"Block by Block," Mayor Zohran Mamdani's sweeping housing plan that he unveiled in late May, covers a lot of ground—from sewer socialist tweaks to improve the City's approach to heating complaints, to neighborhoodwide rezonings, supercharged by his predecessor's reforms to the land use process.
Over 112 pages and eight chapters, the plan addresses the different constituencies that catapulted Mamdani to Gracie Mansion (tenants, immigrants, disaffected, multiethnic millennials/zoomers who can't afford to rent or own) as well as those the administration needs to cultivate in order to govern (multiracial moderate-income homeowners, labor groups that initially endorsed Cuomo, the developer class). Balancing the needs and wants of these different constituencies, with the limitations of municipal governance, at a time of state austerity and federal authoritarianism, is a Philippe Petit-level high-wire act.
The plan includes what Mayor Mamdani boasts as "two of the most ambitious housing targets in modern New York City history": 200,000 "new affordable homes" to be built, and 200,000 to be preserved over the next 10 years. The mayor also is proposing "some of the strongest and most expansive tenant protections" anywhere in the U.S., and a "transformative" investment in public housing. The mayor's executive budget for fiscal years 2026 through 2030 includes $22 billion in capital funding for the housing plan: $7 billion for affordable housing development, $4.9 billion for affordable housing preservation, and $5.6 billion for NYCHA.
Mamdani's development and preservation goals are far more ambitious than Bloomberg's or de Blasio's were, and $22 billion is a mind-boggling number. But it's more like a starting point. This $22 billion figure does not account for non-capital City contributions, like tax breaks and public land, state and federal subsidies, as well as a lot more private debt-financing. Counting potential apartments that haven't been built yet is a little bit like science fiction: even with a massive commitment of public capital, there are way too many variables (think tariffs and wars) to accurately predict the near future of apartment construction. Further, to finance the second half of the $22 billion plan, the mayor would have to be reelected, and negotiate a new round of capital funding with a new City Council.
The innovative parts of the plan rest on its genuine focus on improving living conditions for actual tenants, who organized, doorknocked, and voted for Mamdani. Its limitation is its attempt to follow Mamdani's predecessors and chase yet another development goal without building out a public development option, like Seattle's nascent Social Housing Development Authority, or finding another way to maximize the public's role in how affordable housing gets built in New York City. Without it, the city will be stuck on the hamster wheel of private development that has failed to fully deliver for New Yorkers since Koch's housing plan.