Tracy Rosenthal, the woman that is advising NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani on housing, isn’t what she styles herself as. While she claims to be a champion of the working class, she’s actually the daughter of Steven Rosenthal, a famous music studio owner. Tracy grew up in a trendy $1.7 million NoMad pad and went to the Grammy’s twice with her dad.
A rent-striking, rising-star radical orchestrating the Mamdani administration’s socialist housing agenda is the daughter of a famed music studio owner who recorded rock legends like David Bowie, the Ramones, Blondie, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, the Foo Fighters and Coldplay, The Post has learned…
…Her father recorded hit albums by some of the world’s biggest artists at the Magic Shop, the SoHo studio he founded in 1988, including Coldplay’s 2008 “Viva la Vida,” which sold more than 10 million copies worldwide; the Foo Fighters’ 2014 “Sonic Highways,” for which he was interviewed in the band’s HBO docuseries; and Bowie’s final album, 2016’s “Blackstar.”
The champagne socialist with the privileged background had already cemented her socialist bona fides in Los Angeles where she co-founded the Los Angeles Tenants Union. But when she returned to New York City and found a cockroach in her $2,300 a month Bed-Stuy apartment, she escalated action and for the past four years, she and other tenants have been on a “rent strike.”
At a North Carolina Democratic Socialists of America meeting where she spoke last August, Rosenthal, 39 — who pridefully posed for a snap on Karl Marx’s grave during a trip to London — sang the blues about what she claimed were horrendous conditions she had to endure in 2021.
“As soon as I moved in, I realized that we had roaches . . . and I lost my mind,” she said of the two-bedroom pad that occupies the top floor of a brownstone. “I was very angry. . . . it’s really gross.”
She said the landlord refused to hire an exterminator, and after finding out the building had more rental units than were legally approved and was facing foreclosure, she organized with the other tenants to eventually stop paying rent, stiffing the owner of at least $108,000 on her unit alone.
“We’ve been on rent strike ever since,” she said proudly.
Her Bed-Stuy landlord, Adetunji Akinboboye, eventually lost the building to foreclosure in 2023.
US Bank, the new owner, is now suing Rosenthal, along with four other tenants, for eviction, saying they have “squatted upon the premises,” according to records filed in housing court in November. The cases are still before the courts.
Source: New York Post
Rosenthal even wrote a book in 2024 about tenant activism called, “Abolish Rent”, where she lays out the escalating tactics from creating tenant collectives to rent strikes.
“We pay rent at the peril of our need and at the barrel of a gun,” she said at a meeting in 2024 in Midtown.
“It’s a ransom,” she raged. “We know that if we don’t make this payment, our landlords can call on agents of state violence who can use physical force to throw us outdoors.”
The more inflammatory techniques she pushes include camping outside a landlord’s home; shaming them in front of their neighbors, friends and family; leaving “really bad Yelp reviews;” and even crashing their children’s weddings — something she brazenly did with a tenant union in Beverly Hills in 2023.
Source: New York Post
Here she is talking about her anti-rent positon:
🚨 Meet the “Abolish Rent” Ideologue Teaching DSA Tenant Organizers How to Wage War on Landlords
Tracy Rosenthal co-founded the Los Angeles Tenants Union, helps politically educate DSA tenant organizers, and is currently on rent strike in New York City.
In this supercut,… pic.twitter.com/0fw5wi30rt
— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) July 17, 2026
What a charmer!
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have embraced Rosenthal and her aggressive anti-rent playbook because the entire goal is to shift control of housing away from landlords. Of course. She has been speaking at DSA events across the country for the past two years.
Mamdani is giving a nod to her strategies. On Aug. 4, Mamdani signed a “Right to Organize” letter to remind renters that they have a right to knock on their neighbors’ doors and form tenant associations to pressure landlords. The city also produced a mini documentary about a tenants’ union that Rosenthal helped organize to secure repairs and the forgiveness of millions of dollars in back rent in 93 buildings after the former Pinnacle Group declared bankruptcy and sold its 5,200 property portfolio.
Tracy Rosenthal is a rising star in the DSA, and her tactics are working.
The question is, will the DSA care that their anti-rent activist queen is a nepo baby? Probably not. The hypocrisy doesn’t seem to matter if the tactics are working.
And remember kiddies, this is the future of the Democratic Party.
