Mamdani Must Sweat Small Stuff to Make NYC Affordable

After I wrote about the agony of dealing with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, I received a request from Vital City.

The civic group wanted other examples of ways Zohran Mamdani could make the city more functional and affordable — not fantastical ideas that cost billions of dollars, but simple “blocking and tackling,” to use a football term for the basics.

Here is one that speaks to a larger problem of bureaucratic sludge.

Every two years, I help my father-in-law, who is 88, renew his senior citizen homeowners’ exemption, or SCHE. Like many government programs for seniors, it involves a process that most elderly people cannot possibly figure out, even if English were their first language, which is often not the case in New York City.

Real estate people who deal with government programs and regulations know exactly what I’m talking about. Completing the forms, assembling the documents and submitting them is rarely a simple task. Often it’s maddening. Sometimes it’s totally useless.

For example, condos and co-ops with no employees must file a notarized affidavit each year promising to pay their non-existent employees a prevailing wage. Total waste of time.

Real estate firms have staff to deal with such matters, but mom-and-pops are on their own. They can certainly empathize with senior citizens faced with these confounding tasks.

One solution is to award benefits automatically based on tax returns. Some programs already do that. But low-income households are not required to file tax returns. People who don’t file miss out on these benefits without even realizing they exist.

The SCHE is not awarded based on tax returns, even though that seems possible. Why can’t the government use tax returns and property tax records to figure out who qualifies? Instead, seniors have to submit paperwork — not just once to get the exemption, but every two years after that to renew it.

Fortunately, the city created an online renewal process that is a lot easier than the paper version — not easier for seniors, who struggle with technology, but for their children or grandchildren who help them with such tasks.

Unfortunately, this year’s SCHE online renewal website is broken.

The box for “income” is grayed out, so income cannot be entered and the application cannot be submitted. I informed the Department of Finance of this problem in October, giving the city five months to fix the bug before the submission deadline of March 15, 2026.

It turns out that five months is not enough time for the city to un-gray a box. This week, the Finance Department informed me that the city’s technology agency would not fix the problem this fiscal year.

Its exact message was, “The DOITT Team is not going to be able to correct the box that is gray shaded for the property account in inquiry for filing period TY 202627.” A spokesperson for the Department of Finance later claimed that the website is working and has received 2,500 renewal applications.

Mamdani got elected by running on big ideas. But there’s a long list of small, more achievable things he can do to make the city work better. Real estate people should have their trade groups let him know where the bottlenecks are. Vital City is also interested. Feel free to loop me in too.