Fordham University students tackle affordable housing reform

At Fordham University, two sophomores are leading a student-driven push for affordable housing reform, starting with a new effort aimed at protecting tenants from predatory landlords.

Angelo Mazza and Farid Sofiyev, both 19, founded Civic Reset last year, a nonprofit focused on promoting evidence-based solutions to New York City’s housing shortage while amplifying the voices of renters and young residents. In less than a year, the organization has expanded to multiple campuses and launched an online tool that allows tenants to anonymously report landlords.

Now live on the group’s website, the feature allows renters to submit complaints, including names and photographic documentation of alleged unsafe conditions or hidden fees. The founders say submissions will be reviewed and compiled into a free, searchable database so prospective tenants can research landlords before signing a lease.
“Our goal is to gather enough of that to then make a public database and publicly whistleblow these landlords anonymously, so that when renters are looking, they’re going to go and check our database to see if that landlord is on it,” Mazza said.

Currently, tenants often must search multiple city systems, including housing violation records and 311 complaint data, to piece together a landlord’s history. Mazza and Sofiyev said their aim is to make that process easier and more transparent, particularly for young renters navigating the market for the first time.

Mazza, an Indiana native, said his interest in housing reform began when he struggled to find an apartment after moving to New York for college.

“When I moved out here two years ago, that’s when I started realize the real issue of the housing crisis,” he said. “Once I started looking for a place to live and saw firsthand how bad it really was, it made me passionate to make a tangible change and influence the communities that I’m part of.”

Sofiyev, who grew up in Astoria, agreed, adding he’s watched rising rents reshape neighborhoods he knows well.
“You see a lot of native New Yorkers just continuously moving further and further out, while the city just gets more and more expensive,” he said.

While Civic Reset’s newest initiative focuses on tenant protection, the founders say the broader housing crisis cannot be addressed without looking at how the city builds in the first place. At the heart of their advocacy is zoning — the land-use rules that determine what can be constructed and where.

Large portions of New York City remain zoned for low-density housing, limiting construction to smaller residential buildings even in areas near transit. Mazza and Sofiyev said they initially believed the solution was simply to build more housing. But after studying neighborhoods such as Long Island City, they said they began to see the limits of growth without sufficient infrastructure.

“You could expand anything, all that you want, but if there’s not enough bus, train or even walkability infrastructure, it’s not really going to go anywhere,” Sofiyev said. “So for us, most of the downsides were such a large group of people with not enough services to accommodate them.”

Their focus has shifted toward what they describe as “middle” solutions — mixed-use zoning that allows mid-rise apartment buildings, typically seven or eight stories, with retail and neighborhood services on the ground floor rather than isolated high-rise towers.

“Once you start to look into it, there becomes a lot of issues,” Mazza said. “So we realized that the answer sits somewhere in the middle, and it’s advocating for more mixed-use zoning that you see, where a lot of the buildings are seven, eight stories.”

Civic Reset has grown quickly. The organization now includes chapter leaders at campuses across the country and abroad.

“We have people that aren’t even from New York, they’re still passionate about changing it,” Sofiyev said. “We had someone join from the London School of Economics, which is just crazy from the other continent. But right now we’re focusing mainly on New York. We do realize that the fight for affordability is global.”

“If so many people are really passionate about housing and affordability, then that means that young people do care,” Mazza said. “Maybe they just aren’t doing anything about it. So what we’ll do is we’ll do something about it, and give them an opportunity to do something about it as well.”