She’s unplugged from reality.
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.
While framing herself as a champion of the proletariat, Tracy Rosenthal grew up in a trendy $1.7 million NoMad pad with elite access to the music industry — attending the Grammys at least twice with her dad, four-time winner Steven Rosenthal.
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.”
Yet despite her first-class upbringing, she’s been on a four-year “rent strike” since moving back to New York City after a stint in Los Angeles — because the Bolshevik bugged out after spotting a cockroach in her hip $2,300 a month Bed-Stuy apartment.
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.
Earlier this year, the building on quiet tree-lined Hancock Street was placed under the Housing Preservation Department’s Alternative Enforcement Program — meaning the landlord had a few months to address tenants’ complaints. It was removed from the program on July 14 after resolving the issues, according to a city notice taped to the front door this week.
This is the same program the Mamdani administration wants to use to “seize housing,” a previous Post analysis found — and which received a $2 billion budget boost. It can lead to the city dragging the landlord to court if it doesn’t do the repairs, and a housing court judge appointing a non-profit to take over the management of the building.
“They feel entitled to these properties,” said Stu Smith, investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute, who has been studying Rosenthal and the “rent abolitionist” movement.
“I consider her to be a saboteur, I consider her to be a gaslighter. And the fact that the Mamdani administration wants to highlight her as a hero speaks to the ethics and morality of the mayor’s office.”
Rosenthal’s 2024 book “Abolish Rent” lays out the playbook of escalating tactics she used herself — starting with talking to neighbors to identify shared grievances and making collective demands all the way to rent strikes — with the broader goal of shifting control of housing away from landlords.
It’s helped popularize a confrontational model of tenant activism and become a foundational tome for the DSA, which had her to speak to chapters across the nation for the past two years.
“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.
Rosenthal — who posted “death to America” the night Mamdani clinched the Democratic primary last year and is a visiting scholar at the woke CUNY — put some of these tactics into practice as a strategist in a high-profile battle involving renters across 93 New York City buildings owned by Pinnacle Group, the focus of Mamdani’s taxpayer-funded “mini doc” released this week.
She helped tenants organize into a union that secured repairs and had millions of dollars in back rent forgiven, after the bankrupt landlord sold its 5,200-unit portfolio in the Bronx and Brooklyn.
“Really just everyone should feel so proud of the work that they did advocating for themselves and their neighbors,” Rosenthal says in the City Hall film, where she’s seen celebrating with tenants.
On the day the doc launched, Aug. 4, Mamdani also signed a “Right to Organize” letter — reminding renters of their right to knock on their neighbors’ doors and form tenant associations — echoing Rosenthal’s very techniques.
She proudly shared pictures posing alongside Hizzoner on social media, like at a “Hold Bad Landlords Accountable” photo op at City Hall in May and of the two strategizing during a recent Zoom meeting, according to her now-private Instagram account.
“Absolute banner year for tenant power . . . so much is possible when we organize,” she gloated in an Instagram post in June after the NYC rent freeze was passed.
Rosenthal has been likened to Mamdani tenant czar Cea Weaver — who also hails from an affluent family. The pair regularly speak alongside each other at events and were even featured together in a 2020 Teen Vogue article that framed them as tenant leaders, during the magazine’s activist era under uber woke editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner.
Rosenthal’s dad, who did not return The Post’s request for comment, has also battled landlords.
The Magic Shop was forced to shut down in 2016 after a years-long dispute with the landlord.
Her father, with the financial backing of the Foo Fighter’s Dave Grohl, tried to buy the space as a last-ditch effort, but the building’s co-op board rejected his bid.
Tracy Rosenthal did not return The Post’s calls and messages.
Read the full article here
