Homeward Bound in the Big Apple

If the Democratic discourse du jour pits populist socialism against technocratic “abundance,” nobody seems to have told New York City voters. One the same day that a majority chose Zohran Mamdani to be the second-ever democratic socialist occupant of Gracie Mansion (and a decidedly more fervent one than David Dinkins), voters also overwhelmingly approved three amendments to the city’s charter that would streamline the bureaucratic morass around housing construction.

The ballot questions proposed technical tweaks more than sweeping restructurings. The first will create two fast tracks for housing developments that require city approval: One applies to 100% “deeply affordable” projects citywide, and the other covers developments composed of at least one-quarter permanently affordable units, in the 12 districts of the city that produce the least affordable housing (currently a union of the wealthy, white upper sides of Manhattan and majority-homeowner neighborhoods at the edges of the outer boroughs).¹ The second proposal will allow for expedited review of “modest zoning changes” like one-to-four-story housing in low-density neighborhoods, climate resiliency upgrades and public acquisitions of private housing for dispensation to tenants or other stewards. The last and most controversial amendment replaces the City Council’s de facto veto power over affordable projects: For decades, an informal policy known as “member deference” has meant that a councilmember can singlehandedly decide the fate of projects in their district (similar norms exist elsewhere, like Chicago’s “aldermanic prerogative”). Now, the City Council’s decision can be reviewed and potentially reversed by a vote from an appeals board composed of the mayor, City Council speaker, and the relevant borough president.

Supporters argue that these amendments will help insulate decisions that affect the entire city from their loudest local opponents, delivering more housing quicker. Critics claim that diluting the City Council’s power will remove a vital point of leverage for local residents and organizations to push for projects that include deeper affordability and broader community benefits. At issue is the role of “community input”— but a lot depends on how you define a “community,” and what democratic “input” looks like. Is it a working-class tenant in Washington Heights pleading for more affordable units, or a MAGA homeowner in Whitestone railing against low-income rentals? The city’s feeble housing production — New York ranks 35th for new construction among major metro areas — and 1.4% vacancy rate suggests the latter group has been more successful.

Still, given the relatively narrow scope of the new revisions, both sides are likely overstating their impacts. Government review, however lengthy, is only one of many obstacles to financing and building new housing in America’s largest city. Mamdani, for his part, studiously avoided taking a public position on any of the proposals before announcing his support on the morning of Election Day. He likely kept quiet in part out of a desire to preserve finite political capital with the City Council, whose members were so incensed by the proposals that they spent $2 million in taxpayer money on mailers that featured a grim black-and-white photo of a man with his mouth taped shut, ostensibly silenced by a land use review process with one fewer step. Mamdani will take office with the benefit of these tilts toward executive power already in place. But just because this particular war has ended doesn’t mean the battle lines will suddenly melt away. The incoming administration must build a popular coalition around housing development; how it does so has the potential to make or break New York’s nascent experiment in municipal socialism.

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More than perhaps any other terrain of urban politics, land use fights tend to scramble familiar alignments and create odd ideological bedfellows. In New York, the vast majority of an otherwise progressive City Council joined hands with powerful unions representing building staff, hotel workers and carpenters to slam the proposals.² They found common cause with tenant groups like the Metropolitan Council on Housing, TenantsPAC and the Crown Heights Tenant Union, as well as various lefty social media accounts with tens of thousands of followers, but also with Republican mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa and the council’s conservative Common Sense Caucus.

The proposals’ supporters spanned a similarly wide range, from socialist Mamdani to progressive Comptroller Brad Lander to centrist Gov. Kathy Hochul; from soon-to-be has-beens Mayor Eric Adams and mayoral challenger Andrew Cuomo to a bevy of good-government and social service nonprofits; and a slew of borough presidents looking to reclaim a degree of power for their largely vestigial offices. The New York Apartment Association (NYAA), the city’s largest landlord group, posted some brief supportive videos featuring its CEO: Mamdani’s Bronx Science classmate and political Wario, Kenny Burgos, a young, charismatic former state assemblymember with a penchant for social media explainers. But on the real estate side, the advocacy charge was led by community development corporations and nonprofit housing developers. Most tenant groups — themselves compelled to triangulate between the mayor and City Council — stayed silent, though Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator for the New York State Tenant Bloc, a large coalition of tenant organizations, noted her personal support.

In the end, the housing ballot questions slightly outperformed Mamdani, garnering around 58% of the vote to the mayor-elect’s 50%. The proposals won out in 50 of the city’s 65 state Assembly districts — including every one won by Mamdani, as well as six won by Cuomo. And like Mamdani, the proposals had majority support in areas of the city representing nearly every demographic, except Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish communities and outer-borough neighborhoods with high concentrations of white or Chinese homeowners. (In the general election Mamdani saw especially notable growth in public housing developments and areas with Black homeowners, which he overwhelmingly lost in the primary.)

A new openness to development seems to have taken hold in New York. During much of the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations, tenant groups focused disproportionately on opposing neighborhood rezonings and individual developments, expending organizing energy trying to negotiate for projects with more affordable apartments and community amenities, or to block projects entirely. While the strategy yielded some local successes — more low-rent units here, fewer luxury units there — the scale of the city’s housing crisis showed the limits of this reactive, piecemeal approach. Toward the end of the de Blasio era, tenant groups began directing more effort toward broader fights like strengthening rent stabilization, expanding eviction protections, building social housing and increasing funding for vouchers for people at risk of homelessness. While local battles continued, they were less of a focus. This change has contributed to a growing latitude of left opinion toward private development.

In 2022, Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed Councilmember Tiffany Cabán made waves by supporting a rezoning in her (and then-Assemblymember Mamdani’s) district in Astoria, Queens, arguing that while for-profit development could not provide housing for those in the lowest-income brackets, it could serve as “harm reduction,” creating more supply and easing cost pressures in middle and upper bands of the market. More recently, Councilmembers Chi Ossé and Crystal Hudson, both part of the council’s Progressive Caucus, vocally advocated for a plan to upzone sections of Atlantic Avenue in their central Brooklyn districts. A shift of mayoral strategy toward citywide proposals has proved more successful than even these efforts focused on specific neighborhoods. All but one member of the Progressive Caucus voted for Mayor Adams’ signature City of Yes plan, which (mostly) allows for slight zoning increases citywide, aiming to incentivize construction of 80,000 new units over the next 10 years. Once the proposal was negotiated to include $5 billion for housing and infrastructure investment, it passed the council by a vote of 31 to 20.

Mamdani has openly discussed his own evolution on the issue. In a New York Times interview in June, he acknowledged “the role of the private market in housing construction” as an area where he has changed his mind. That role was “very important,” he said, “and one that city government must facilitate … in tandem with a muscular role for the public sector.” His campaign sought to balance those dual commitments, and in the process to build a coalition that includes those on both sides of development debates. Lefties still skeptical of uncut YIMBYism have been thrilled by Mamdani’s public sector plan to triple the city’s production of government-subsidized, permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes, pledging to construct 200,000 new units over the next decade. Meanwhile, his private sector plan, focused on removing superfluous bureaucratic checks, has endeared him to some supply-side critics skeptical of his ability to convince Albany to raise the city’s borrowing limit.

Not only did Mamdani’s campaign propose to pursue a comprehensive city plan (rather than local rezonings), fast-track 100% affordable development, incentivize development around transit hubs and eliminate parking minimums; he has also mooted reforms to bring down landlord costs. His proposal to expedite the removal of sidewalk scaffolding — unsightly corridors of steel and plywood that clog city blocks for years on end — could lead to significant savings. Skyrocketing increases in property and liability insurance premiums, driven primarily by catastrophic climate change-related losses elsewhere in the country, are the fastest growing costs for landlords. Mamdani has signaled general support for reforms and backed creative initiatives to combat hikes, like the Milford Street Association Captive Insurance Co. (his explanation of this innovation on the manospheric “Flagrant” podcast with Andrew Schulz could be the single most sublime instance of Zohranism to date). Last, Mamdani has pledged to aggressively fight for changes to New York City’s outdated, regressive property tax system, which disproportionately taxes apartment buildings and homeowners in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods while capping costs in wealthier areas. But while every mayor this century has backed property tax reform, none has put political capital behind an effort so sure to make powerful enemies.

This suite of policies could not only dwarf the effects of City of Yes, let alone the recent ballot proposals, but potentially begin to reshape political coalitions around housing. Central to Mamdani and President Donald Trump’s shockingly positive first meeting was mutual agreement on the need for new construction and reform of the city’s land use review process, goals apparently now supported by a majority of New Yorkers. For now, the goodwill generated by that overlap seems to have contributed to Trump’s decision to not deploy the National Guard in the city or pursue aggressive federal disinvestment — though it remains to be seen if those benefits will last. Just days after the White House meeting, five members of the City Council’s Progressive Caucus allied with MAGA Republicans and outer-borough moderates — all united in hostility to new development — to elevate a wealthy Upper East Sider to the influential role of City Council speaker, who has explicitly promised to block Mamdani’s agenda.

Movement toward realignment seems possible, but fragile. Property tax reform might help dissolve the bond between large landlord groups (who already benefit from major tax abatements) and outer-borough homeowners, who often find themselves lobbying against tenant protections that don’t actually apply to them, in exchange for the support of a more powerful lobby. Affordable housing developers with thin margins, who would benefit most from fast-tracking, could likewise break with big industry groups run by indignant billionaires. (Recent reporting suggests even outfits like Burgos’ NYAA are resigned to working with Mamdani, and see opportunities for collaboration.) Tenant groups opposed to new private construction could be swayed toward bigger fights for social housing. But will each part of this diverse coalition hold together if Mamdani commits himself to proposals they see as misguided or harmful?

In Chicago, embattled Mayor Brandon Johnson has attempted a similar balancing act. His administration has implemented nearly a hundred supply-side reforms, including a reduction of parking minimums far more aggressive than Mayor Adams’ in New York. But even the optimistic case for supply-side reforms concedes that the real benefits don’t materialize until after years of development. On the public side, Johnson created a social housing developer for the city, and most notably, tried and failed to pass a referendum known as Bring Chicago Home, which would have hiked the city’s real estate transfer tax on expensive properties to pay for homelessness prevention programs. Fairly or not, without tangible wins in the present, Johnson has become synonymous with mayoral failure.

His unpopularity is not the fault of housing policy alone. Like Adams, Johnson faced widespread backlash over his handling of the migrant crisis, and has been seen by critics as hamstrung by an administration stocked with incompetent allies (in his case, the Chicago Teachers Union and a network of politically connected pastors, rather than the petty criminals and Balkan real estate impresarios preferred by Adams). But even before the failure of Bring Chicago Home, a survey found that nearly 70% of Chicagoans disapproved of Johnson’s housing policy. As in any political coalition, it’s a high-wire act to keep everyone happy, and the fall can be fast and painful.

For his part, Mamdani’s predecessor is doing what he can to wrong-foot the incoming mayor. It appears last-minute chicanery from Adams could permanently block Mamdani from fulfilling his pledge to build deeply affordable low-income senior housing on the site of the Elizabeth Street Garden, a city-owned lot in downtown Manhattan illegally seized by an art dealer in 1990 and turned into a semiprivate green space, which became a cause célèbre of a horseshoe alliance of right-wing New York Post readers and celebrity NIMBYs. But if Mamdani himself had brought the bulldozers down on such a social media sensation, would parts of his young online base have turned against him? When Mamdani’s citywide comprehensive plan upzones widely, will groups who opposed City of Yes and the charter revision questions defy him with the same vigor? If, like so many mayors before him, he abandons his push for property tax reform, will the moderate pro-development groups that have held some of their fire choose to unleash it against him?

Challenging in the best of conditions, these efforts stand to be further rocked by a coming wave of distress in buildings containing thousands of rent-stabilized homes. In the 2010s, flush with low-interest loans, many landlords speculated wildly, buying up rent-regulated buildings at inflated prices, on the assumption that their apartments would soon be deregulated. In 2019, new state laws effectively banned such deregulation along with other rent-raising loopholes, and suddenly debt service became unsustainable. Further burdened by dizzying spikes in insurance rates and post-COVID inflation of maintenance costs, many over-leveraged buildings are reaching a crisis point. Eliding this complex and unflattering story, landlords have seized on the resulting wave of foreclosures and bankruptcies to argue that the 2019 rent laws, and rent stabilization in general, have made operating rental housing impossible. When Mamdani delivers a rent freeze for stabilized tenants, that argument will go into hyperdrive, and the resulting political crisis could distract from the more forward-facing parts of the administration’s agenda. An already tenuous coalition with very different ideas for solutions could be torn apart.

There will, in the end, be winners and losers, and neither the most expansive platform nor Mamdani’s trademark charisma can keep all parties on the same side. The results of the last two citywide development battles suggest the factions more opposed to private construction represent far from a majority of the city’s residents, and an especially small minority in the more renter-heavy neighborhoods of his base. But Mamdani must also look beyond which coalition can deliver wins now, and consider the institutions and constituencies — like tenant unions — from which the socialist project can derive durable power, and how his administration can help build them up.

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For all the daunting challenges ahead, Mamdani’s ambition has given him a wider range of possible outcomes than past mayors. A scope of change has been opened far beyond patchwork rezonings, with their messy politics, slow implementation and limited impact. “American planning is so tethered to zoning in large part because it is the last option available,” Samuel Stein wrote recently in The New York Review of Books. “To move beyond these limited horizons, we need politics: political movements of organized people fighting for their interests and contesting those who exploit them. Rezoning should be a component of those politics, but it cannot be their sum.”

The full breadth of Mamdani’s platform, beyond even his bold and diverse housing proposals, offers useful tools for such a movement. Key to many of his proposals is immediacy: While new development, either public or private, can take years to happen and even longer to alter market dynamics, programs like a rent freeze for rent-stabilized tenants, or even property tax reform, can be felt as soon as passed. As such, these policies generate opportunity for coalition-building in the here and now, reshaping alliances that have otherwise ossified into debates over zoning alone, and perhaps even building buy-in for long-term solutions. Mamdani opened his victory speech by quoting Eugene Debs’ sighting of “the dawn of a better day for humanity.” That dawn can only break over a political horizon significantly wider than what has come before. The results of New York’s election show a city ready for one.

1. Affordable housing refers to units with regulated rents, restricted for households making below a specified percentage of Area Median Income (AMI). The level of affordability can depend on which city programs are involved in a specific project, but one study found that from 2014 to 2020, 15.5 percent of affordable units went to tenants making 0–30 percent of AMI (extremely low income), 28.5 percent went to those making to 31–50 percent AMI (very low income), and 40 percent went to those making to 51–80 percent AMI (low income). Deeply affordable housing refers to units restricted to households earning at or below 40 percent of AMI, currently $44,000 for a couple or $54,000 for a family of four. ↩︎
2. Building staff and construction trades unions have a long record of backing pro-development policies, but in this case feared the proposed changes would weaken their ability to ensure that new projects employ union labor. ↩︎