Mamdani targets housing holdouts

NEW YORK — Mayor Zohran Mamdani plans to tackle “inequitable” residential growth across New York City that allows many wealthy neighborhoods to add scant housing amid a massive shortage.

Mamdani will roll out a set of zoning and land use initiatives on Tuesday aimed at changing this paradigm, as one plank of a wide-ranging housing plan.

City Hall will explore land use changes to allow residential development in neighborhoods with the lowest rates of affordable housing production, and citywide zoning reforms to permit more housing to be built near public transit, among other policy changes.

“When communities don’t build new housing, rents stay high, housing choice stays limited, and many New Yorkers are locked out of neighborhoods where their families can thrive,” officials wrote in a section of the plan shared with POLITICO ahead of its release.

These supply-oriented proposals are the latest illustration of how the city's new democratic socialist mayor is far from a market skeptic when it comes to housing. He has leaned into Yes-In-My-Backyard-style rhetoric and pursued policies to reduce regulatory barriers to housing growth, all while continuing to champion a rent freeze for rent-stabilized units and go after unscrupulous landlords.

“The mayor's been very clear with me that we need to move at the scale and urgency that the housing crisis demands,” Leila Bozorg, deputy mayor for housing and planning, said in an interview. “We’d like to be as ambitious and aggressive as possible.”

The city is struggling with the lowest rental vacancy rate in more than 50 years — 1.4 percent — and options affordable to lower-income residents are especially scarce.

Mamdani’s larger housing plan — set to be released today — will lay out a path to fulfilling his campaign promise to build 200,000 affordable homes over a decade — which would constitute a significant acceleration of city-financed housing production. The blueprint will also detail strategies to preserve existing housing as many building owners struggle with skyrocketing costs and boost affordable homeownership.

Through the land use and zoning proposals, Mamdani seems inclined to capitalize on new tools approved under his moderate predecessor, Eric Adams.

New York City voters approved a series of charter revisions last fall — which came out of a commission convened by Adams — to overhaul the lengthy and unpredictable land use process and curb the power of the City Council to block housing developments. Under these changes, affordable housing proposals in 12 yet-to-be-determined neighborhoods with the lowest rates of production will be able to go through a shortened review process that ends with a vote of the City Planning Commission — the majority of which is appointed by the mayor — instead of the council.

The city will identify these 12 districts by October by calculating the rate of affordable housing permitting in each community district over five years.

Recent analysis from the NYU Furman Center indicates where some of these low-producing neighborhoods might be. Based on rates of completed affordable housing units, Furman found the lowest-producing districts included outer borough neighborhoods like Bay Ridge in Brooklyn and Bayside in Queens, alongside the Upper East and Upper West sides of Manhattan.

“While some neighborhoods are adding significant amounts of housing, other neighborhoods add virtually none,” Mamdani’s housing plan states. “Some high-cost, resource-rich neighborhoods, like parts of the Upper East Side, the West Village, and Park Slope, are even losing housing as wealthy New Yorkers combine existing apartments faster than new apartments are built.”

The administration will pursue more neighborhood-wide rezonings — in addition to two already announced in Brooklyn and the Bronx — and explore a citywide proposal to “meaningfully” increase housing permitted near transit. Mamdani additionally plans to use high-density zoning districts allowed under the state’s 2024 housing deal, and pursue smaller-scale “micro-plans” in some areas to allow more housing without a full neighborhood-wide rezoning.

The mayor will announce the plan this morning in Gowanus, where a 2021 city rezoning has produced a major housing boom in recent years.