Meeting Member Zohran Mamdani needs to construct 200,000 new ‘affordable homes’ over the subsequent decade.
File Photograph by Paul Frangipane
Queens Meeting Member Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic socialist who’s operating for mayor, will suggest an formidable plan on Monday to construct 200,000 new “affordable” houses over the subsequent decade financed instantly by the town, New York News Metro has realized.
Mamdani’s multifaceted housing plan, which his marketing campaign shared solely with New York News Metro forward of its Feb. 3 launch, entails the town taking the lead on paying for brand spanking new housing manufacturing slightly than non-public builders. It builds on Mamdani’s marquee housing proposal, which he rolled out when he introduced his candidacy final fall: Freezing the lease for all stabilized tenants.
“What we’re going to do is construct 200,000 new permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes over the next ten years, tripling the amount of housing that New York City is currently set to build with our own capital dollars,” Mamdani mentioned in an interview. “This vision puts the public sector first and commits city government to delivering measurable outcomes as opposed to simply relying on the behavior of private developers.”
Mamdani mentioned he would additionally foyer Albany lawmakers and the governor to cross laws requiring that each new unit of housing constructed be rent-stabilized.
For example the dire state of the town’s present housing disaster, Mamdani pointed to the over 630,000 households who utilized to get a spot on the New York Metropolis Housing Authority’s Part 8 voucher waitlist final summer time. Solely 200,000 of these households nabbed spots on the waitlist, which nonetheless doesn’t assure them a voucher.
“That’s how broken our approach has been to the biggest crisis facing the city,” he mentioned. “We now have the highest level of homelessness since the Great Depression. A majority of tenants are rent-burdened. The vacancy rate for apartments less than $2,400 a month is below 1%, basically 0% for those under $1,100 a month.”
Mamdani’s daring plan proposes the town make investments $100 billion in capital funds into already current applications throughout the metropolis’s Division of Housing Preservation and Improvement (HPD) and Human Sources Administration (HRA) geared toward constructing reasonably priced housing for these with the “greatest need.” They embrace HPD’s Senior Inexpensive Rental Flats and Extraordinarily Low and Low-Earnings Affordability applications.
The Meeting member mentioned that whereas these applications are the perfect outfitted to serve very low-income individuals, they’re “not yet operating at their maximum capacity and not yet operating at the scale required for the level of the crisis that New Yorkers are living through.”
The plan requires doubling the town’s capital funding in repairs for NYCHA residences. Nonetheless, the town’s decaying public housing inventory requires an estimated $40 billion in capital enchancment—funding the town has lengthy waited for the federal authorities to supply.
Mamdani additionally proposed growing funding and staffing ranges for housing companies corresponding to HPD and NYCHA, which have gone underfunded and understaffed below Mayor Eric Adams.
The mayoral hopeful additionally proposed three most important funding streams to pay for the huge enterprise.
First, Mamdani says he would push Albany to elevate a cap on the town’s municipal bond capability so it might probably safe $70 billion in municipal bonds. These funds would come on prime of the $30 billion the town has already pledged to spend on housing manufacturing, bringing its complete dedication to $100 billion.
Second, he mentioned he would leverage city-owned land and buildings for brand spanking new housing building — much like a proposal from former Comptroller Scott Stringer’s marketing campaign.
Lastly, Mamdani mentioned he would make the most of a course of often called “pooling” to mix housing vouchers for very low-income or homeless New Yorkers, which they haven’t been in a position to make use of, with a view to fund new housing growth. He added he would additionally finish the Adams administration’s authorized problem to a Metropolis Council regulation tremendously increasing eligibility for housing vouchers below a program often called CityFHEPS.
“What this proposal would do is take that money and use it as guaranteed income for the development of these kinds of units,” he mentioned. “Because we would know that not only would this one unit be generating more than $3,000 in annual rent, but that that money has already been allocated, and it is simply not being used at this time.”
Mamdani is hardly the one mayoral candidate floating formidable proposals to deal with the town’s housing disaster.
Brooklyn State Sen. Zellnor Myrie launched a plan late final yr to construct 700,000 new models over a decade and protect one other 300,000. Stringer rolled out a multi-pronged proposal final month he says would produce 20,000 new reasonably priced models over 5 years by using city-owned land and buildings.
Adams has made housing one of many focal factors of his first time period, establishing a “moonshot goal” of constructing 500,000 houses over 10 years. His largest step towards that purpose to this point was passing an enormous zoning overhaul dubbed the Metropolis of Sure for Housing Affordability, which is projected to generate 82,000 models over the subsequent 15 years.
However Mamdani mentioned the Metropolis of Sure plan didn’t go far sufficient as a result of it included too many carve-outs for low-density neighborhoods within the outer boroughs. He vowed to implement zoning modifications that may fill within the gaps of Adams’ plan.
“I believe we need to increase our zoning capacity in neighborhoods that have not historically contributed to citywide housing goals,” he mentioned. “And I think there were a number of places across the five boroughs that were cut out of that increase in zoning capacity and that were given exceptions. I think that there is still far more to be done.”
