Mamdani's latest horrible, terrible, really bad idea
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's latest idea for the New York housing market will be bad for New York, particularly the needier people within New York. His housing proposal will make the existing market worse and if the City succeeds in taking over existing housing, as the Mayor proposes, these will turned over to an agency with a horrible track record.
But let's take a step back and acknowledge the positives of the Mamdani's plan. The Mayor proposes changes to land use and zoning rules, as well as building codes to "lower construction costs and reduce delays in housing development." The plan includes goals to build 200,000 new affordable homes and preserve another 200,000 existing affordable units. To fund this, the City will invest $22 billion in housing funding over the next five years.*1
Mamdani also proposes to improve enforcement of building codes on existing buildings, to help current residents. Another positive aspect to his proposal but with unintended consequences, or maybe intended consequences. If there are laws and codes to ensure people have safe, decent housing, then those should be enforced. However, because New York has rent controls limiting how much owners of properties can increase their revenues, the consequence of that enforcement will be some property owners accumulating fines for repairs they cannot afford to make and possibly selling the apartments or relinquishing them to the City - which may be the intended consequence.
The overarching problem with Mamdani's whole idea is placing all of this under the guidance of the New York City Housing Authority, also known as NYCHA, an agency that is one of the worst landlords in the city. Approximately 81% of residents in NYCHA properties are in apartments needing repair. Problems range from mold, water leaks, pests, plumbing issues, heating/hot water failures, lead paint, and elevator issues.*2 While residents suffered, higher level NYCHA officials were paid very handsomely, others enhanced their pay by taking bribes.*3
NYCHA's existing units have a backlog of $78 billion in repairs that need to be done over a 20 year period, only $38 billion of which is funded.*4 (Hope existing residents don't mind going without heat in the winter or living with mold for another 20 years.) That leaves $40 billion of existing known repairs.
That repair funding deficit gets worse if the NYCHA takes over failing buildings with their own needs to compete for limited City funds. The Mayor's proposed additional $22 billion in funding won't be sufficient for the existing NYCHA inventory, let alone taking over privately owned buildings with unknown amounts of needed work.
The Mayor's interest in reducing red tape and setting a goal of seeing 200,000 new homes built should be commended, as well as the plan for additional funding to fix the properties already owned by the City. Rather than taking on a greater amount of work the City can't pay for, Mayor Mamdani should stay focused on getting more private sector homes built and making conditions livable for residents of the current inventory of housing owned.
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