New York City Mayor Eric Adams compared an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor to a plantation owner after she complained about rising rents in New York. The exchange took place during a town hall meeting in the Washington Heights neighborhood on Wednesday.
In response to questions raised by Jeanie Dubnau, an assistant professor of biology at Rutgers University and decades long tenant advocate, Adams said: “Okay, first, if you’re going to ask a question, don’t point at me and don’t be disrespectful to me. I’m the mayor of this city and treat me with the respect I deserve to be treated.”
He continued: “I’m speaking to you as an adult. Don’t stand in front like you treated someone that’s on the plantation that you own”
Jeanie Dubnau was born in Belgium after her parents fled Nazi Germany. She is well known in New York as an advocate for tenants’ rights as the co-founder of the Riverside Edgecombe Neighborhood Association (RENA).
This woman is Jeanie Dubnau, the Co-Founder of the Riverside Edgecombe Neighborhood Association (RENA), a tenants & housing rights advocacy organization in Upper Manhattan. She has +40 years advocating for low income NYers of all races. Jeanie is not a racist & this was wrong. https://t.co/KA3lEQDlYu
— Juan Rosa (@JuanRosa_NYC) June 29, 2023
According to The New York Post Dubnau said that Adams’ response to her was merely “to avoid accountability for his policies:
He didn’t have an answer,” she said. “That was just a deflection that’s all, because he doesn’t have any answers.”
“He’s a landlord himself. He said, ‘Oh, I don’t raise the rent on my own tenants.’ Who cares about his own personal tenants? He’s raising the rents on thousands and thousands of people in New York City.”
Dubnau said Wednesday’s meeting proved that Adams is “an enemy of all the rent-stabilized tenants in New York City.”
“You know, Mayor Adams is a landlord stooge and the enemy of tenants in New York City,” she said. “He gets millions of dollars from real estate.
“That’s the main issue here.”
She also isn’t holding her breath for an apology from the former NYPD captain.
“Oh, he’s not going to apologize,” she said. “I mean, you know the mayor. He thinks he’s the greatest and doesn’t want to be criticized.”
Adams spokesperson Fabien Levy defended Hizzoner’s outburst — saying “this administration has invested more money for housing than any in New York City history.”
“The mayor’s comments are the mayor’s comments. We stand by the mayor’s comments,” Levy said.
Dubnau was born in Belgium shortly after her parents fled the terrors of the Nazi regime in Germany.
After hiding out in Belgium and France throughout World War II, she and her parents emigrated to New York City when she was 8 years old and has resided in the Big Apple ever since.
Now a volunteer tenant organizer since 1960 and the current chairwoman of Riverside Edgecombe Neighborhood Association, Dubnau has publicly taken other mayors to task before.