Q&A With Leila Bozorg

On his first day in office, Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed three housing-related executive orders.

One relaunched the Office to Protect Tenants, which was created by Mayor Bill de Blasio but hollowed out by the last administration. Another sought to speed up housing construction, while the other focused on opportunities to build housing on public land.

Leila Bozorg, the newly-appointed deputy mayor of housing and planning, said the orders lay the groundwork for what’s to come.

“I think the executive orders that we put out on day one of the administration really show that comprehensive approach that we want to take,” she said during an interview this week. “We’re not just going to be focused on continuing to build on our housing supply challenges, but also coupling that with important perspectives and tools to protect tenants.”

As Mamdani’s housing czar, Bozorg will play a major role in shaping the mayor’s housing plan, building on her work with the previous administration while taking a more aggressive approach to tenant protections.

Bozorg most recently served as Mayor Eric Adams’ executive director of housing, where she worked extensively on zoning changes under the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity. She also served on the mayor’s Charter Revision Commission, which presented voters with four housing-related ballot measures, including three that created different avenues for project approvals. Before that, she served on the City Planning Commission and was chief of strategy and policy at nonprofit NYC Kids RISE.

She also previously was chief of staff to two former commissioners of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, as well as a senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Obama administration.

The Real Deal caught up with Bozorg this week to speak about the new role and the administration’s early actions.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What are your top priorities in this new role?

I am really going to be focused on building off the foundation of work that I’ve done in my career over the past 15 years to make sure that we are using every tool at our disposal to address our housing crisis, and in this administration, building new tools.

What kind of new tools are you looking at?

I’m really interested in building off the work that HPD has been doing, not only to build 100 percent affordable housing but [to develop] new, mixed-income tools that allow us to build both market-rate and affordable housing. Especially given the mayor’s ambitious goals to create 200,000 new affordable units, we’re going to have to come up with new, mixed-income strategies to be able to scale to that level of affordable production. We’ll also be looking to work closely with NYCHA, build[ing] on the work that they’ve been doing through PACT, but also to reposition some of their campuses to do affordable infills along with building off the work at the Preservation Trust.

What is your role in helping the mayor deliver on some of his key campaign promises, including the promise to freeze rents on stabilized apartments for the next four years?

A huge part of my role right now is going to be helping to identify and appoint new members to the Rent Guidelines Board. It’s ultimately going to be up to the board to decide whether it’s appropriate for a rent freeze. But we’re confident that when you look at the various elements that the board has to take into consideration, they’ll find that a rent freeze is appropriate, through the process of both looking at data, taking testimony and looking at the economic conditions that tenants are facing.

In addition, we really need to build out our preservation strategies supporting distressed buildings, including distressed rent-stabilized buildings. We want to be looking at different programs to help bring down operating costs. The issue of insurance costs going up is something we’re looking closely at, and whether there’s any public sector tools we can bring to the table to address those types of growing costs. And the mayor has also stated that he’s interested in taking a look at our property tax system, which ultimately creates some of the kind of inequitable outcomes that have created distress in the rent-stabilized stock.

When searching for rent board candidates, are you looking for people who are more amenable to a rent freeze? You said it’s ultimately up to the board to decide, but the mayor’s pledge wasn’t qualified in that way during the campaign.

There’s a number of requirements that board members have to meet to be qualified to be on the board. We’ll be looking to make sure anyone that’s appointed is qualified to analyze these issues comprehensively, as required by law.

How are you thinking about the role of the Office to Protect Tenants, especially in terms of taking over distressed buildings?

There’s going to be a lot of things that the office is focused on, not just on distressed properties or the case of bad landlords that need to be held more accountable, but also the types of services that need to be available to tenants and working better for tenants or the types of services that are often available but siloed across government.

The city actually [has] a lot of examples of intervening in distressed multifamily properties and helping facilitate preservation purchases. That’s a huge chunk of work that HPD does every day, facilitating preservation transactions so that buildings can be on a better financial foundation and get rehab. The tools already exist, but we’re one week in, and at the early stages of thinking about whether there are gaps in that toolbox that we need to develop for the distressed stock.

Are you concerned that the housing regulation bills vetoed by Mayor Eric Adams might be revived by the City Council?

I’m really excited to be working with the new City Council and with Speaker Julie Menin to advance shared housing goals. And yes, we’ve voiced some concerns about a number of the bills that were vetoed by the last administration, particularly when it comes to the impact that some of those bills may have on the cost of housing production, or how much we can be producing with the limited resources that we have. It remains to be seen whether the Council will override those vetoes, but I have full faith that we have a lot of shared goals and that we’ll be able to work together to address the affordable housing challenge.

The last administration did not veto the Construction Justice Act, which established minimum wages for construction workers on certain projects. Do you have a sense of how that’s going to affect the city’s ability to impact city-financed housing going forward?

It’s a bill we support and look forward to working with the laborers and others to ensure that, as we’re building, people are paid a livable and fair wage.

(The Adams administration warned that this measure would be the costliest of the housing measures.)

Do you expect landlords to participate in the Rental Ripoff hearings?

We want to be hearing from everybody, including landlords, about the types of issues and conditions that tenants are facing, or maybe the types of unscrupulous fees that they’re facing, but we also want to hear the experiences that landlords and property managers are faced with as well. For too long, we’ve been a bit disconnected from real people’s voices. We’re really aiming to bring New Yorkers into the policy-making process very early on in the administration, so that we can hear from them directly as we’re developing the housing plan and creating a baseline for new housing policy.

There are some people in the real estate industry who see the early actions of the administration as anti-landlord. How do you think about balancing the push for more tenant protections while also encouraging development of housing by the private sector?

We really have to be able to do multiple things at once. We have to be aggressive in addressing our housing supply challenges. That’s why two of the executive orders were really focused on finding sites for more housing and speeding up the development process. This mayor very much recognizes that we have a housing shortage and wants to be incredibly aggressive on the development front, so we’ll remain a pro-development administration. At the same time, yes, there’s going to be a focus on ensuring we can do that while also protecting tenants. That’s critical for a city like ours, where we have a 1.4 percent vacancy rate. It’s incredibly hard to find housing, and that’s created an uneven playing field for tenants across the whole city.

What do you want to see happen at the Elizabeth Street Garden site, where the last administration abandoned plans for senior housing?

We’ll have to take a close look at the actions that the last administration made at the very end of the administration, and evaluate the kind of cost and benefit of trying to move forward on the site.

Does the city plan to step in or help other portfolios in similar situations as the Pinnacle buildings?

We have a history of supporting preservation of projects that are in physical and financial distress. A large part of HPD work focuses on repositioning properties that are facing both physical or financial distress. We have a number of tools, but we’ll be evaluating case-by-case on what our options are to support buildings and the tenants that live in them.