A Housing Roadmap for New York’s Next Mayor

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.

That said, the new ballot measures cannot fully substitute for wider “by‑right” upzoning. The faster approval process put in place thanks to the ballot measures  — an expedited ULURP — while an improvement, is still slow and costly compared to zoning that just allows projects to be built by default. Projects that make sense, especially near subways, should not be presumptively illegal without special permission.

So what would a genuinely robust pro-housing agenda look like under Mayor Mamdani? It begins with intelligent adjustments to his rent freeze proposal and expands to a more energetic, creative housing and transit production plan.

1. “Pay for” a rent freeze without breaking the system

Mamdani’s signature promise — a four‑year rent freeze — tests whether his technocratic turn is real or Memorex. The critical table 8 in the RGB’s annual Income and Expense Report shows that in 2025, 10% of rent-regulated buildings already report operating costs equal to or greater than their rental income, meaning they’re already near the edge of tax foreclosure. 

But this promise isn’t going away; it’s too central to Mamdani’s agenda and even identity. So how to make it work?

The Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) is a utility-style cost regulator — essentially a rate-setting public service commission for one million rent-stabilized apartments. Its mandate is to align rent adjustments with changes in building operating costs. That’s how rent stabilization was designed to protect tenants and preserve the housing stock.

Over the past decade, that link has been broken. Successive boards have approved 10 straight one-year rent increases below inflation — the longest continuous real-dollar rent rollback in RGB history for one-year guidelines. The result is visible in the data (Table 8 in the annual Income and Expense Report) reflecting the RGB’s dichotomous coverage of the city’s healthiest buildings and the least-healthy. We set annual increases on both new towers whose “market” units are under rent stabilization because of the former 421a tax exemption, and dilapidated tenements originally under the WWII rent control regime that haven’t seen significant rent increases since 1947. The financially distressed 10% of regulated buildings are overwhelmingly fully rent-stabilized prewar buildings in the outer boroughs.

That alarming figure excludes debt service entirely; it reflects only routine costs like fuel, insurance, labor and property taxes. When those outpace income, the maintenance cuts begin: deferred repairs, skipped painting cycles, late tax bills. Once properties fall behind on taxes, the city inherits the problem through what’s called in rem foreclosure. Rehabilitating each building after years of neglect costs $250,000–$500,000 per unit (and usually takes it off the property tax rolls permanently through transfer to nonprofit ownership). Scale that to the 10% of the regulated stock now underwater, and the fiscal math becomes untenable. Without cost-flattening reforms, four consecutive rent freezes amid costs compounding at a typical 3% annual rate risk re-creating by regulatory fiat the mass tax foreclosures of the 1980s naturally-occurring real estate bust.

One of the most pernicious myths about the recent history of the Rent Guidelines Board is the claim that Mayor de Blasio ordered his board to do a rent freeze in contravention of the data, and without doing any harm. Everyone seems to forget to actually check the RGB’s historical cost data: our Price Index of Operating Costs would have justified a nominal rent rollback, not just a freeze, in 2016 because operating costs (especially energy) fell an extraordinary 1.2% that year (see Table IV). No press or popular accounts have explained that de Blasio’s freezes were within the ordinary cost-based behavior of the board, not a willful political hack job.

Assuming Mamdani insists on ordering a freeze regardless of what the data show, he should at least take pains to ensure a freeze is paid for in a legitimate way that will eventually show up in RGB cost data. That means lowering operating costs rather than pretending they don’t exist or ordering the RGB to ignore them. What would this look like in practice?

• Property taxes. Class II multifamily properties — mostly rental buildings — face the most punitive effective tax rates in the city. Even nonprofit landlords, though tax-exempt, are struggling under the remaining operating burdens. Mamdani supports tax reform to relieve Tax Class 2 multifamily buildings of punitive rates in general, but so has every mayor in recent memory.
• Insurance and scaffolding costs. New York’s unique combination of Local Law 11 and the state’s absolute-liability Scaffold Law, together drive up both construction costs and insurance premiums. Illinois was the only other state with such a rule; it repealed the law in 1995. Studying how that change reduced costs in Chicago would provide an evidence-based path for reform here. It’s essential to cut fundamental costs, not just transfer property tax dollars to pay for them, because struggling regulated nonprofits already don’t pay property taxes.
• Rehabilitation incentives. Targeted tax abatements like the former J-51 program, now trimmed down and relaunched as the J51-R program, provide tax abatements for rehabilitating existing multiple dwellings. Restoring a stronger version tied to Local Law 97 energy upgrades and code compliance would help rescue older rent-regulated buildings — at least the ones that will pay taxes ever again. J-51-R also requires rent-regulated landlords to forego the temporary 2% annual rent adjustments usually available when they make Major Capital Improvements (MCIs) if those improvements receive J-51 funding; applications for both J-51 and MCI adjustments have both collapsed since these laws were tightened.

A rent freeze won’t be supported by economic data unless we get as lucky as the 2016 board, and may not hold up in court amid tax seizures potentially on the scale of NYCHA’s portfolio. But if Mamdani insists, he can credibly “pay for” at least one year by fixing cost drivers that make the system unsustainable.

2. Tie rent guidelines to building quality

Another chronic flaw of rent stabilization is that RGB rent orders flow equally to responsible owners and to “slumlords.” The RGB can change that through rulemaking, issuing differential guidelines based on building quality.

The simplest way is to use the existing Alternative Enforcement Program (AEP)  enforcement threshold as a quality filter. Buildings with AEP-tier violations — basically the worst 3% to 5% of the regulated housing stock, with conditions so bad that the factual merits of abuse are beyond question — would receive no rent increases. All others would receive adjustments aligned with operating costs.

This approach needs no new data system, avoids subjectivity and directly ties revenue to performance. It would finally recreate a “customer-service” relationship in the regulated market: landlords who maintain their buildings would effectively be rewarded, while chronic violators face a financial penalty that stops short of expropriation.

Politically, it also offers a useful bridge. If we can find a way to pay for a single rent freeze, but not all four years, then in later years, Mamdani can still meet the intent of his promise by freezing the rents of negligent landlords without wrecking 100,000 units or risking a Supreme Court “unconstitutional takings” loss. Mamdani arguably must deliver at least one year of rent freeze, but poll breakouts show his support is highest among market-rate tenants and below 50% among rent-regulated tenants: That means voters are interpreting his promises symbolically, not literally. If he can deliver on at least one true freeze and then functionally ban slumlording with partial freezes (while keeping rent growth reasonable and growing affordable housing citywide) he will have succeeded. The point is to stand up for working people, not to paint yourself into a dangerous corner and put hundreds of thousands of peoples’ homes into financial trouble.

3. Fix the hardship program

There’s one more step Mamdani should take to make his rent freeze more practical. State law nominally provides a hardship process for buildings whose operating costs exceed rent income. Roughly 10% of stabilized buildings should currently qualify, but approvals from the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal are nearly nonexistent.

Mamdani has said he supports hardship relief for insolvent buildings. The next mayor should help Albany make that true — through what might be called the Zohran Odd  Lots Law. Require the state to process applications promptly and set increases large enough to restore solvency. That could stop the bleeding for the first 100,000 units near tax distress. (The governor may also be able to share Zohran’s podcast clip with DHCR leadership to inspire them to process at least some hardship applications under current law).

Longer term, consider allowing modest rent resets when tenants voluntarily vacate, keeping total revenue aligned with costs and minimizing hardship increases during tenancies.

4. Upzone the subways to boost affordable housing production without City capital funding

This is the logical extension of Mamdani’s late‑summer recognition that affordability also requires private construction. Upzoning transit corridors channels that realism into structural reform.

Before COVID, opponents of housing growth claimed new residents would overload the subways. That was never strictly true — and it’s definitively false now. The MTA carries about 80% of pre‑pandemic ridership, but hybrid work freed up vast peak‑hour capacity.

The next mayor should use it.

Treat the subway map as a capacity map. Work with the MTA to identify which stations and branches have room to grow and upzone accordingly in high‑opportunity areas. Where trains have space, relax growth controls to match available infrastructure.

MIT researcher Vincent Rollet estimates that if New York City allowed denser housing — about the level of an R8 zoning district — within a quarter mile of every subway or commuter rail stop, and slightly less dense (R7) zoning within a half mile, the city could increase its housing supply by about 15% and its population by 12%. That extra supply would likely lower rents by roughly 10%, even without cooperation from the suburbs.

Allowing very high density (R12) on the parcels that directly touch subway entrances would do even more — opening up more land for construction, creating more housing and directing more people into the subway system.

Every new apartment built near a half-full subway station brings riders, taxpayers and vitality back to the system. Each additional household pays into the tax base that funds the very services urban residents rely on. The MTA needs riders. The city needs residents. Workers need homes. Transit-oriented development delivers all three. 

Finally: Upzoning the transit system will allow mixed-income Mandatory Inclusionary Housing production all over the city, juicing subsidized affordable housing production without HPD assistance. These projects will still face the 485x 99-unit prevailing wage problem, but only Albany can change it. In the meantime, City Hall can at least track and publish where projects are being downsized or segmented to avoid the rule, quantifying the lost units, and using that data to press for a legislative correction.

5. Build new trains using the mayor’s power of the purse

We must develop more housing around transit — but also more transit to bring affordable housing within commutable range. The governor controls the MTA, but the mayor can still build subways by paying for them. Bloomberg’s 7‑Train extension reached Hudson Yards without federal money, financed entirely through local value capture.

Value capture fulfills Mamdani’s instinct for redistribution and preventing private capture of public gains, but in an economically literate way. An obscure state law passed in 2016 allows the mayor to capture the billions of dollars of land value that new MTA projects create through a never-before-used “split-rate land value tax” district mapped around MTA capital projects. Professor Arpit Gupta at NYU Stern, a colleague of mine on the Rent Guidelines Board, has shown that the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway, despite its $4.5 billion cost for only three stations, created over $7 billion in private land value nearby. In lower-density areas, we can’t expect quite that high of an uplift ratio — but by controlling costs, value capture can still fund major expansions like the Utica Avenue Subway or the Interborough Express.

The next mayor should fund new lines where city land value makes it feasible and use those projects to anchor the next generation of transit‑oriented housing. It can raise billions without a new Albany law—though the MTA must agree to accept the city’s money.

The Path Forward

Experienced policy hands don’t need to dampen Mamdani’s boldness; we should channel it. He can be the mayor who brings New York back from COVID on every metric: MTA ridership, tax base, jobs, population — and leads the first major city-led subway building spree in a century. The housing shortage is so dire, and the resulting economic damage to the city so profound, that reform in this one area can pay for many sins.

If Mamdani can pair his moral clarity with technocratic consistency, he can turn what began as a movement slogan for temporary rent freezes into the foundation of a durable affordability agenda. Let’s help him get it done.