Approximately 80,000 New Yorkers called 311 last month to report a lack of heat and hot water — the highest monthly total on record — as temperatures in the city plunged below ten degrees. Tens of thousands of residents in both private and public housing endured conditions that belong in a developing country, not the largest city in the United States. And now City Council lawmakers are hauling Mayor Zohran Mamdani before them to answer a straightforward question: what exactly has his administration done to protect tenants?

The answer, so far, appears to be: appoint an activist and review the rulebook.

According to Breitbart, more than 215,000 heat complaints have been logged with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development since October 1 — up from more than 187,000 during the same period the previous year. The numbers tell a story of systemic failure accelerating under new leadership.

Boiling Water to Survive

The human cost isn't abstract. Alex Hughes, a tenant in Williamsburg, described conditions that no New Yorker should accept as normal:

"We've had over 40 days of no hot water over the last 11 months. And we're now on day eight or nine straight of no hot water."

Hughes wasn't finished:

"I had to walk 15 minutes in the snow and ice to a friend's house so I could shower."

Forty days without hot water. In a city that collects billions in taxes, employs an army of bureaucrats, and never misses an opportunity to lecture the rest of the country about compassion.

Nicole Pavez, a 31-year-old city planner living in Astoria, Queens, reported that the heat in her building went out almost every night. She bundled up inside and dressed her dog in sweaters to wait out the cold. A city planner — someone who works inside the system — reduced to layering clothing indoors because the system doesn't work.

In public housing, the picture is no better. Malik Williams, a 27-year-old tenant at Lehman Houses, said his apartment went without heat for most of January. He resorted to boiling water on the stove "just to keep the house warm."

Boiling water on a stovetop in 2026, New York City. That's the progressive vision in practice.

The Activist Czar and the $78 Billion Hole

Mamdani's flagship response to the housing crisis has been the appointment of Cea Weaver as the city's new tenant protection czar. The New York Post reported that Mamdani touted the appointment, positioning Weaver as a champion for renters and a key figure in the administration's push to crack down on negligent landlords and improve living conditions citywide.

There's just one problem. Weaver is a housing activist who has previously argued for stronger tenant protections and less reliance on private ownership models. In other words, Mamdani's answer to a crisis of government failure is to bring in someone whose instinct is to expand the role of government — the same government that presides over the New York City Housing Authority's estimated $78 billion repair backlog.

Let that sink in. Seventy-eight billion dollars in deferred repairs at NYCHA. And the administration's solution is an activist czar who wants less private ownership.

NYCHA officials said they run a 24-hour heat desk and emergency response system and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on upgrades to heating infrastructure in recent years. Hundreds of millions against a $78 billion backlog is a rounding error. It's the bureaucratic equivalent of bailing out the Titanic with a coffee mug.

Reviewing the Rulebook While Pipes Freeze

When pressed, City Hall offered the kind of response that has become a hallmark of administrations that prize ideology over execution. Matt Rauschenbach, City Hall's Deputy Press Secretary of Housing, told the New York Post that the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants is doing the following:

"taking a long, hard look at the Housing Maintenance Code and how it's enforced."

A long, hard look. Residents are boiling water on their stoves, walking through ice to shower at a friend's apartment, and dressing their pets in sweaters to survive the night — and City Hall is reviewing how the code is enforced. Not enforcing it. Reviewing how it's enforced. The distinction matters. It is the difference between action and the performance of action.

This is what happens when the government treats governance as a theoretical exercise. You get czars instead of repairs. You get task forces instead of functioning boilers. You get press statements about reviews while people freeze.

The Progressive Contradiction

The deeper problem isn't one bad winter. It's the ideological framework that produced this failure and will produce the next one.

Mamdani's administration wants to crack down on negligent private landlords. Fine — no one defends a landlord who lets tenants freeze. But the administration simultaneously oversees a public housing system with a $78 billion repair backlog that delivers the same misery. The private sector is failing tenants. The public sector is failing tenants. And the proposed solution is to shift more power toward the public sector.

This is the loop that progressive housing policy can never escape:

• Private landlords fail tenants, so the government must intervene.
• Government housing fails tenants, so the government needs more resources.
• More resources disappear into a bureaucracy that never closes the gap.
• The cycle repeats, and the only constituency that never benefits is the one shivering in the dark.

Weaver's appointment crystallizes the contradiction. She argues for less reliance on private ownership — but the entity she'd rely on instead can't keep the heat running in its own buildings. The ideology demands faith in a system that the facts have already convicted.

What Happens Next

City Council members are now asking whether Mamdani has done enough. The fact that the question needs asking — months into a heating season that has shattered complaint records — suggests the answer is already known. The Council hearing will produce the usual theater: stern questions, bureaucratic deflections, promises to do better. Whether it produces functioning radiators is another matter entirely.

The real test is whether Mamdani's administration can move from activist sloganeering to the unglamorous work of keeping buildings warm. That means confronting NYCHA's decay with something more than press releases. It means holding the city's own agencies to the same standard it wants to impose on private landlords. It means treating governance as a craft, not a cause.

Eighty thousand calls in a single month. More than 215,000 since October. Each one represents a New Yorker who did what the system told them to do — report the problem, trust the process, wait for help. The help didn't come.