What Zohran Mamdani’s First 100 Days Meant for Real Estate

Standing over a giant Monopoly-like game board, Mayor Zohran Mamdani explains in a snappy video how the city decides annual rent increases for regulated apartments.

The video, posted on social media last month, shows the mayor holding up fake game pieces labeled tenants, in blue, matching his tie, and landlords, in red. He notes that the Rent Guidelines Board is an “independent body that considers the evidence” before deciding how much property owners can raise rents on stabilized apartments.

The mayor avoids saying the phrase “rent freeze” but playfully alludes to it.

“You probably know how I feel about what should happen to the rent, but this is a chance to have your voices heard by the people who make the final decision,” he said.

Friday marks Mamdani’s first 100 days in office. In his first few months, the Democratic Socialist has elevated tenant voices, agitated landlords and pledged to speed up housing construction. He’s also stepped back from some campaign promises and moderated on others. As a candidate, he vowed to use mayoral power to achieve a rent freeze. As mayor, he defers to the board, which is primarily made up of his appointees.

Tenant and pro-housing groups have seen their stars rise within City Hall, while landlord groups complain that they are sidelined and villainized in conversations about how to address the housing crisis.

Much has happened in his early days at Gracie Mansion, but Mamdani’s biggest tests lie ahead, as the city works to fill a $5.4 billion budget gap and his administration crafts a housing plan to deliver on his campaign promise to build 200,000 affordable homes over the next decade. How these issues play out will depend on a number of factors, including the administration’s relationship with Albany and the City Council. These first three-plus months have set the tone for his administration — and reveal that future battles, especially between the City Council and mayor, may be on the horizon.

Pro-housing, but against bad landlords

On his first day in office, Mamdani revived de Blasio-era creation the Office to Protect Tenants and named Cea Weaver, a tenant advocate who was a driving force behind reforms to the state’s rent stabilization law in 2019, as its new leader.

The appointment reinforced that tenant-centered policy would be a key focus for the administration. Sumathy Kumar, who replaced Weaver as executive director of the New York State Tenant Bloc and Housing Justice for All, said tenants have much more access to the administration than under previous mayors.

“We’ve been feeling locked out of City Hall for so long,” she said.

A few days after Weaver’s appointment, the mayor signed an executive order launching the “rental ripoff” hearings, the last of which was held Tuesday in Staten Island. In 90 days, city agencies will release a report detailing common themes from the hearings and issue recommendations for how to address “unlawful fees” and “poor housing conditions.” Officials, including Weaver, have already indicated that they hope to see policies that address tenant complaints about non-rent-related fees.

Landlord groups, meanwhile, have seen the hearings as evidence that the administration isn’t interested in helping owners deal with rising costs, and that a pro-housing stance only extends to housing development, not property ownership or management.

“You can’t just build your way out of the crisis,” said Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, a group that represents rent-stabilized owners.

During the mayoral campaign, Mamdani acknowledged that alongside the promised rent freeze, his future administration would also look at ways to help struggling owners, including through insurance and property tax reform.

“You don’t hear about those offsets anymore,” said Jim Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York.

“They sort of decided to pursue a route that was more divisive and theatrics,” he said.

The mayor has shied away from explicitly mentioning the rent freeze and these measures aimed at helping owners. Yet the mayor’s appointees appear to have taken up the mantle. During a budget hearing last month, Dina Levy, commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, noted that “operating expenses are strangling property owners” and that a “majority of property owners and managers in this city are working in good faith.”

In an interview, Leila Bozorg, deputy mayor of housing and planning, echoed that sentiment, saying that the administration is working to address owner challenges.

“We know that we need to not just add a lot more housing, but we have to address the current housing stock and the current conditions that tenants are facing, as well as the way that owners are struggling,” Bozorg said. “But we’ve also been very clear that in this administration, we are going to stand up to bad landlords who are harassing tenants, and if a landlord is not upholding their responsibility, we want to step in.”

On that latter point, the administration tried and failed to stop the sale of more than 5,100 mostly rent-stabilized apartments to Summit Properties. It is now reportedly exploring how to intervene in the sale of a 38-building, rent-stabilized portfolio in East Harlem.

Bozorg described the administration’s housing strategy as coalescing around three core pillars: protecting tenants and improving housing quality, “supercharging public excellence and public sector-led housing policy” and increasing housing supply.

That second pillar includes the city’s efforts to cut down on project approval timelines and improve public housing. The rental ripoff hearings faced some backlash after it became clear that the events were focused on private-sector housing, rather than the New York City Housing Authority. Officials, including the mayor, later clarified that NYCHA tenants were welcome to testify.

The administration is on track to release its housing plan in May, and an insurance-related proposal is expected to be included. In February, the mayor said he planned to deliver his property tax reform proposal to Albany in a few weeks, though no details have emerged. When asked about the proposal’s timeline, Bozorg said it would be “rolled out soon.”

On the team

After Mamdani won the primary, some affordable housing developers met with the Democratic nominee and said they were heartened by his commitment to ramping up housing construction.

Among those developers was Rick Gropper, founding principal of the Camber Property Group. As the mayor nears his 100th day in office, Gropper said he is encouraged by the mayor’s housing-related appointments, including Bozorg and Levy.

He pointed to their careers: Bozorg has worked for city and federal housing agencies, and Levy last worked for the state’s housing regulator. Gropper said they both have a “deep understanding of the issues and the pain points” in building housing in the city.

“Overall, the deputy mayor, the commissioner of HPD are seasoned professionals, problem solvers,” he said. “They are asking the right questions.”

Still, the administration doesn’t have a real estate whisperer, someone within the administration with a corporate background who the industry and broader business community feel gets where they are coming from. The Bloomberg administration had Dan Doctoroff, who joined from private-equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners, and de Blasio had Alicia Glen, a former Goldman Sachs executive.

“A lot of personnel who are capable and competent, but no one in the business community writ large,” Whelan said.

That person could ultimately be the yet-to-be named head of the Economic Development Corporation. Under this administration, the agency was moved from Bozorg’s purview to a new role, the deputy mayor of economic justice, a title suggesting focus on consumers and labor practices.

Pro-housing groups also seem to have more of a presence in the administration.

In February, Annemarie Grey, executive director of Open New York, spoke at a press conference alongside Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul to promote the governor’s proposal to exempt some housing projects from the State Environmental Quality Review Act, or SEQRA. The group’s policy director, Andrew Fine, recently joined the administration as a policy advisor to Bozorg.

Industry and pro-housing groups have supported the mayor’s early actions around making it easier to build housing, including the creation of the Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development, or SPEED, task force. The group, which includes representatives from various city agencies, will release recommendations on how to expedite public project approvals and financing.

Grey said she is encouraged that the mayor took such a public stance in favor of reforming the state’s environmental review requirements and by his commitment to building “more homes of all kinds.”

As the mayor continues his term, Grey said she’s watching to see what “bigger swings” he’ll take on housing to “define his legacy.”

Campaign versus office

The late Mario Cuomo famously said, “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose,” a nicer way of saying that abstractions and pretty ideas are for when you are trying to get the job. Once you are behind the desk, slogans come with caveats and conjunctions, often “but.” The phrasing gets clunkier.

Mamdani quoted this truism, coined by the father of his campaign foe, during his victory speech in November.

“A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose,” he said. “If that must be true, let the prose we write still rhyme, and let us build a shining city for all.”

But the mayor’s reversal on a campaign promise to expand the city’s housing voucher program is, at best, a near rhyme if a settlement is reached with the City Council.

The administration appealed a court decision that would have forced the city to implement the expansion of the CityFHEPS housing voucher program, as approved by the City Council in 2023. The appeal argues that the City Council lacked authority to expand the program.

“The mayor’s perspective is the kind of realism that happens when you go from campaign to office,” said Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission. “You go from promises to practicalities, and CityFHEPS is there as a shining example.”

The city’s Independent Budget Office previously estimated that expanding vouchers would cost the city $17 billion over five years. CBC has recommended freezing the number of vouchers to stop costs from ballooning as the city stares down its $5.4 billion budget deficit.

Christine Quinn, former City Council speaker and CEO of Win, called the mayor’s reversal “nothing short of betrayal.” She said she was blindsided because the mayor had reaffirmed his commitment to implementing the expansion when he met with her and others on his transition team after the November election.

The administration has maintained that it is still committed to reaching a settlement that expands the voucher program while acknowledging the city’s budget challenges. Quinn wants the administration back at the negotiation table.

“I think everyone in the homeless community understands the budget crisis that the mayor has inherited,” Quinn said. “People are willing to work with the city to phase it in, make some tweaks.”

The mayor’s allies see his about-face on vouchers as part of the natural transition from advocate to the city’s top official.

Kumar thinks the mayor is both testing his new authority and running into its constraints.

“Now there’s different levers of power that he has access to, and I think he’s trying to figure out how to use those,” she said.

She added that she feels the mayor’s commitment to making the city as affordable as possible is “as strong as ever.”

Budget fights

The city’s appeal in the voucher lawsuit underscores a mounting tension with City Council leaders, which erupted last week when the City Council released its response to the mayor’s preliminary budget.

Mamdani painted a bleak financial picture: Absent more revenue from the state, the city would need to raise property taxes by 9.5 percent, while also raiding the city’s reserves. The Council’s proposal, however, found $6 billion, largely in recalculations of estimated revenues and costs, to address the city’s deficit. Council Speaker Julie Menin repeatedly said the Council is a “hard no” on raising property taxes and dipping into the city’s reserves.

“We strongly oppose raising property taxes, or drawing down the rainy day fund, full stop,” Menin said in a video, alongside Council member Linda Lee, chair of Committee on Finance. “Higher property taxes would hurt homeowners, renters and small businesses across the city.”

The mayor immediately fired back, calling any proposal that didn’t include ways of raising new revenue “unrealistic.” The mayor has said that his proposal to raise property taxes is a “last resort,” in the event that the state doesn’t raise taxes on the state’s highest earners. Hochul is opposed to doing so.

Though the mayor hasn’t spoken much about raising property taxes since laying out his pitch in February, Burgos sees the proposal as a real threat from a socialist mayor who doesn’t want to cut programs or services in his first budget. Still, he thinks it’s a bad and widely unpopular move.

“I just don’t understand how this mayor can campaign on affordability, and yet propose revenue raisers that would hurt the 99 percent,” Burgos said.

“Mayor Mamdani didn’t create this housing crisis, but if he moves forward with the rent freeze and property tax increases, he will own this crisis,” he added.

Whether the budget fight sets the tone for the relationship between the Council and the mayor remains to be seen. Bozorg thinks the Council and administration share enough goals, especially when it comes to housing, to overcome their differences.

“Our housing crisis really depends on a strong partnership,” she said. ”Even the last administration, where there was a lot of tension, the council and the administration were able to come together to pass really ambitious housing reform.”

On Wednesday, Menin reiterated her stance on raising property taxes. Taking the stage after the mayor at a kickoff event for the National Action Network’s convention, Menin pointed to the Council’s “hard no” on Mamdani’s proposal.

“If we were to do that, we would be hurting Black communities across our city,” she said.

For now, Quinn, who led many overrides of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s vetoes while on the Council, thinks the Council and administration will get past the budget conflict.

“Unless it is some profound moral issue, you have to keep moving forward to the next thing,” she said. “You keep working on whatever comes up next.”