There’s the candidate, and then there are the people around him.
Zohran Mamdani’s housing promise is well-documented: to freeze the rent on 1 million rent-stabilized apartments.
Exactly how he goes about implementing that, and other promises, will depend on whom he deputizes in his administration and his inner circle.
Senior Reporter Kathryn Brenzel went to a Mamdani rally on East 76th Street, across from the Reuben Brothers’ Surrey Hotel, now partly converted into luxury condos. There, Mamdani emphasized hotel worker solidarity and called out billionaire owners, playing to the campaign’s themes and almost perfectly distilling the real estate industry’s anxieties about an administration that would paint landlords as villains, Brenzel writes. She also collects the would-be mayor’s real estate record from his time in the Assembly, tracks the flow of campaign money to his opponents and looks at how real estate is starting to prepare for Election Day — and the inauguration of someone they’re on the outs with.
But the most telling part of the rally might be that Mamdani shared the podium with Rich Maroko, head of the powerful hotel union, who is apparently now in Mamdani’s circle, though he supported Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the primary.
Others in the housing-related Mamdani brain trust are tenant advocates, and it remains unclear whether a Mayor Mamdani’s staff would include anyone who can make real estate’s voice audible, as Alicia Glen did for Bill de Blasio.
How and why someone makes it to anyone’s inner circle is a question where motivation matters. Is it for love of the work, belief in the goal? Or for social status and power? Either way, inner rings aren’t static. You’re in, you’re trying to get in, or you’re out. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani is in — anyone not with him is suddenly feeling like an outsider.
When broker Margit Brandt made it into Palm Beach’s inner circle, haters began to talk. Brandt is a native New Yorker who married into the exclusive Florida enclave, not an easy gate to unlock, and she’s closed more than $1 billion in sales in fewer than four years. Reporter Kate Hinsche traced Brandt’s motivations back through to childhood, when she seemed to hone an early instinct for where the money lay. Some of her earliest clients include the children of the wealthy, who provided a path to their parents. Hinsche caught up with Margit and her husband, Blair Brandt — whose dynamic she describes as starlet-producer — in the Hamptons, where, like their clients, they summer.
Meanwhile, Senior Reporter Rich Bockmann tells the story of how Leo Jacobs changed his name from Ilevu Yakubov, moved into a big house in Queens and got himself a Bentley (later replaced with a Mercedes Maybach). Why? To live at the speed of his clients — property kings who happened to have hit hard times. Bockmann profiles the lawyer who shed his Queens world to get into Manhattan, and whose fast rise coincides with an uptick in downfalls: His clients need help saving their fortunes from lenders with whom they signed personal guarantees. Jacobs is willing to try things white-shoe lawyers might not and isn’t afraid of a sanction.
Fortune International Group CEO Edgardo Defortuna likewise knows where to find his people: buyers in South American and European countries who are still parking savings in South Florida condos despite concerns that President Donald Trump’s immigration policies could scare them away. Senior Reporter Katherine Kallergis writes about him, and charts the return of brokers pitching to non-Americans.
A scene in Jake Indursky’s story about Yitzchak Tessler losing his grip on his final condo project may best conjure the dynamics of the inner ring.
When David Gordon, whose company ArcPe was in the middle of foreclosing on the building’s five remaining unsold penthouses, arrived at a party on the rooftop of the building, 172 Madison Avenue, Serhant agents swarmed him to show off their sales handiwork, Indursky writes.
Tessler, who has been in and out of the hospital and blames the Covid pandemic for some of his building’s fate, wasn’t invited.
Elsewhere in the issue, Sheridan Wall describes the strongmen of the resi world war and draws out their visions of empire, Elizabeth Cryan looks at how the Soho-i-fication of Williamsburg has brought luxury brands and institutional money to North Brooklyn and Kari Hamanaka profiles the top brokerages in Los Angeles.
Enjoy the issue!