Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed Executive Order 08 and did something no major American city has done before. He created a formal, government-backed series of public hearings called “Rental Ripoff Hearings” – designed with one specific purpose: to let tenants sit down with city officials, one-on-one, and tell them exactly what their landlords are doing to them.

That’s not a metaphor. These are literal hearings, scheduled across all five boroughs, where renters pre-register for a time slot and provide direct testimony to agency leadership from the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the Department of Buildings, and the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The hearings kicked off in Downtown Brooklyn on February 26 and will continue through Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island into April.

What can tenants testify about? Poor living conditions. Ignored repair requests. Non-rent “junk fees” – the kind of charges that show up on your bill for amenities, pets, payment processing, and services you may not have asked for. Unconscionable business practices. The stuff that, if you’re a renter, you’d recognize instantly.

Here’s what makes this more than a listening tour: Executive Order 08 requires city agencies to publish a report within 90 days of the final hearing, complete with policy recommendations and action plans drawn directly from tenant testimony. The hearings are open to the press and recorded. Each location also hosts a resource fair where tenants can connect with the city’s Tenant Support Unit for help with individual issues on the spot.

You’d think something like this would be standard practice in any state where renters face exploitation. It isn’t.

Rhode Island has no equivalent program. Not from the governor’s office, not from any municipality. And that’s striking, because we’ve covered the bad landlord problem extensively – the slumlords who let properties decay, the repeat code violators who face minimal consequences, the operators who collect rent on units that wouldn’t pass a basic safety inspection. Recent legislation has started to address some of these gaps, including new protections around security deposits and habitability standards. Those laws matter.

But laws on the books and laws that get enforced are two different things. What’s interesting about the New York model is that it creates a structured feedback loop between the people experiencing the problem and the agencies with the authority to act. It’s not a town hall where a politician nods sympathetically for an hour. It’s a mechanism – with a paper trail, a deadline, and a public record.

Rhode Island’s rental market is smaller than New York’s. The scale is different. But the dysfunction is familiar. And a smaller state should, in theory, be able to pull this off more easily. Fewer boroughs to cover. Fewer agencies to coordinate. A General Assembly and governor’s office that are, quite literally, a short drive from every renter in the state.

The question isn’t whether Rhode Island has a bad landlord problem. We’ve reported on it for years. The question is whether anyone in state or local government is willing to hand tenants a microphone – and then actually do something with what they hear.

New York just showed what that looks like. It would be worth paying attention.