July 4, 2025
Mamdani and Affordable Housing Development
CNN quoted me in Zohran Mamdani Has Big Housing Plans. Here’s What Stands in The Way. It reads, in part,
Mamdani’s rent freeze plan could undermine his goal of building 200,000 publicly subsidized, rent-stabilized, permanently affordable homes over the next decade for low-income households and seniors.
That’s because the private sector may be dissuaded from participating if these buildings don’t include market-rate housing. The private sector has a “very important role” to play in building housing, Mamdani has said.
“A rent freeze will change how a conversion might pay off for the developer,” said David Reiss, a law professor at Cornell University who served on the Rent Guidelines Board under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
And to be permanently affordable for extremely low-income renters, it will require deeper government subsidies than Mamdani has pledged, experts say. Previous New York City mayors have attempted to produce housing for a wide range of incomes to help offset higher subsidies for deeply-affordable units.
“It’s in the right direction to focus on people with the greatest affordability challenges,” said Alex Schwartz, an urban policy professor at The New School and a current member of the Rent Guidelines Board. “It’s important to recognize that the capital dollars won’t go as far in terms of total numbers of units if they only go toward people with extremely low incomes.”
Mamdani wants the city to borrow $70 billion to build affordable housing over the next decade, on top of the roughly $25 billion it already plans to invest.
That’s no easy task – he will need state approval since the plan would exceed the city’s debt limit by around $30 billion, as well as the New York City Council’s approval of zoning reforms that would make it easier to build.
“This would be a significant increase in city capital to produce deeply affordable housing,” said Rachel Fee, the executive director of the New York City Housing Conference, a non-profit affordable housing policy and advocacy organization. “It’s not something he can just implement on his own. It will take a political coalition to make this happen.”
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