This week, state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic mayoral front-runner, debuted a campaign affordability calculator that he said would help New Yorkers figure out exactly how much they might save under his signature big three proposals: a rent freeze, universal child care and free buses. According to the tool, many New Yorkers could save anywhere from a few thousand dollars a year to the vicinity of $50,000 or more for families with children in rent-stabilized housing, for example. Almost simultaneously, the New York Times released an estimate of how much the proposals would cost the city: roughly $7 billion — a massive sum, though one that exists in the context of the city’s gargantuan nearly $116 billion budget.
The Times said that free childcare would account for the bulk of the costs. But let’s look at housing, since that’s what a chunk of the electorate sees as the most salient issue in their struggle to remain New Yorkers. I’ve touched on this before, and I know it makes me sound a little bit like a wet blanket, but a rent freeze for stabilized units is something that might undermine its own objectives. That’s because market-rate units around the city effectively subsidize stabilized ones. The more stabilized rents are kept low, the more non-stabilized units have to subsidize them, which is just another way of saying that stabilized rent freezes put upward pressure on all market-rate rents.
As some other reporters have also delved into, many smaller landlords are already in some manner of financial straits and might not be able to afford to weather a year or two of frozen rents, let alone four or eight, given that costs from materials to labor to insurance have legitimately been rising. To address the inevitable cries of “Boo-hoo, poor landlords, rolling in a little less dough than they would otherwise,” it’s important to understand that while New York City has experienced significant corporate consolidation of the housing stock in the last decade and a half or so, there are still wildly different kinds of landlords, including small, family-owned enterprises with relatively few units. For them, increases in costs without increases in revenue could mean that repairs don’t get made – or that the property gets sold off to a large corporate landlord or private equity firm even more focused on squeezing out profits.
That’s not to say that Mamdani’s flagship housing policy proposal of rent freezes should be discarded out of hand. But I’m not sure that people excited about it understand its full implications — or even that this isn’t a pledge to freeze all rents, only those covered by the city’s rent stabilization system, which are a bit over 40 percent of the total private rental market in the city. As always, we come back to the one true and indisputable solution to address the crisis of unaffordable rents: significantly ramping up housing construction. Stabilized, market-rate, luxury – the city needs it all, and always will as long as all types of people want to live here. I don’t mean to say that Mamdani does not also have plans for housing construction, because he certainly does, but I wonder if this should be a more significant part of his housing pitch.
On that note, let’s talk about the ballot questions that will feature on the back page of electoral ballots in this November’s election. Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that Mayor Eric Adams created his own Charter Revision Commission to develop and issue these ballot proposals as a transparent “screw you” to the City Council. This was in response to the Council’s effort to add ballot questions to give it more power over mayoral appointments, which Adams’ commission derailed. I think the commission’s ideas are generally sound. The Council, of course, absolutely detests them mainly because the housing-related proposals, especially Numbers 2, 3 and 4, are designed to sap some of the Council’s own power to slow, block or derail housing projects.
Proposal 2 would streamline the time-consuming rezoning process by allowing certain proposed projects receiving public financing or using the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) system — which ties approval of certain developments to the inclusion of some percentage of designated affordable units — to sidestep consideration by the full Council and instead be approved by the Board of Standards and Appeals, which regulates certain aspects of zoning, or by the City Planning Commission for MIH projects, as opposed to having to go through the entire Council.
Proposal 3 would similarly speed up the approval process by circumventing the Council for what are considered modest housing modifications, such as those that add units to existing developments.
Proposal 4 would create a new affordable housing appeals board, which does include the City Council speaker, but also representatives from the mayor’s office and borough presidencies, which would have the power to override City Council votes against certain housing proposals.
This gets a little hairy in the sense that it would take some decision-making away from the city’s elected legislature, including representatives from the very districts and neighborhoods that are set to be rezoned or slated for additional development. These have long enjoyed a good amount of deference when it comes to these decisions, so much so that there is an informal so-called member veto, the informal practice of letting any member block developments in their district. That might seem reasonable on its face — the locals know best what works and what doesn’t in their community — but if you’ve ever spent any time at all around local political action you might begin to see the problem. A lot of people support the idea of additional housing construction but not here, with the result that affordable housing projects across the city have crashed in the face of what is often small but very vocal local opposition. Taking some of that power away might not be the worst way to deal with this emergency.
Separately, the Council is currently considering a bill that would change the city’s affordable housing application systems so that people would be notified about the status of their applications and whenever housing they’re eligible for becomes available. This might seem like a somewhat obvious and small-bore fix, but it addresses an important if unseen factor in the affordable housing crisis, which is that it’s at least in part an information problem.
Some commentators had a field day with Mamdani’s assertion earlier in the campaign that he was not aware that his apartment was rent-stabilized when he first moved in, but the reality is that this is a relatively common experience. That’s why there are multiple guides online on confirming whether your apartment is actually stabilized, because it’s not uncommon for a new tenant to have no idea, either because a landlord intentionally hid that fact or it just did not come up in the shuffle of securing a lease. Similarly, the processes to apply for and follow along with the city’s housing lotteries and such can be confusing and arcane, so anything that smooths it out a little is probably a good thing. Still, that is only really going to matter if there’s enough housing for everyone. That will be the biggest challenge for the next mayor, whether it’s Mamdani or one of his challengers.
