This article originally appeared in Vital City on November 6, 2025.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ran on an affordability agenda. Creating more housing is the single most important way to make the city more affordable — lower rents, or at least rents that rise at a slower pace, would ease by far the largest item in every New Yorker’s budget.
At the start of the campaign, Mamdani’s housing approach was narrowly focused on a rent freeze for the 1 in 3 New Yorkers’ homes under rent regulation, plus building 200,000 units of union-built subsidized housing funded by $70 billion in new borrowing by the City.
As Mamdani’s star rose in the primary, he soft‑launched a technocratic pivot, advocating for upzoning in high‑income neighborhoods and around high‑resource transit stations. By the time he spoke to the Association for a Better New York in October, he elaborated that his 200,000 City‑subsidized homes would be “additive” to continued private construction. Finally, after much hemming and hawing, on Election Day, Mamdani endorsed four pro-housing ballot measures meant to reduce the City Council’s post-1989 experiment with “member deference” veto power over proposed rezonings.
For housing policy nerds, the swell of pro-housing momentum throughout the campaign, one clarification or elaboration at a time, has been encouraging. But there are still pain points:
- Big bucks: Mamdani’s housing capital proposal is so large that it will require State permission to raise the City’s debt cap, potentially starving other important uses of capital funds.
- Some rents are already too low to freeze: Roughly 10% of the stabilized stock — an enormous portfolio of prewar outer-borough buildings — is currently struggling with costs above income.
- Tax foreclosure: If a rent freeze pushes buildings into foreclosure, the City could be forced to buy out or acquire through tax seizure as many as 100,000 distressed stabilized units. This would consume half of Mamdani’s proposed $100 billion housing construction proposal before building a single new home.
- Deep state words of warning: Staff at the City’s Housing Preservation & Development warn me anonymously that requiring city-funded housing to be built with all-union labor — which Mamdani has pledged to do — will raise housing production costs by 30% or more, evaporating at least 23% of the city’s new construction budget overnight.
- The “99‑unit problem”: Under state rules for the new mixed-income affordable housing production program, called 485x, costly prevailing‑wage mandates now kick in at 99 units, creating a perverse incentive for developers to shrink or split projects to stay below the line.
These are real challenges. The good news is that, with the affordable housing ballot measures now approved by voters, there are three new fast tracks for all-affordable, mixed-income and modest market-rate projects. This should make a big difference on day one. Mamdani should not only support the Department of City Planning’s existing pipeline; he should use his bully pulpit to go broader and faster. These new fast tracks also streamline opportunities to grow NYCHA’s housing supply, integrate incomes and entire neighborhoods, build substantial volumes of mixed-income housing and directly address NYCHA’s daunting $80 billion capital backlog.