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Moving into an apartment in the city can easily cost more than $10,000 in upfront costs, including a security deposit, first month’s rent and a fee paid to the broker. The fee is typically more than one month’s rent, and right now the median rent is roughly $3,400.

The City Council approved a bill on Wednesday to shift the cost of broker fees to landlords in most cases.

The bill’s sponsor Chi Ossé, a progressive City Council member from Brooklyn, said that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s victory showed the urgent need for Democrats to address concerns over the cost of living.

“A cruel and unfair system that has persisted for decades will end,” Mr. Ossé said. “Democrats will prove we can tackle affordability. And the voters will see that government can work for them.”

Image Councilman Chi Ossé stands at a lectern in front of a group of people holding signs. Councilman Chi Ossé has talked about how difficult it was for him to find an affordable place to live.Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times

The New York broker fee system is atypical. In most other cities, landlords pay broker fees for rentals.

The real estate industry has strenuously opposed the bill. The powerful Real Estate Board of New York, the industry’s main lobbying arm, has argued that if landlords are forced to absorb broker fees, they would simply pass the cost on to renters by raising rents.

The bill, which had 33 sponsors in the 51-member City Council, passed 42 to 8, enough for a veto-proof majority that might be necessary if Mayor Eric Adams tries to stop the bill.

Mr. Adams, a Democrat who has close ties to real estate leaders, said at his weekly news conference on Tuesday that he had concerns about the bill and he did not want it to hurt small property owners.

“The bill has the right intention, but sometimes good intentions do not get the results you’re looking for,” he said, warning that the bill could lead to “permanent” rent increases.

The bill requires whoever hires a broker to pay the fee. Landlords and their agents would be required to disclose fees in listings and rental agreements. Violations could result in a civil penalty, including fines of up to $2,000. The bill would take effect 180 days after it becomes law.

The new rules apply to market-rate rentals and to rent stabilized apartments, which account for roughly a million homes in New York City and are overseen by the Rent Guidelines Board.

It has prominent supporters, including StreetEasy, the real estate listing website; Brad Lander, the city comptroller who is running for mayor; and Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist and former adviser to Michael R. Bloomberg when he was mayor.

The City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams, who supports the bill, said at a news conference on Wednesday that the Council was prepared to override a veto if necessary. She said she was surprised by the mayor’s comments because his administration was part of the negotiations and did not raise any major objections.

The relationship between Mr. Adams and Ms. Adams, who are not related, has grown increasingly contentious and they have disagreed over how to bring down housing costs.

The city’s rental vacancy rate hovers at close to 1 percent, the lowest it has been in more than 50 years.

James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said in a statement that the bill was “yet another instance of prioritizing ideology over economic and practical reality when it comes to the city’s rental housing stock.” He argued that the bill would raise rents and make it harder for tenants to find housing.

Broker fees were briefly banned in early 2020 under sweeping rent protection laws passed by the State Legislature. But the Real Estate Board of New York sued, and the fees were reinstated.

New York’s broker-fee framework was established decades ago, when brokers were the gatekeepers to rental units and earned fees for listing apartments in different publications and answering calls. But today, most renters find an apartment online, and some never meet a broker.

Mr. Ossé, 26, the Council’s only Gen Z member, shared his own struggle to find an affordable apartment in his district. He has used social media to rally support for the bill.

The Real Estate Board of New York started its own ad campaign this week, showing an image of an empty apartment listing without pictures and listing the size as “bigger than a toaster, smaller than a subway car.”

In response to Mr. Ossé’s bill, the ad says, “I am no longer able to share information on listings. I promise this apartment exists.”

“We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” the group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, said in its statement revoking the apology. The group marked the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by distributing a newspaper with a headline that used Hamas’s name for it: “One Year Since Al-Aqsa Flood, Revolution Until Victory” it read, over a picture of Hamas fighters breaching the security fence to Israel. And in an essay, it called the Oct. 7 attack a “moral, military and political victory,” and quoted Ismail Haniyeh, the assassinated former political leader of Hamas.

“The Palestinian resistance is moving their struggle to a new phase of escalation and it is our duty to meet them there,” the group wrote on Oct. 7 on Telegram. “It is our duty to fight for our freedom!” The group’s increasingly radical statements are being mirrored by pro-Palestinian groups on other college campuses, including in a series of social media posts this week that praised the Oct. 7 attack. They also reflect the influence of more extreme protest groups off campus, like Within Our Lifetime, that support violent attacks against Israel.

“Long live October 7th,” Nerdeen Kiswani, the head of Within Our Lifetime, wrote on X on Tuesday.

Image Nerdeen Kiswani, the founder of Within Our Lifetime, holds up her arms in the middle of a crowd of protesters, many wearing kaffiyehs.

Within Our Lifetime, a group founded by Nerdeen Kiswani, center, supports violent attacks against Israel. It is increasingly influential on campuses.Credit...Adam Gray for The New York Times

The rhetoric poses a challenge to university administrators who must decide how to handle students and student groups that take such positions. Their statements are broadly protected under the First Amendment but could lead to federal investigations into campus antisemitism or on campus discipline if they are deemed to create a hostile environment for Jewish students.

“Statements advocating for violence or harm are antithetical to the core principles upon which this institution was founded,” said Ben Chang, a spokesman for Columbia.

Oren Segal, vice president of the A.D.L. Center on Extremism, said that there were chants and other messages “filled with support for terrorist organizations” at many of the over 100 protests the organization tracked on and off campuses around the country marking the anniversary of Oct. 7.

“I mean, literally, there were images of paragliders,” he said, and added, “There were multiple chants of glory to the resistance.”

The Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities, and about 250 hostages were taken. Many hostages have died or been killed. Since the start of the war, more than 40,000 people in Gaza have been killed, according to local health officials. The majority of the people were civilians, and hundreds of thousands more have faced starvation.

Some students who have sympathy for pro-Palestinian student actions last semester disagree with the hard-line turn in the movement. In interviews at Columbia and Barnard last week, several students said that between student activists’ harsher stances, and the threats of punishment from administrators for participating in protests, their desire to protest has lessened.

“I think this whole situation and the way that it’s been handled on my campus has absolutely no eye for nuance,” said Bellajeet Sahota, a Barnard senior, who added she was “a little meek when it comes to campus protests.”

“I also think my fellow students, as much as I love them, also have no eye for nuance,” she said.

Students for Justice in Palestine, a pro-Palestinian student group that has chapters at hundreds of colleges across the country, was among the groups whose members posted praise for the Oct. 7 attack. “Al-Aqsa Flood was a historic act of resistance against decades of occupation, apartheid, and settler colonial violence,” the Brown chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine posted on Instagram.

The increasingly revolutionary tilt of the student movement reflects an internal push among many pro-Palestinian groups to align their goals with principles known as the Thawabet, crafted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1977. They include the right of Palestinians to armed resistance and to self-determination on all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

In a series of posts on Substack, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD, narrated its own evolution since last semester from an organization that saw itself in April as a “continuation of the Vietnam antiwar movement” focused on pushing Columbia to divest from Israel to one that now openly backs armed resistance by Hamas and other groups.

Citing revolutionary thinkers, like Vladimir Lenin and Frantz Fanon, it explained how solidarity was essential with members of the so-called Axis of Resistance — which includes Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas — because they oppose imperialism.

Since then, the group has praised a Tel Aviv attack by Palestinian militants that killed seven people at a light rail station on Oct. 1, including a mother who died while shielding her 9-month-old baby. It also praised Iran’s missile attack on the Jewish state that began that evening, calling it a “bold move.”

On Tuesday, the group said it rescinded an apology it made last spring about the behavior of Khymani James, a student who had said in a disciplinary hearing that “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and, “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”

“We let you down,” the group wrote in a statement, referring to Mr. James. No longer, the group vowed, would it “pander to liberal media to make the movement for liberation palatable.”

Mr. James, who is suing Columbia over his ongoing suspension, thanked the group. “I will not allow anyone to shame me for my politics,” he wrote on social media. “Anything I said, I meant it.”

Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace remain suspended at Columbia, but are active on social media. Some of their members organize through CUAD, which is not an officially recognized student group.