When Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani takes office on January 1, he will immediately feel the crushing weight of the housing crisis, including 25 years of astronomical rent inflation and 350,000 New Yorkers who don't have homes. Like all mayors before him, he will not have control over tariffs, the cost of multifamily lending, or other global factors that shape our financialized housing system. Instead, Mayor Mamdani will confront a Rube Goldberg machine of contradictory municipal laws; messy inter- and intra-agency dynamics; complex and contradictory federal, state, and local jurisdictional hierarchies; and complicated relationships that help shape New York City's housing landscape.
Mamdani's campaign astutely identified the Rent Guidelines Board as one important piece of the housing affordability puzzle that would allow him to make the lives of 996,600 households living in rent-stabilized apartments easier with a rent freeze. Interestingly, Eric Adams's efforts to shield his executive power with a charter revision commission and to generate a development frenzy for his second term with the City of Yes zoning reforms will make Mamdani's other housing promise—200,000 new, permanently affordable units over the next decade—a little bit easier to achieve. And a last-minute lawmaking push by the outgoing City Council may give the incoming administration additional tools, including an overhauled municipal foreclosure system and a legal pathway for community purchases of some multifamily buildings.
However, all housing policies and programs run into a temporal problem: the promise of an affordable apartment by 2036 is cold comfort if you are struggling to pay rent now. Even Mamdani's signature proposal to freeze stabilized rents would not go into effect until October 2026 (or October 2027, if Mayor Adams and First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro's final "fuck you" to the city's tenants comes to pass).