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Zohran for NYC
Zohran for NYC / Policy

Housing By and For New York

New York City is a majority-tenant town, but too often, our government works for the landlords. It’s time to take back our power and unleash the public sector to build housing for the many.

Introduction

Last summer, for the first time in 15 years, New Yorkers were allowed to apply for a lottery to get help paying their rent. The lottery was open for just one week. More than 630,000 people applied to get on the waitlist for a program that currently approves only about 250 people a month. New York City now has the highest level of homelessness since the Great Depression. More than half of all households are rent-burdened.

We need significantly more affordable housing. But for decades, the City has relied almost entirely on changes to the zoning code to invite and shape private development, with results that can fall short of the promises. And the housing that does get built is often out of reach for working families who need it the most.

We can’t afford to wait for the private sector to solve this crisis. Zohran will triple the City’s production of publicly subsidized, permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes, constructing 200,000 new units over the next 10 years. Any 100% affordable development gets fast-tracked: projects like the 200 deeply affordable units at West 108th Street, the 175 affordable units above the new Inwood library, and the 500 affordable units on the site of the long-vacant Greenpoint Hospital will no longer take years to get approved.

We’ll also double the money we’re spending to preserve public housing, and fully fund and staff our city’s housing agencies so we can actually get the work done.

Investing in Public Sector Development

From the first public housing in the nation to the union-built, publicly-funded, limited equity cooperatives that have kept hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers affordably housed, New York was once a beacon of creative, public sector-led, affordable housing production. But decades of disinvestment and shrinking government capacity have left us waiting on the real estate industry to solve a housing crisis from which they profit.

As Mayor, Zohran Mamdani will triple the City’s production of publicly-subsidized, affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes—creating 200,000 new units over the next 10 years. And he will double the amount of capital we are investing into preserving the homes of existing public housing tenants. This $100 billion dollar commitment over 10 years will once again make New York City a leader in providing homes for families who earn less than $70,000 a year—the median income for renters in New York—and ensure that our City’s resources are used to provide jobs with safety and dignity.

Specifically, Zohran will:

  • Triple the amount of housing built with City capital funds. A Mamdani administration will construct 200,000 new affordable homes over 10 years for low-income households, seniors, and working families.By putting the public sector in the driver’s seat, we’ll be able to increase the share of new units built that are affordable to families who are low-income or are stuck in our City’s shelter system. We’ll significantly expand programs that serve families with the greatest need:
    • HPD’s Senior Affordable Rental Apartments (SARA), which produces 100% affordable low-income housing for seniors.
    • HPD’s Extremely Low and Low-Income Affordability (ELLA), which produces 100% affordable housing for families who earn less than $72,000 for a family of four
    • HRA’s Master Lease Program, which allows the City to pool its rental assistance programs (like CityFHEPS) to create project-based, subsidized housing for families at risk of eviction and/or living in the shelter program. This will go even further, as Zohran will drop lawsuits against CityFHEPs and ensure expansion proceeds as scheduled and per City Law.
  • Recommit to public housing. Federal, state, and city disinvestment have left NYCHA tenants with crumbling buildings and uncertain futures. Zohran will double the City’s capital investment in major renovations of NYCHA housing, activate underutilized storage areas like parking lots for affordable housing development, and use tools like City subsidies to invest money directly in upgrading our public housing. Some of the City capital for new construction will be used to build new affordable, publicly-controlled housing on NYCHA’s City-owned land. Zohran will also push Albany to make a similar commitment to NYCHA’s capital needs on an annual basis.
  • Invest in our public sector workforce. Zohran will fully fund and staff the operating budgets of the City’s housing agencies—including Housing Preservation & Development (HPD), the Department of City Planning (DCP), and the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)—which have been woefully neglected under Mayor Adams.Zohran will increase staffing levels for financial closing and project management in construction and renovation pipelines to move projects forward more quickly. By increasing the number of people who work at HPD, DCP, and especially NYCHA, we’ll increase the City’s ability to ensure housing gets preserved and built.
  • Fast-track planning review. Any project that commits to the administration’s affordability, stabilization, union labor, and sustainability goals will be expedited through land use review.
  • Redirect the Office of Management and Budget towards public sector priorities, and advocate in Albany to increase the City’s public debt ceiling and in Washington to remove the City’s volume cap for affordable housing bond financing.Under the Adams administration, the Office of Management and Budget has acted as a barrier to creating more robust public services. Zohran will break that bottleneck by directing OMB to ensure that our resources are managed responsibly without hamstringing city services, including the development pipeline for affordable housing.Cities across the United States are passing sensible policies to expand municipal or state bonding capacity for affordable housing, using the public sector to build. But New York’s ability to issue municipal debt to fund public services is limited by arbitrary caps. Zohran will advocate in Albany and Washington to reform these archaic measures so we can invest deeply in affordable housing.
  • We will fund this through:
    • Municipal bonds – Zohran will allocate $70 billion new capital dollars in the City’s Ten-Year Capital Plan to create new affordable housing, raised on the municipal bond market. This is on top of the about $30 billion the City is already planning to spend, making our total investment $100 billion
    • Activation of City-owned land and buildings - using the City’s public land as a source of subsidy, with numerous opportunities to build
    • Pooled rental assistance - From a lack of available affordable supply to widespread source of income discrimination, the City’s voucher utilization rates are tremendously low—just 53% in 2022 for Section 8 and 21% for CityFHEPS from 2019 to 2023. We can use this existing subsidy more efficiently by pooling individual rental assistance and providing project-based operating assistance to buildings that can then reliably use these stable income streams while providing very low rent.

Comprehensive Planning

Even with a $100 billion commitment to new publicly-subsidized and preserved housing, we must do much more. Zohran will give the public a firmer hand in guiding housing development across New York by pursuing a Comprehensive City plan.

New York City, with more than eight million residents, does not have a guiding plan driving its growth and development. It’s high time we reformed our disjointed planning and zoning processes to create a holistic vision for affordability, equity, and growth. Comprehensive, citywide planning will allow NYC both to address the legacy of racially discriminatory zoning and to proactively plan for the health and needs of the city—in housing, transit, education, and other areas. That planning will include:

  • Increasing zoned capacity. This will allow housing supply to meet New York’s demand for both mixed-income and permanently affordable housing in areas that have historically not contributed to citywide housing goals—including those cut out of City of Yes.
  • Supporting climate sustainability and accessibility. By encouraging growth around subway stations and other public transit hubs across New York City, we will create a greener city.
  • Eliminating parking minimums. The City should be building housing, not parking lots.
  • Advocating to expand rent stabilization in Albany. When the City allows private developers to build, we are inviting the private sector to profit. We should ensure New Yorkers are getting more in return than what is currently required through Mandatory Inclusionary Housing and programs like 485-x. Zohran will advocate in Albany to expand rent stabilization to all new production as it was under 421a—ensuring that any new housing built in our city provides a stable home for those who live there.