At the dawn of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s term, the City Council revived a housing bill that Eric Adams had vetoed in his final hours as mayor.
The bill, which Adams thought was too expensive, sought to boost homeownership with mandated financial support. It got through the Council at a moment when rental apartments were hogging the limelight and renters had solidified as Mamdani’s base.
Yet the legislation, which will cost somewhere between $31.8 million (the City Council’s estimate) and $85 million (Adams’ figure) annually, won the day. Its success illustrated the long-simmering tension in New York between tenants and would-be homeowners, who have long fought for shares of limited resources.
Because New York City is a city of renters — nearly 70 percent of residents rent their homes — New York state has the lowest homeownership rate of all states in the country. As a result, housing policy tends to focus on the majority: improving renters’ lives, keeping regulated rent increases low and adding new affordable apartments.
“Since the vast majority of affordable housing has been rental over the decades, it is sort of a well-vetted, well-oiled machine,” said Spencer Orkus, partner and the president of development at L+M Development Partners.
That well-oiled machine of policies includes low-income housing tax credits, a critical source of rental housing financing; the state’s rent stabilization system, which has been at the center of the biggest housing battles in New York over the last decade-plus; and a property tax break focused on multifamily housing.
Meanwhile, existing stock remains out of reach for many prospective homebuyers: The median price for homes sold in the city in 2025 was $745,000, according to PropertyShark. For Manhattan, it was $1.15 million.
Homeownership has historically been at the center of national housing policy, including government-backed mortgages aimed at expanding access to the American Dream of homeownership and federal tax policy that allows homeowners to deduct their mortgage interest payments from their tax bills. But homeowners in New York and other high-tax states faced a $10,000 cap on deductions for state and local taxes on their federal income tax bills. That threshold was raised to $40,000 last year, an improvement but still a far cry from the cap elimination sought by New York lawmakers.
Even programs held up as bastions of affordable homeownership have been shaped by lawmakers prioritizing multifamily rental housing. Early on, a buyout provision was added to the Mitchell-Lama program to encourage investment in multifamily construction instead of co-ops. More recently, the state legislature made it harder for co-ops to exit the program, keeping limitations on how much equity shareholders could build and, therefore, how much they could borrow against the building for things like repairs.
“It is sort of a well-vetted, well-oiled machine.”
Recent political shifts have also exposed the difficulty in prioritizing more housing with ensuring that additional units aren’t exclusively for rent. Homeowners in the city have sometimes found themselves at odds with the rise in support for so-called Yimby policies that make it easier to build. Having a democratic socialist as mayor has also put some on edge that the very concept of homeownership is at risk — especially after a Mamdani official’s old social media posts were unearthed.
Still, elected officials on both sides of the aisle agree, at least conceptually, that the city should increase homeownership opportunities. Yet when it comes to encouraging new housing, recent federal policy proposals have zeroed in on a small subset of owners of single-family homes, while tax credits favor rentals. The result is a tug-of-war of resources.
“This is something that happens day and night in other parts of the country, but for some reason, it’s a special exotic topic in New York City,” said Jamie Smarr, CEO of the nonprofit NYC Housing Partnership. “Unless it’s a legislative priority, it will not get done.”
State of affairs
While renters are the majority, homeowners cannot be so easily dismissed. Roughly 1.1 million New Yorkers — making up more than a third of New York City households — own their homes.
Most homeowners in the city live in single-family homes, closely followed by co-ops. According to the last housing and vacancy survey, the city had 465,800 single-family homes, of which 80 percent were owner-occupied. Roughly half of the units in the 448,000 two-unit buildings were owner-occupied.
Of 450,800 co-op units, 69 percent were owner-occupied, compared to 40 percent of 318,000 condo units.
Overall, 3,960 new building permits were issued for one- to three-family homes between January 2021 and December 2025, according to an analysis of Department of Building filings by The Real Deal.
The homeownership bill the Council passed requires the city, starting in July, to ensure that at least 4 percent of the new housing units it finances over the next five years are intended for ownership. That includes new units and those that are converted from nonresidential or rental use. Financing for up to 60 percent of those units can be in the form of downpayment assistance. The ramifications of the City Council bill will not be known for some time.
The city’s rate of financing homeownership units has varied. In the past five years, the city funded the creation of 1,324 new homeownership units, of which 413 were in the form of down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers. That means each year from 2021 to 2025, fewer than 2 percent of the affordable housing units the city created or preserved were new homeownership units. In 2023 and 2025, it was fewer than 1 percent.
The Adams administration estimated that in order to keep up with current rates of building affordable housing, about $85 million would need to be added to the capital budget each year to guarantee the percentage mandated by the City Council. Without the funding, the number of housing units financed each year could drop by about 600.
One of the reasons the city focuses on affordable rental housing is that it is eligible for federal low-income housing tax credits, one of the most significant funding sources for new affordable housing construction. These credits are not available for homeownership units, meaning the city and state can get more bang for their buck spreading subsidies across rental projects that can tap into those federal resources.
That’s especially true after the Trump administration increased how many of the so-called 9 percent credits are issued to each state and expanded eligibility for the 4 percent credit.
Whereas, if the city wants to increase supply of residences intended for homeownership, it will have to shoulder the subsidy locally, potentially cutting into the number of multifamily units. Absent the credits, local governments have to fill in the financing gaps.
“You are left with the city putting in a lot of capital in order to execute those projects,” Camber Property Group founder Rick Gropper said. “The net result is that there are fewer homeownership deals that can get done.”
“Elected officials want to see more of it in every part of the city, but at the same time, it’s difficult financing to execute,” he said.
Political battles
In January, old videos resurfaced of Cea Weaver, head of the city’s Office to Protect Tenants, denouncing homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy,” adding a new political twist to the longtime battle for resources.
Mamdani’s adversaries seized on Weaver’s statements. Claims spread that the socialist mayor was putting white middle-class New Yorkers under attack. (Weaver has said she regrets the comments and was referring to long-standing inequities in homeownership.)
But beyond the headlines, the issue underscored how the debate over increasing housing opportunities can devolve into a zero-sum competition between homeowners and renters.
Homeowner concerns about ramping up density in suburban areas of Queens and Staten Island, for example, resulted in a watered-down version of City of Yes for Housing Opportunity that exempted areas zoned for single- and two-family homes from changes that would have permitted five-story apartment buildings and accessory-dwelling units. Minimum parking rules were also preserved in most of Staten Island, southern Brooklyn and eastern Queens.
The tension between the interests of tenants and homeowners has played out in other legislative fights. In 2019, as part of a sweeping set of changes to the state’s rent stabilization system, lawmakers made it more difficult for property owners to convert rentals into condos and co-ops. Under the law, 51 percent of existing tenants must agree to buy their units for a condo or co-op conversion to move forward, up from the previous 15 percent. While changes have been made for some buildings with expiring affordability agreements, the higher threshold has dramatically slowed rental-to-condo conversions.
The city’s ban on short-term rentals was framed as prioritizing renters over tourists, ensuring that apartments weren’t disappearing from the market to instead appear on sites like Airbnb. But supporters of a bill to ease short-term-rental restrictions on one- to two-family homes have described such efforts as a lifeline for Black and brown homeowners looking to supplement their incomes.
The City Council approved a controversial bill last year that would have given city-approved nonprofits or nonprofits that partner with for-profit companies first dibs on buying certain multifamily buildings. Adams vetoed the measure, but it has support from Mamdani and is expected to be reintroduced. That measure, the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, or COPA, has been billed as a pathway for tenants to team up with nonprofits to ultimately buy the buildings themselves.
In addition to various other controversial aspects of the bill, the prospect of losing rent-stabilized apartments also has some lawmakers “skittish,” Smarr said.
“I just think rent stabilization, rent regulation are such a third-rail issue, any talk about taking them offline is politically sensitive,” he said.
Road ahead
New York is not alone in its struggles to beef up homeownership opportunities. For the first time in eight years, the national homeownership rate decreased in 2024 to 65.6 percent, according to the latest report by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. The median age for first-time homebuyers hit 38 that year, a record high.
Sponsors of the bipartisan Road to Housing Act have said that a main impetus for the measure is making it easier for Americans to buy homes. The federal bill would, among other things, restrict large institutional investors from buying up single-family homes (see page 26).
Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called the changes “a good first step to rein in corporate landlords that are squeezing families out of homeownership,” but large institutional investors only own about 2 percent of the nation’s single-family rental homes.
In New York, Camber’s Gropper sees potential in projects following a similar route as his firm’s Stevenson Square, by combining rentals with for-sale options. The Bronx project, when completed, will have 1,000 units, a mix of apartments and townhomes. The project uses both the city and state’s new construction homeownership financing programs, respectively Open Door and Affordable Homeownership Opportunity Program.
Open Door provides subsidies of up to $445,000 per unit, while the state provides up to $200,000 per home. But Open Door has only financed 456 units in the last five years, and the city hasn’t heeded advocates’ calls for adding hundreds of millions of dollars to its budget. The city’s housing agency, however, has issued a new term sheet that makes more subsidy available for the program, and the mayor has committed to building homeownership units on city-owned land.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s $25 billion, five-year housing plan includes $150 million to finance up to 750 homeownership units. One of those projects is 104 homes planned for state-owned land formerly home to the Harlem’s former Lincoln Correctional Facility.
L+M’s Orkus, who is also policy chair for the New York Association for Affordable Housing, said one of the ways to increase the production of more affordable housing would be to create a tax abatement for the construction of middle-income, for-sale homes.
While the property tax break 485x has a homeownership option, it is not available to projects in Manhattan and eligibility is further limited by the building’s assessed value. The benefit is largely designed for multifamily rental projects.
“Sometimes when we try to mix up the economics with rentals and homeownership, it makes things more difficult,” he said.
Valerie White, senior executive director at the New York City chapter of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, noted the challenge of making housing more accessible to first time homebuyers while also maintaining homeownership as a path to building generational wealth.
“While limited equity co-ops are one option, we want to make sure that the family is building wealth,” she said.
Orkus believes the state program strikes the right balance in this regard. When affordable homeownership units are sold, their value isn’t capped. Instead, the units must be sold to someone whose income falls within a specific range.
Matthew Dunbar, chief of staff and executive vice president at Habitat for Humanity NYC and Westchester County, has worked on policies focused on creating homeownership opportunities within the city’s existing housing stock.
He thinks more could be done to create a path for multifamily projects that receive low-income housing tax credits to eventually convert to homeownership units. Ultimately, he thinks ramping up this type of housing requires attention to both new construction and preservation.
“We are not going to be able to move the needle just with new construction,” he said.