Recommendations for the Mamdani administration from former top city economic development officials
Moments after capping off his victory, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani promised to enact “the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost-of-living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorello La Guardia.” His vision resonated deeply with millions of New Yorkers, who have high expectations for what he can achieve in office.
How he will realize these goals, however, remains an open question, particularly as it relates to an overarching economic development strategy. Many in the mayor’s base find growth itself — making the city more hospitable to businesses so they can settle and grow here — problematic or antithetical to delivering economic justice. That’s a false view, but it is also true that a commitment to growth does not guarantee widespread prosperity. Critical to understanding what can be accomplished in New York is acknowledging the limitations of city government, which has limited control over the macroeconomy, federal and state policy and private-sector decision-making.
The two of us understand this well. We developed and implemented an economic strategy for another ambitious, progressive mayor: Bill de Blasio, whom Mamdani has described as the best mayor of his lifetime because he “showcased the ability of city government to meet the needs of New Yorkers.”
Those needs are extensive and expensive, including providing high-quality education and childcare; affordable mass transit; a healthy environment; and recreational, cultural and green spaces that make living here joyful and desirable. Woven through those objectives is Mamdani’s core promise: to deliver an economy that works for all New Yorkers and can fund robust social services.
That was also the de Blasio promise. Our strategy flowed from the belief that being pro-growth is a prerequisite to delivering on bold agendas and supporting equitable outcomes. It doesn’t just create jobs and expand the tax base, it avoids a self-reinforcing downward spiral in which residents leave New York, leading to declining tax revenue, eroding social services and confidence — causing still more population decline. New Yorkers from the 1970s remember this well.
Mamdani should develop an economic platform rooted in three pillars: investing in infrastructure, incentivizing private sector investment and fostering talent pipelines to fuel high-growth industries. He should thread equity throughout, carefully weighing impacts to ensure that opportunity, resources and wealth are shared across communities and racial and gender lines. By doing this, he can demonstrate that economic growth is not at odds with economic justice. Just as it’s true that a key component of how to bring down the cost of housing is to produce more of it, the way to make prosperity more widely accessible is to double down on New York’s dynamism.
That is the playbook for New York to remain a thriving economic capital — and to achieve an agenda many consider unrealistic.
1) Investing in infrastructure
Investing in infrastructure is both a core government responsibility and a powerful economic accelerant. When the City builds and supports physical infrastructure, private capital follows with new jobs, new vertical development and an expanded tax base. Two examples from our experience show how this works in practice: NYC Ferry and Long Island City.
NYC Ferry
The idea behind the NYC Ferry was simple: serve as a connective tissue across our waterfronts, providing commuters in transit-starved neighborhoods with new public transportation and helping to unlock the promise of the City’s transforming waterfronts.
We built the Ferry system from the ground up using only City financial and agency resources (along with rider fares). Nearly a decade in, it is far exceeding expectations. The network now spans 70 nautical miles with 25 landings and served a record 7.4 million passengers last year — far above pre-COVID levels. Tte system also has the lowest subsidy-per-rider of any comparable municipal ferry operation.
That alone is worth cheering, but the lesson is broader than just transit: The City’s investment laid the foundation for more dynamic neighborhoods. As it moved toward launch, residential construction increased by 6% within a quarter mile of ferry slips, and commercial construction increased by 3% — creating jobs and economic activity in waterfront neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods are still seeing benefits, exemplified by how healthcare workers at hospitals on the Upper East Side started moving to Astoria to find more space and affordability — and enjoy a five-minute commute to East 90th St.
Long Island City
Investment in horizontal “hard” infrastructure also enables vertical growth. Consider Long Island City, where aging infrastructure was devised to support an industrial district that had shrunk for decades. It was our job to revitalize that infrastructure to lay the foundation for a modern mixed-use community.
The headline infrastructure investment was the de Blasio administration’s $99 million commitment to the second phase of Hunter’s Point South’s waterfront park — concurrent with leveraging City-owned property for 5,000 units of new housing, 3,000 of which are permanently affordable. The 11-acre park is now unrecognizable from what it once was, with newly created wetlands, green space and public amenities like pedestrian and bike pathways, playgrounds, picnic areas and permanent art installations by local artists.
Less sexy, but arguably more important, was our $180 million Long Island City Investment Strategy, which funded new sewers and water mains, street reconstruction and other improvements to support the neighborhood’s revitalization. The private sector took notice, making major investments to create millions of square feet of new office and retail space, bringing thousands of permanent jobs to the area.
Progress continues. A large swath of Long Island City was recently rezoned, further advancing its transformation into a thriving mixed-use hub and deepening the economic growth pattern. And, of course, Hunter’s Point South is getting a new and improved ferry slip.
With the constraints on the capital budget and the focus the Mayor is rightly putting on supporting an ambitious Housing Plan, it is imperative that the Administration also make longer-term, strategic investments in hard infrastructure. Although focusing on “state of good repair” is necessary to assure the CIty literally functions, we need to think and act ambitiously in order to grow the economy.
2) Catalyzing private sector activity
New York’s dynamic economy relies in part on its concentration of Fortune 500 headquarters and a thriving start-up ecosystem.
Startups and large corporations serve as a magnet for sustained population growth and help provide reliable customers for restaurants, theaters and small businesses. Being pro-business does not require handouts to large companies. But it does often require using the tools of governors to facilitate economic activity.
Most businesses need a physical footprint. By keeping them in New York, we can help maintain a local spirit of innovation and create a durable economy over the long-term. Two examples from our experience — the East Midtown rezoning and the revitalization of the Brooklyn Navy Yard — demonstrate the benefits to the City from being proactively “pro-business.”
270 Park Avenue
Consider 270 Park Avenue, JP Morgan Chase’s soaring new tower above Grand Central Terminal. For some, it may seem a monument to wealth, or the sort of development activity City Hall should eschew. Untrue.
This decades-long commitment from one of the nation’s top employers created a sustainable, healthy work environment for 14,000 New Yorkers across the income spectrum and generated 8,000 jobs for members of 40 labor unions during construction. This single building is projected to generate $74.6 million in FY26 taxes to the City of New York — the equivalent of the City’s total support for cultural organizations this year, demonstrating that even one individual project can have a significant impact on the City’s bottom line. At scale, this sort of activity helps the City grow and expand its tax roll, providing funding necessary to deliver the services New Yorkers expect.
It did not happen by accident or by offering Chase any financial incentives. 270 Park was the first major project approved under the 2017 East Midtown rezoning, employing the City’s land-use powers to grow and modernize its largest business district. And because our agenda was focused on assuring that the growth generated by new development activity did not just inure to the private sector, the new zoning was structured to make sure there were demonstrable improvements made to the public realm, including support for struggling landmarks. In developing 270 Park Avenue, JP Morgan contributed $42 million to a public improvement fund, created an outdoor public plaza and bought air rights from St. Bartholomew’s, among others.
270 Park is one example, but New York is filled with similar success stories.
Brooklyn Navy Yard
The City itself owns real estate assets and has a significant role to play in providing physical space for businesses. The Brooklyn Navy Yard — a long-underutilized, environmentally compromised parcel of City-owned land — is a textbook example of how New York can use its assets and capital to drive growth, create jobs and foster an equitable educational environment.
Multiple administrations made capital investments in the redevelopment of the Navy Yard despite pressure to sell parts of the Yard, or re-zone for residential use. Maintaining that commitment to use the Yard to support businesses growing, the de Blasio administration invested $140 million into Building 77, creating a new “affordable” tech and manufacturing hub for New Yorkers.
Today, more than 13,000 employees across 550 businesses and 17 industries work at the Navy Yard, earning an average hourly wage of $39 — or $81,000 annualized. Nearly half (45%) of these ventures are Minority- and Women-Owned Business Enterprises. And, through the Brooklyn STEAM Center, high school students have earned 2,200 industry certifications, completed 1,400 college credits and received more than $1.4 million in paid internships.
This collective investment allowed companies like 10xBeta to evolve from a small, prototyping studio into a nationally recognized biomedical company that produced portable ventilators during COVID and is now delivering mobile, hospital-level care in rural areas.
3) Fostering a talent pipeline
The City also plays a critical role in fostering talent pipelines for emerging industries and high-growth fields. During de Blasio’s two terms, we prioritized the tech sector, as we concurrently heard from private-sector leaders that they needed more tech talent and from educational institutions that they lacked the resources to train it.
In practice, this took several forms. We helped lay the groundwork for more robust tech education opportunities at our public universities so that students of all backgrounds had the skills to break into the industry more broadly and made strategic targeted investments into the tech-heavy life sciences industry.
Leveraging Higher Education to Promote Job Growth
After convening CUNY presidents and provosts, we launched a $20 million CUNY 2x Tech program to help build the capacity of their Computer Science departments. As one campus-level program manager told the Center for an Urban Future, the program “really elevated the type of jobs graduates are getting…our graduates are getting positions in places like Amazon, Google and some of the big banks and insurance companies.” Another called it “the best thing to ever happen to that department, and I’ve been there for 30 years.”
We also fostered the next generation of cybersecurity professionals, recognizing that the nascent industry should not be dominated by other cities when its largest and most important customers are based here. Through CyberNYC, we paired New Yorkers with paid internships, created a bootcamp to upskill workers looking to break into cybersecurity and launched a Master’s program with the City College of New York that takes just three semesters and costs less than $20,000.
This has contributed to a vibrant and thriving sector overall, with more than 25,000 tech-enabled startups in New York and a 146% increase in tech jobs from 2010 to 2022.
LifeSciNY
Leveraging the City’s network of world-class academic and healthcare institutions, we made a $1.1 billion public investment into the life sciences industry designed to spur research, support a talent pipeline via CUNY and other local universities and create the specialized physical spaces the sector needed to grow.
This investment paid off. New York’s life sciences industry now encompasses approximately 20,000 jobs across 500 R&D stage companies and 3.5 million square feet of space. This includes advanced facilities like CZ Biohub New York, the Joint Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine by Mount Sinai and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Lab of the Future by Deerfield, where emerging technologies are applied to health outcomes.
Students are also benefiting. Over 220 companies have participated in the program’s internship program, benefiting 950 interns – with nearly half leveraging that opportunity into a longer internship or full-time role. Today, New York has one of the largest life sciences economies in the United States.
This is not to say that we got everything right. Mayor Mamdani should evaluate and improve upon our record. That said, the core principles guiding our economic development strategy remain sound, and as the data shows, contributed to a growing economy with equitable results. While there are many factors, our policies and investments contributed to higher wages for workers through an increased minimum wage alongside record job growth, a City GDP that grew faster than national averages and a poverty rate that declined 12.7% from 2013-2019 and lifted 521,000 people out of poverty. These economic successes resulted in Moody’s upgrading our general obligation bonds to its highest-ever rating of Aa1 in 2019, specifically citing the strength and diversification of the economy as a key factor in the upgrade.
In other words, growth and being “pro-business” can be leveraged in support of progressive values – and despite the rhetoric of how hostile Mamdani is to big corporations, there is evidence he understands this. He flew to D.C. to pitch President Trump on a bold, ambitious plan to create a new affordable mixed-use neighborhood over Sunnyside Yards, potentially activating a plan we oversaw. It is expensive and complex and will require partnering with large private-sector companies. But the concept is exactly right: make long-term, large-scale public investments in infrastructure to create and catalyze new mixed-income housing, while providing educational, employment, commercial, recreational and transportation opportunities for New Yorkers today and tomorrow.
The good news for Mayor Mamdani? Developing Sunnyside Yards will only work if the City plays an active, leading role. And there is a long body of evidence to suggest that when New York City takes the reins, growth follows – with benefits not just for titans of industry, but for every resident who calls our great city home.
