She’s unplugged from actuality.
A rent-striking, rising-star radical orchestrating the Mamdani administration’s socialist housing agenda is the daughter of a famed music studio proprietor who recorded rock legends like David Bowie, the Ramones, Blondie, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, the Foo Fighters and Coldplay, The Publish has realized.
Whereas framing herself as a champion of the proletariat, Tracy Rosenthal grew up in a classy $1.7 million NoMad pad with elite entry to the music trade — attending the Grammys at the least twice together with her dad, four-time winner Steven Rosenthal.
Her father recorded hit albums by a few of the world’s largest artists on the Magic Store, the SoHo studio he based in 1988, together with Coldplay’s 2008 “Viva la Vida,” which offered greater than 10 million copies worldwide; the Foo Fighters’ 2014 “Sonic Highways,” for which he was interviewed within the band’s HBO docuseries; and Bowie’s closing album, 2016’s “Blackstar.”
But regardless of her first-class upbringing, she’s been on a four-year “lease strike” since shifting again to New York Metropolis after a stint in Los Angeles — as a result of the Bolshevik bugged out after recognizing a cockroach in her hip $2,300 a month Mattress-Stuy house.
At a North Carolina Democratic Socialists of America assembly the place she spoke final August, Rosenthal, 39 — who pridefully posed for a snap on Karl Marx’s grave throughout a visit to London — sang the blues about what she claimed had been horrendous situations she needed to endure in 2021.
“As quickly as I moved in, I noticed that we had roaches . . . and I misplaced my thoughts,” she mentioned of the two-bedroom pad that occupies the highest ground of a brownstone. “I used to be very offended. . . . it’s actually gross.”
She mentioned the owner refused to rent an exterminator, and after discovering out the constructing had extra rental models than had been legally accredited and was dealing with foreclosures, she organized with the opposite tenants to finally cease paying lease, stiffing the proprietor of at the least $108,000 on her unit alone.
“We’ve been on lease strike ever since,” she mentioned proudly.
Her Mattress-Stuy landlord, Adetunji Akinboboye, finally misplaced the constructing to foreclosures in 2023.
US Financial institution, the brand new proprietor, is now suing Rosenthal, together with 4 different tenants, for eviction, saying they’ve “squatted upon the premises,” in accordance with data filed in housing court docket in November. The circumstances are nonetheless earlier than the courts.
Earlier this yr, the constructing on quiet tree-lined Hancock Road was positioned underneath the Housing Preservation Division’s Different Enforcement Program — that means the owner had just a few months to deal with tenants’ complaints. It was faraway from this system on July 14 after resolving the problems, in accordance with a metropolis discover taped to the entrance door this week.
This is similar program the Mamdani administration desires to make use of to “seize housing,” a earlier Publish evaluation discovered — and which obtained a $2 billion funds enhance. It could actually result in town dragging the owner to court docket if it doesn’t do the repairs, and a housing court docket decide appointing a non-profit to take over the administration of the constructing.
“They really feel entitled to those properties,” mentioned Stu Smith, investigative analyst on the Manhattan Institute, who has been learning Rosenthal and the “lease abolitionist” motion.
“I take into account her to be a saboteur, I take into account her to be a gaslighter. And the truth that the Mamdani administration desires to focus on her as a hero speaks to the ethics and morality of the mayor’s workplace.”
Rosenthal’s 2024 ebook “Abolish Hire” lays out the playbook of escalating ways she used herself — beginning with speaking to neighbors to establish shared grievances and making collective calls for all the way in which to lease strikes — with the broader objective of shifting management of housing away from landlords.
It’s helped popularize a confrontational mannequin of tenant activism and turn out to be a foundational tome for the DSA, which had her to talk to chapters throughout the nation for the previous two years.
“We pay lease on the peril of our want and on the barrel of a gun,” she mentioned at a gathering in 2024 in Midtown.
“It’s a ransom,” she raged. “We all know that if we don’t make this fee, our landlords can name on brokers of state violence who can use bodily power to throw us outside.”
The extra inflammatory methods she pushes embrace tenting exterior a landlord’s house; shaming them in entrance of their neighbors, family and friends; leaving “actually unhealthy Yelp opinions;” and even crashing their youngsters’s weddings — one thing she openly did with a tenant union in Beverly Hills in 2023.
Rosenthal — who posted “demise to America” the night time Mamdani clinched the Democratic major final yr and is a visiting scholar on the woke CUNY — put a few of these ways into follow as a strategist in a high-profile battle involving renters throughout 93 New York Metropolis buildings owned by Pinnacle Group, the main focus of Mamdani’s taxpayer-funded “mini doc” launched this week.
She helped tenants set up right into a union that secured repairs and had thousands and thousands of {dollars} in again lease forgiven, after the bankrupt landlord offered its 5,200-unit portfolio within the Bronx and Brooklyn.
“Actually simply everybody ought to really feel so pleased with the work that they did advocating for themselves and their neighbors,” Rosenthal says within the Metropolis Corridor movie, the place she’s seen celebrating with tenants.
On the day the doc launched, Aug. 4, Mamdani additionally signed a “Proper to Set up” letter — reminding renters of their proper to knock on their neighbors’ doorways and type tenant associations — echoing Rosenthal’s very methods.
She proudly shared footage posing alongside Hizzoner on social media, like at a “Maintain Unhealthy Landlords Accountable” photograph op at Metropolis Corridor in Might and of the 2 strategizing throughout a current Zoom assembly, in accordance with her now-private Instagram account.
“Absolute banner yr for tenant energy . . . a lot is feasible after we set up,” she gloated in an Instagram put up in June after the NYC lease freeze was handed.
Rosenthal has been likened to Mamdani tenant czar Cea Weaver — who additionally hails from an prosperous household. The pair frequently converse alongside one another at occasions and had been even featured collectively in a 2020 Teen Vogue article that framed them as tenant leaders, throughout the journal’s activist period underneath uber woke editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner.
Rosenthal’s dad, who didn’t return The Publish’s request for remark, has additionally battled landlords.
The Magic Store was pressured to close down in 2016 after a years-long dispute with the owner.
Her father, with the monetary backing of the Foo Fighter’s Dave Grohl, tried to purchase the area as a last-ditch effort, however the constructing’s co-op board rejected his bid.
Tracy Rosenthal didn’t return The Publish’s calls and messages.
