“One thing I learned from working on the Edison,” he said, “is that lots of people are angry, lots are complaining — they’re just not sure what to do. They don’t know that there are real solutions already out there.”

Among those solutions, Mr. Moss maintains, is the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, which was first introduced in the City Council in 1986 and is intended to provide commercial tenants with the legal means to negotiate rent disputes with landlords. While the bill was re-sponsored last year by Councilwoman Annabel Palma, a Democrat from the Bronx, and has the support of politicians like Gale A. Brewer, the Manhattan Borough president, who is also a Democrat, the real-estate industry opposes it. Nonetheless, Mr. Moss argues that by gathering an army of complainers — “A crowd is loud,” he said — he can get it passed as part of his broader agenda: to cap the number of chain stores in the city, to fine landlords who leave their storefronts empty and to create a special landmarks program that would seek suggestions from communities to preserve important cultural institutions, not just the buildings that surround them.

This essentially conservative approach to urban land management has drawn criticism from those who find Mr. Moss’s distaste for change elitist and counterproductive. Last month, The New York Observer wrote an unflattering article about him that employed the phrase “The Tyranny of Nostalgia.” Other publications, like The Economist, have argued that restrictive zoning laws constrain information-based economies in cities like New York.

But drawing on the work of the Marxist geographer Neil Smith, Mr. Moss has advanced a theory that today’s pervasive gentrification started in the 1990s as a revanchist assault on crime, disorder and general funkiness by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican. The terrorist attack of Sept. 11 deepened the city’s psychic need for security and comfort, Mr. Moss said, and by the time Mr. Bloomberg came to power in 2002, many residents were responsive to his vision of New York as a corporatized citadel of luxury and money.

That vision has persisted, Mr. Moss contends, despite the arrival of Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat. Just a few months ago, the Center for an Urban Future issued a study announcing that Manhattan alone now has more than 2,800 chain stores, a 10 percent increase since 2009. Over roughly the same period, the city has been flooded by a transformative tide of international capital, much of which has flowed into the upper reaches of the real estate market, crowding out affordable housing, Mr. Moss has argued, and leading to a general rise in rents.