnerable to lead exposure.
A previous renovation does not automatically erase the legal presumption unless the owner has the required testing and documentation.
But the system also includes an important route out of continuing lead obligations.
If testing shows that all relevant surfaces are negative for lead-based paint—or any lead paint identified has been fully removed—an owner can apply to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development for a Lead-Free exemption.
That means Speliotis’s broader point about compliance cost is valid, while the idea that a fully documented lead-free apartment must simply be treated forever as contaminated would be incomplete.
The regulation asks owners to prove that the hazard is gone.
For a nonprofit managing many older buildings, proving it across unit after unit can itself be expensive.
Fire-safety systems produce a different kind of burden.
Speliotis said some of MHANY’s smaller properties have sprinkler systems tied to centralized fire monitoring, with annual expenses she estimated at $7,000 to $10,000 per building.
Central monitoring exists for an obvious reason: when a protected building’s fire or sprinkler system activates, the signal can be transmitted quickly to emergency responders.
But Speliotis described the everyday operating consequences as frustratingly expensive.
“When you burn toast, the Fire Department comes,” she said.
She also said repeated false alarms can produce penalties.
The precise monitoring cost and penalty exposure can vary by building, system and violation, so her figures are best understood as MHANY’s operating experience rather than a universal price tag for every affordable-housing property in the city.
The same distinction applies to smoke detectors.
Speliotis said residents sometimes remove detectors because they are annoyed by alarms, leaving the housing provider responsible for correcting the condition when inspectors arrive.
Before an upcoming HUD inspection, she said MHANY purchased another 500 detectors.
“I have 9 million smoke detectors,” she joked, “and a fire escape.”
The exaggeration captured a familiar problem for housing operators.
A safety requirement can be entirely rational and still create recurring costs when equipment is damaged, removed or repeatedly replaced.
Speliotis offered a more dramatic example involving a sprinkler.
She said a seventh-floor resident hung laundry from a sprinkler head, triggering the system and sending water through the property.
“Ruins the entire building,” she said, putting the damage at approximately $400,000.
MHANY filed an insurance claim, but the incident came while the organization was already dealing with higher insurance costs.
That story should not be read as an argument against sprinklers.
Automatic sprinklers are designed to prevent fires from becoming deadly building-wide disasters.
It does show why affordable-housing finances can be more complicated than comparing monthly rent with a mortgage payment.
Insurance, code compliance, emergency repairs, inspections, staffing and legal costs all exist whether the owner is a for-profit company or a nonprofit.
The most difficult policy question in Speliotis’s account involves supportive housing.
She said MHANY sometimes houses residents referred through city programs who have serious mental-health needs and are connected with service providers.
The housing may come with funded case management or other support.
But the tenant does not have to open the door or accept the service.
“Even though you have an entire program funded to support them, they don’t have to answer their door,” Speliotis said.
She described situations in which a tenant’s problems had progressed into housing court while the service provider told her it could not force the resident to participate.
That is not simply a gap that the provider forgot to close.
Voluntary participation is an explicit feature of New York City supportive housing.
The city says supportive-housing residents can receive case management, counseling, treatment referrals, employment assistance and other services, but participation is voluntary and is designed around each resident’s needs.
City testimony on supportive housing has likewise stated that participation in services is not required to maintain tenancy.
The policy reflects the Housing First idea that stable housing should not depend on a person first complying with treatment or service requirements.
Supporters argue that making treatment a condition of housing can push the people with the greatest needs back toward homelessness when they are least able or willing to engage.
Speliotis sees the other side of that design.
If a resident is seriously ill, disrupting a building or facing eviction, a landlord can find itself managing the housing consequences while the support system remains unable to compel contact.
She believes residents in supportive housing should have some obligation to participate in the services attached to those placements.
That would be a significant policy change, not a minor administrative fix.
It would force the city to weigh tenant autonomy and housing stability against the argument that publicly funded supportive programs should be able to intervene more aggressively before a tenancy reaches crisis.
The tension helps explain why Speliotis’s comments are more important than another complaint about bureaucracy.
New York City housing rules are not imposed on a blank sheet of paper.
Lead regulations exist because lead exposure can permanently harm children.
Smoke detectors, sprinkler systems and alarm monitoring exist because fires can kill people quickly.
Supportive-housing protections exist because people with mental illness, histories of homelessness or other vulnerabilities can lose housing if treatment compliance becomes a condition of tenancy.
Those objectives do not make the costs disappear.
And that is the part of the debate Speliotis is emphasizing.
MHANY cannot simply raise rents whenever insurance, repairs or compliance expenses increase.
Many of its apartments operate under affordability restrictions, regulatory agreements or subsidy structures intended to keep housing within reach of low-income residents.
The organization’s mission depends on preserving that affordability over the long term.
That creates a basic financial problem.
If a new requirement costs money and rents cannot rise enough to cover it, the provider must find additional subsidy, reduce spending somewhere else, absorb the cost through its balance sheet or eventually conclude that a particular property is no longer financially sustainable.
The same pressure can affect private owners of regulated housing, but it is especially revealing when the complaint comes from a nonprofit whose stated purpose is affordable housing.
It suggests that the city’s policy argument cannot stop at whether each individual regulation has a defensible purpose.
Policymakers also have to ask what all of the rules cost in combination.
That does not mean every mandate should be repealed.
It means the city has to decide whether the public benefit of a requirement should be paid entirely through a building’s operating budget or supported with grants, reimbursements, tax relief, insurance reform or other funding.
Speliotis’s own record makes that distinction clearer.
When she backed higher compensation standards for construction workers, she argued that affordable housing should not depend on low wages.
Her current complaint is essentially the same financial question from the other direction.
If New York wants safer buildings, stronger labor standards, deeply affordable rents and extensive supportive services, it has to design a financing system capable of paying for all of them at the same time.
That is harder than declaring any one of those goals worthwhile.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office in January with affordability at the center of his political agenda.
MHANY represents the kind of mission-driven nonprofit provider that can play a major role in any strategy to preserve low-cost housing.
Speliotis’s warning therefore creates an awkward but useful challenge for the city.
A housing system can be strongly pro-tenant and still make it too expensive for some affordable-housing providers to operate.
It can also reduce compliance costs too aggressively and expose residents to risks the rules were created to prevent.
The policy question is not whether one side cares about tenants and the other does not.
It is where New York should draw the line between protection and financial feasibility—and who should pay when the two collide.
Speliotis has supplied a particularly vivid answer from the provider side.
After 35 years in affordable housing, she says the accumulated burden is reaching a point that feels unsustainable.
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The city’s regulations still have reasons behind them.
The harder question is whether the system has given nonprofit landlords enough money and flexibility to comply with all of those reasons at once.
