Zohran Mamdani has ambitious goals for making housing affordable. Officials from the past two mayoral administrations say making those plans a reality will take tremendous management and strong relationships with the city council and Albany.
Apartment buildings in Queens at dusk. (Benjamin Kanter/Mayoral Photo Office)
Why is the rent so damn high?
It’s a question New Yorkers want their mayor to answer. Fed up with the high cost of housing, New York City Democratic voters powered Queens Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani to an upset victory in last month’s mayoral primary.
He’ll now head into the general election on Nov. 4 against incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, Republican Curtis Sliwa, independent Jim Walden and possibly former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is still deciding whether to remain in the race on the independent line.
Mamdani’s campaign put affordability at the forefront. Housing, the largest expense in many household budgets, was the top issue for voters in some polls, and several told City Limits that housing affordability was one of their main concerns.
“People are struggling and every little bit helps,” said Michael Campos, 38, on the cost of housing. Campos works in a warehouse and ranked Mamdani first when he went to the polls in Prospect Heights on June 24.
Nearly every primary candidate had a plan for housing affordability. From building hundreds of thousands of new units, prioritizing income-restricted housing, pushing large-scale zoning reform, to building new neighborhoods on city-owned golf courses, there was no shortage of big ideas.
Mamdani, now the Democratic nominee for mayor, called for a four-year freeze on rent in the 2.4 million stabilized units citywide, constructing 200,000 affordable apartments, and fully staffing city housing agencies.
“I love that there is ambition in his and many other plans. It’s clear that the number one issue is affordability,” said Maria Torres-Springer, former deputy mayor for housing under Mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent in November’s general election..
Housing officials from the past two administrations told City Limits that the mayor has significant agenda-setting power. But turning plans into reality is no cakewalk.
Mayors stretching back decades have struggled to get housing plans done in the nation’s densest city, where land is precious and building housing is increasingly expensive. “Housing is very complicated,” said Vicki Been, former deputy mayor for housing under Bill de Blasio’s administration, now with New York Law School and the Furman Center.
Almost any move on the mayor’s chessboard quickly entangles other institutions—like the City Council, the state legislature, and the governor—which can control or influence tax policy, land use, and budgets.
“A mayor is incredibly constrained compared to what I think people believe to be the case, being the mayor of the nation’s largest city,” said Been.
Here’s what the next mayor can do on day one, and what they may need a little help with.
People power
The mayor has direct control over who they appoint: to set rent for rent stabilized tenants, review land use applications, oversee NYCHA, and run city agencies that build housing.
Mayors have, “through [their] appointees, very strong control over housing policy within the city,” said Carl Weisbrod, former City Planning Commission chair and director of the New York City Department of City Planning during the de Blasio administration.
“If you want world class results on your housing plans, you need world class talent,” added Torres-Springer.
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign has promised to appoint a Rent Guidelines Board that would freeze rent all four years, a move that some critics say undermines the independence of the board. Landlord groups, like the New York Apartment Association’s Kenny Burgos, questioned the legality of such a move on X.
But Mamdani and former Mayor de Blasio have maintained that rent freezes are within the mayor’s control, regardless of what the board’s economic analysis might say.
Members of the Rent Guidelines Board voting last week on rent changes for the city’s stabilized apartments. The mayor appoints the board’s members. (Photo by Adi Talwar)
NYU Law School’s Been emphasized that appointment is a powerful, but not unlimited, tool.
“You have the enormous power of appointment and you have the power to try to persuade those people, but if they don’t vote the way that you want them to vote, your remedy is to fire them and to appoint somebody else. But that’s heavy handed, and it’s going to get attention. You have those powers, but you have to use them wisely,” she said.
To make meaningful progress on new development, particularly affordable housing, Torres-Springer said you need the “plumbing” of government to function. “You need the coordination and the cooperation of so many agencies so that an idea of a [housing] project goes from a kernel of that idea to actually being occupied by a real human being.”
“You’re a manager of an enormous, enormous corporation,” added Been.
In New York, housing (and particularly affordable housing) is expensive, and can take a long time to build. If a project requires zoning changes, it must also go through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), where community boards, borough presidents, the planning commission, and the City Council all weigh in and negotiate the changes, a process that can take months.
Mamdani has touted the importance of government efficiency as part of a broader platform to deliver affordability. “As someone who is very passionate about public goods, I think that we on the left have to be equally passionate about public excellence,” said Mamdani in an appearance on the “Plain English” podcast before the primary.
“Any example of public inefficiency is an opportunity for the argument to be made against the very existence of the public sector,” he added. “And so to truly make the case time and time again that local government has a role in providing that which is necessary to live a dignified life, you have to ensure that every example of the government’s attempt to do so is one that is actually successful.”
Making that government apparatus work “entails a maniacal focus on execution,” said Torres-Springer. “In New York you don’t get credit for effort. You get credit for fixing what’s broken and for scaling what works.”
Money makes the (housing) world go round
When it comes to securing public money for housing projects and programs, the mayor sets the table with their policies, but needs the help of the City Council and the state legislature to make them a reality.
“These executives and legislative bodies do operate in some degree of tension, even in the best of times,” said Weisbrod.
The mayor sets the agenda when it comes to the operating budget (which controls housing programs) and the capital budget (which finances the construction of new housing). “But both budgets have to be ultimately approved by the City Council,” said Weisbrod.
That can introduce complicated tradeoffs. “The mayor—everybody—says that they want affordable housing, but they also want libraries and schools and parks and all of those other things,” said Been.
As deputy mayor, Been recalls being confused when the de Blasio administration put out a budget proposal with cuts to libraries. “We have to… go through this dance because we have to be able to satisfy the City Council. We’ve given to their projects, but then they get a lot of pressure from the libraries, and then we can then take some back from what they got in order to give to the libraries.”
The mayor also sets policy priorities for agencies—whether they focus on housing production, preservation, or homelessness. “Once the budget is passed, then [the mayor] has enormous control over how it’s actually spent,” said Weisbrod.
The state, meanwhile, controls key tax incentives, like 485x, where developers get a tax abatement in exchange for affordable units—essential given the high costs of building housing, experts say. 421a, the predecessor of 485x, was used to produce 68 percent of new units from 2010 to 2020, according to the Furman Center.
Mamdani’s plan calls for major capital investments in housing: borrowing $100 billion in bonds up from the $30 billion the city has already pledged. That may require asking the state for permission to borrow $70 billion in municipal bonds, above the city’s current debt limit.
Separately, he hopes to raise revenue for programs through an increase in corporate taxes and on the 1 percent. That would require getting the governor and Albany on board.
Gov. Kathy Hochul expressed an openness to work with the presumptive democratic nominee on X last week. But she remained skeptical about tax increases as she faces reelection next year.
“If it gives you sticker shock, it’s because our housing crisis is really acute, and it’s going to take really dramatic action,” said Torres-Springer.
New housing under construction in Harlem in 2020. (Photo by Adi Talwar)
Land use scars
The mayor has power to activate city-owned land in the five boroughs.
But broader changes to where the city can build housing, and how much it can build on any given parcel, require extensive review by the public and collaboration with the City Council. And ultimately the city’s land use powers are limited to what the state permits it to control.
Weisbrod was encouraged to see growing consensus among candidates that the city needs to produce more affordable housing, leveraging public capacity and also the private sector through zoning changes.
Housing officials say working with the private sector is essential to getting anything built. “Government can’t do it alone, either. There aren’t enough dollars,” said Torres-Springer.
Mamdani changed his tune on leveraging the private market in housing construction in an interview with the New York Times that caught the eye of many housing wonks.
“I clearly recognize now that there is a very important role [for the private sector] to be played, and one that city government must facilitate through the increasing of density around mass transit hubs, the ending of the requirement to build parking lots, as well as the need to upzone neighborhoods that have historically not contributed to affordable housing production—namely, wealthier neighborhoods,” Mamdani said.
Eric Adams administration’s City of Yes, passed in January, allowed more housing density in neighborhoods across the city. “I’m hoping that what made the City of Yes possible and the rezonings that have been approved is not a flash in the pan,” said Torres-Springer.
But City of Yes showed that zoning reform is no easy task. As City Limits reported in January, what began as a proposal to spur 108,000 new units was chopped down to 82,000 as it moved through City Council review, with powerful councilmembers carving their own districts out from some of the changes.
Further complicating matters, Mayor Adams was then facing a corruption indictment from the Department of Justice (the case has since been controversially dropped).
The final City of Yes deal included a pledge of $5 billion for new housing, infrastructure upgrades and tenant protection measures—$4 billion from Mayor Adams and $1 billion from the state.
“It required a very smart, strategic, nuanced political strategy, and set of partnerships with people in the City Council and with the governor to get it over the finish line,” said Torres-Springer.
Sometimes zoning changes are initiated by private developers, who want to rezone a particular parcel. Other times, the mayor and city agencies initiate larger neighborhood rezonings, as the Adams administration has done in the Bronx, Atlantic Avenue, Midtown South, and Long Island City. But they almost always ignite local resistance.
It’s something Mayor Adams’ Charter Revision Commission, in its initial findings, wants to tackle, with several proposals to speed up the process for approving and building housing.
In addition to streamlining ULURP, it takes aim at an informal City Council practice that has held up housing production in the past: member deference. Under the norm, the Council won’t push through a land use issue unless the local councilmember is on board.
Those negotiations between the city, elected officials, and local groups can be complicated. Sometimes, as Been recalled, it requires getting the state involved. For example, if there’s a rezoning and the local community wants to secure improvements to a state-owned park in the deal, it means calling up Albany.
“I just don’t think people understand how interwoven it all is, and you’ve got to be negotiating on all of those different fronts,” said Been. “The mayor is beholden to the state in so many ways.”
Those extensive negotiations create many veto points. Sometimes they result in tangible benefits for the community, like more affordable units. But other times they slow the pace of housing construction to a crawl.
“Every project that has to go through the land use process you can either see the best of our politics in New York or the worst of it,” said Torres-Springer.
The next mayor will likely have to navigate fundings cuts from the federal government. (Official White House photo by Molly Riley)
Fretting over the Feds
New York City is heavily reliant on the federal government to fund rental assistance, building repairs, homelessness programs, and more. NYCHA is particularly vulnerable, as it gets 75 percent of its funding from the federal government and has faced decades of disinvestment already.
“The better that relationship with both the president and the Congress, the better,” said Weisbrod. “But as we’re seeing, and as we’ve really seen over the sweep of my last 50 years, the federal government, irrespective of party or ideology or personality, has in some areas just totally withdrawn from housing policy.”
Congressional Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill,” which narrowly passed the house Thursday, sharply cuts medicaid and SNAP assistance, programs that are essential to addressing homelessness. The cuts mean that the state might have to fill holes in the safety net, possibly at the expense of housing and homelessness programs.
“Fundamentally, this is an issue of money,” said Weisbrod, emphasizing that strong leadership matters most in times of crisis and budget shortfalls. “It’s always easy to say we’ll do more with less, but really what it means is, can we use our less more efficiently, as opposed to really doing more, because in the housing area, money is the driver.”
More cuts, proposed in President Donald Trump’s budget for the next fiscal year and being considered by Congress in the coming months, would change the way New York gets money for housing, allocating it via a block grant rather than through the subsidy programs that currently support hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.
Should that come to pass, a good relationship between the next mayor and Albany will be even more important.
“If the states are getting the federal money, and it’s the states who are deciding how to allocate that federal money, then you know you really have to be able to get along with your governor,” said Been.
While it won’t be easy, experts hope the momentum around housing policy brings tangible results under the next administration.
“I think a path-breakingly diverse coalition made their preferences known [Primary election] night. That’s the type of support and coalition building that makes politics easier for anyone,” said Torres-Springer.
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